To: Brith Sholom Media Watch Subscribers
From: Jerry Verlin, Editor (jverlin1234@comcast.net)
Subj: Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #675, 12/8/13
WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Last week we listed loaded terms and expressions the mainstream Western media (MSM) uses to delegitimize Israel. This week we list how the MSM, in part by using these terms, distorts ancient and modern Jewish homeland history It starts with denigrating Jewish homeland connection to “the West Bank” and “East” Jerusalem, but goes on to mis-portray the U.N. as having attempted to partition Palestine between “Palestinians and Jews,” which is not what the U.N. attempted to do.
Each Week In the MSM: A Misportrayal of History
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
Last week’s BSMW #674 listed many misleading terms the Western media commonly uses in reporting on Israel. This week, we look at how the media misuses these terms to distort the Jewish people’s three-millennia homeland connection to Israel.
Historic Connection with Jerusalem
Jewish connection with Jerusalem goes back beyond the time of King David, but in the second half of the 20th century a paucity of 10th century BCE archeological findings, especially in the city’s original City of David section, allowed “minimalists” to quip “King David was as real as King Arthur.” Then, in an electrifying discovery in 1993 at Tel Dan, archeologists uncovered the “House of David” inscription, a 9th century BCE enemy king’s monument, just a century after David’s time, boasting of victories over the northern kingdom of Israel and “House of David.”
Then, in 2005, archeologists unearthed in the City of David an enormous 10th century BCE public building that may have been King David’s Jerusalem palace. In reporting this find, the New York Times and International Herald Tribune (8/5/05) went beyond treating as a serious issue the Palestinian Arab claim that ancient Jewish history never happened. They treated as a serious issue, as the Times put it, whether Jews’ claimed ancient connection to Jerusalem is “a myth used to justify conquest and occupation.”
N.Y. Times:
The find will also be used in the broad political battle over Jerusalem –whether the Jews have their origins here and thus have some special hold on the place, or whether, as many Palestinians have said, including the late Yasser Arafat, the idea of a Jewish origin in Jerusalem is a myth used to justify conquest and occupation. (emphasis added)
International Herald Tribune’s language went even further, ending that “many Palestinians believe – including the late Yasser Arafat – that the notion of a Jewish origin in Jerusalem is a religious myth used to justify occupation and colonialism.” (emphasis added)
Judea and Samaria
The mainstream Western media (“MSM”) religiously refers to Judea and Samaria as “the West Bank.” It takes jabs at Israelis who use “Judea and Samaria” as invoking “biblical” or “nationalist” terms. E.g.
N.Y Times (10/3/10, Bronner, Inq., A15) quoted an Israeli official quoting Israeli P.M. Netanyahu:
“Everyone knows that restrained and moderate building in Judea and Samaria in the coming year will not affect the peace map at all,” he [Netanyahu] said, according to the [Israeli] official, using the biblical term for the West Bank. (emphasis added)
Citing mid-September 2010 articles by Jackson Diehl in the Washington Post and Roger Cohen in the N.Y. Times which called “Judea and Samaria” the “Israeli nationalist term” and a “biblical reference,” respectively, the Forward columnist, “Philologos,” wrote in an October 2010 column that when he sees this, “I want to scream.” Philologos:
Judea and Samaria, although they derive from the Hebrew biblical terms Yehuda and Shomron, have been part of the geographical vocabulary of Christian Europe since the time of Jesus. “The West Bank” has not been. To refuse to refer to the [so-called] West Bank as Judea and Samaria is, whether deliberately or not, to declare that Jews and Christians have no historical connection to these areas. To malign others for calling them that is even worse. (emphasis added)
U.N. 1947 Palestine partition resolution: “. . . the hill country of Samaria and Judea ….”
1948
“Separate Jewish and Palestinian States”: Among the media’s loaded expressions cited in BSMW #674 last week was mischaracterization of the U.N.’s 1947 Palestine partition resolution as calling for “separate Jewish and Palestinian states … separate states for Palestinians and Jews.” I suggested that that’s like calling for partitioning Pennsylvania between “Pennsylvanians” and Jews, Pluto between Plutonians and Jews. The United Nations sought to do no such thing. Its resolution repeatedly used “the Jewish State” and “the Arab [not “Palestinian”] State,” and expressed hope for cooperation “between the two Palestinian peoples.”
Israel’s “Creation” and “Founding”: The MSM revels in rechristening Israel’s attainment of independence, the fruition of two-millennia continued Jewish presence in becoming the land’s next native state after Jewish Judaea, as Israel’s “creation” and “founding,” as though artificially and out-of-the-blue, while writing (AP, Inq, 8/14/07) that “India and Pakistan won their independence,” and (AP, Inq, 8/13/08) “gained independence.”
“Palestinian Refugees From the War that Followed Israel’s Creation” (without the invading Arab states even named): Text under “C – Creation of Israel” in our “A-to-Z” media bias book, Pressing Israel, cites example after example of the MSM referencing Arab refugees from “the creation of Israel,” or “war that followed Israel’s creation,” sans mention of the Arab states whose invasion intending Israel’s destruction and annihilation of its people started that war.
The Arab-Israeli Conflict’s Jewish Refugees: “They Emigrated, They Left”: There’s another side to what the MSM calls the Arab-Israeli conflict’s “Palestinian refugee issue” (e.g., Trudy Rubin, Inq, 4/7/11). That other side is that same conflict’s Jewish refugees from Arab lands. In Brith Sholom Media Watch’s first years, in contrast to endless MSM references to Palestinian Arab refugees – using terms including “uprooting…expulsion and exile…forced from their homes…forced to leave…forced out…expelled…driven from…forced from their lands…forced from lands…driven out…driven from their homes…fled their homes” – BSMW found two references to Arab lands’ Jewish refugees: they “emigrated” (K-R, Inq, 1/8/04), they “left” (AP, Inq, 4/18/03).
Israel has begun raising the Jewish side of the Arab-Israeli conflict’s refugee issue, and there has been some, though hardly proportionate, media reference. In contrast to Israel’s absorption of the Jewish refugees, which does not remove them from the refugee issue, the “Palestinian refugees” (who weren’t even called “Palestinian” at the time), remain isolated by their Arab “hosts,” even in Palestine itself, in what the media calls “refugee camps.” The Inq’s Trudy Rubin, perhaps not fully appreciating what she was saying, wrote in her Inq column on 11/28/10 of a Palestinian Arab living “in his family’s comfortable rowhouse in the Al-Arroub refugee camp near Hebron.” (emphasis added)
“Israel’s 1967 Border”: A final, lasting MSM misstatement dating back to the events of the 1948 time period is media mischaracterization of the “green line” drawn in the 1949 Israel-Jordan Armistice Agreement as “Israel’s 1967 border – i.e., as Israel’s agreed political border just before the start of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. However, the 1949 agreement expressly declared the line it drew with a green pen to be an exclusively military ceasefire line, without prejudice to either side’s claims to political borders. And even as a military ceasefire line, lacking the international standing of “borders,” the green line was vitiated by renewed fighting, and a new ceasefire line, between the same sides.
1967 to Today
“Lands Israel Seized in 1967”: A long-time pet MSM expression which resurfaces from time to time is reference to the heart of Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria as “lands Israel seized