Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #672, 11/17/13

To: Brith Sholom Media Watch Subscribers
From: Jerry Verlin, Editor (jverlin1234@comcast.net)
Subj: Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #672, 11/17/13
 
 
WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: The AP told Inq readers this week of friction between the U.S. and Israel over “Netanyahu’s insistence on continuing to settle Jews on occupied land” in “East” Jerusalem and “the West Bank,” and that “the United States and the rest of the international community object to settlement construction as a sign of Israeli bad faith,” all without telling readers of Israel’s actual insistence that Jerusalem over the long-gone 1949 ceasefire line is not “East” Jerusalem and that Jews are not “settlers” there or in what the U.N.’s own resolution had called “Samaria and Judea.”
 
The AP went on to quote an Arab negotiator rejecting Israel as the Jewish homeland, the Jewish state, without telling readers that the U.N. had called for “the Jewish State” and “the Arab State,” that the League of Nations had called for “the Jewish National Home,” and that the U.S. defines its “two state solution” as “two states for two peoples.”
 
 
This Week In The Inq: One Side of a Two-Sided Conflict
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
 
Briefly, the Philly Inquirer (“Inq”) could have done better this week with its pair of Israel-related Inq-headlined AP “Around the World” squibs:
 
*** “Israel: Cleared of Charges, Politician Gets Post Back” (Inq, Tue, 11/12/13, A3), called “hard-line Israeli politician” Avigdor Lieberman, newly reinstated as Foreign Minister, a “polarizing” figure who is “likely to further complicate an already troubled negotiating climate with the Palestinians.” Those “Palestinians” themselves aren’t especially known for negotiations’ climate warming, and the media can fairly start calling rightwing Israelis “polarizing” when it starts calling leftwing Israelis polarizing. And do the AP and Inq call Secretary of State, former Senator and presidential candidate, Kerry “politician”? Or is that term reserved for his Israeli counterpart?
 
*** “Israel: Teen Held in Soldier’s Slaying” (Inq, Thu 11/14/13, A6, AP) reported on a teenage Arab who, in what the AP called a “nationalistic” attack, stabbed to death a teenage Israeli soldier as he lay sleeping in an Israeli civilian bus. The Inq could have headlined, sans David-Goliath allusion, “Palestinian Arab Fatally Stabs Sleeping Israeli.”
 
 
The Inq ran two full Israel stories this week in the Inq (“U.S.-Israeli Relations are Fraying,” Sun, 11/10/13, A8, AP, and “Netanyahu Says the World is Too Soft on Palestinians,” Mon, 11/11/13, A6, AP), both purveying the Arab perspective.
 
Sunday’s Inq AP article stated
 
… there has been constant friction [between the U.S. and Israel] over Netanyahu’s insistence on continuing to settle Jews on occupied land even as he negotiates with the Palestinians.
 
Israel isn’t insisting on “settling Jews on occupied land.” That’s what the Arabs insist Israel is doing. Israel insists that Jerusalem, which has had a renewed Jewish majority since 19th century Ottoman times, is its capital, that Jews living across the 1949 ceasefire line there are not “East” Jerusalem “settlers” (the Reform’s Rabbi Yoffie agrees), and that Judea and Samaria are not “occupied” lands. The AP should use non-loaded terms and state what both sides are doing. E.g., “Both Jews and Arabs build communities in contested areas Jews call ‘Judea-Samaria’ and Arabs call ‘the West Bank.’”
 
What the AP asserts by characterizing Bibi’s position as “insistence on continuing to settle Jews on occupied land, even as he negotiates with the Palestinians” is that just Arabs, not Jews, can build on that land being “negotiated” between Jews and Arabs.
 
 
Monday’s Inq AP encore, again citing “Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem” as being “in occupied lands,” summed up succinctly, and not wholly inaccurately, where the world stands:
 
The Palestinians, along with the United States and the rest of the international community, object to settlement construction. They say that settling Jews in lands where the Palestinians want to establish their state is a sign of bad faith.
 
Pause on that: “The Palestinians, along with the United States and the rest of the international community, object to settlement construction.” Does that suggest that maybe we ourselves should stop saying
 
“Jewish settlements”?
 
“Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem”?
 
“Jewish settlements across Israel’s 1967 borders in the West Bank and East Jerusalem”?
 
“Jewish settlements across Israel’s 1967 borders in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem”?
 
“Jewish settlements across Israel’s 1967 borders in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem that The Palestinians claim for their Palestinian State”?
 
 
But wait, AP and Inq fans, there’s more. AP in Inq article Monday:
 
Mohammed Ishtayeh, a Palestinian peace negotiator, said accepting Israel’s demand to be recognized as the Jewish homeland would undermine the rights of Israel’s Arab minority as well as claims of Palestinian refugees to lost properties in what is now Israel.
 
A news service with a scintilla of balance would not have quoted only one side’s claim on a conflict’s bottom-line issue, but would have counter-quoted an Israeli peace negotiator expressing counterpart concern over what had happened to the Arab countries’ Jewish minorities, which “lost properties” but which didn’t remain – sixty-five years later – “refugees,” because mostly Israel absorbed them while the Arabs, who call Israel “apartheid,” isolate their own Arab refugees’ descendants’ in 65-years-later “refugee camps.” And a balanced news service, on its own initiative, would have contrasted Palestinian Arabs’ touching concern for “Israel’s Arab minority” with Palestinian Arabs’ own demand for a judenrein Western Palestine Arab state.
 
Further, news article balance demanded that a news service quoting an Arab rejecting for stated reasons Jews’ claim to the land of Israel as our Jewish homeland counter-quote a Jew stating the historical basis on which the land of Israel is and has been that Jewish homeland. That basis is real and substantial and tenaciously held (and millennia more rooted in history than today’s Palestinian Arabs’ claim to the exclusive mantle of “The Palestinians.”). The U.N.’s 1947 resolution sought to partition Palestine into expressly “the Jewish State” and “the Arab State” (not “Palestinian” state). This was preceded by the League of Nations Palestine Mandate for the Jewish National Home, by San Remo, by 3,000 years continuous twice-previously sovereign Jewish homeland presence that British historian Parkes rightly stated wrote the Zionists’ “real title deeds.” As for Jewish, as well as Arab, tenacity, British Foreign Secretary Bevin, no friend of ours, told Parliament in 1947:
 
… For the Jews, the essential point of principle is the creation of a sovereign Jewish state. For the Arabs, the essential point of principle is to resist to the last the establishment of Jewish sovereignty in any part of Palestine. (Quoted in Bell, Terror Out of Zion, p. 188)
 
Sunday’s and Monday’s Inq AP articles zeroed in on Israel’s “settlements” as impeding peace without telling readers that the Palestinian Arabs’ quoted rejection of Israel as “the Jewish homeland” is a flat rejection of the U.S., not just Israeli, definition of “the two state solution” as “two states for two peoples.”
 
Compare these two statements:
 
First, Bibi:
 
… The entire international community demands that we recognize the principle of two states for two peoples and we are discovering that this is two states but not for two peoples but two states for one people, or two states for a people and a half.
 
Now, here’s senior Palestinian Arab negotiator Nabil Sha’ath on Arabic News Broadcast (quoted by Caroline Glick, Townhall.com, 8/5/11), explicitly acknowledging what the U.S. and Israel mean by “two states,” and expressly rejecting it. Sha’ath:
 
The story of ‘two states for two peoples’ means that there will be a Jewish people over there and a Palestinian people here. We will never accept this.
 
And, yet, all that Inq readers read this week in the Inq about obstructions to peace talks was
 
*** “Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem”
 
*** “Netanyahu’s insistence on continuing to settle Jews on occupied land even as he negotiates with the Palestinians”
 
*** “The Palestinians, along with the United States and the rest of the international community, object to settlement construction. They say that settling Jews in lands where the Palestinians want to establish their state is a sign of bad faith.”
 
 
Western newspaper readers were entitled to have been told this week in the Inq et ilk
 
*** that what the Arab side considers “Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem” the Israeli side considers Jewish communities in Judea, Samaria and its capital, Jerusalem; and
 
*** that Arab rejection of Israel as the Jewish homeland, the Jewish state, is a direct rejection of the express intent of the U.N. partition resolution that called for “Jewish” and “Arab” states, of the League of Nations Palestine Mandate, San Remo, and three-millennia Jewish homeland history in which modern Israel is the land’s next native state after ancient Judaea, and is an express Arab rejection of the United States’ own definition of the U.S.-promulgated “two state solution” as “two states for two peoples.”
 
There is zero prospect of the mainstream Western media informing Western readers of peace obstructions other than “settlements.” But if we are to make a dent in “the United States and the rest of the international community” largely objecting to “settlement construction,” we should stop calling those Jewish communities “settlements.”
 
Regards,
Jerry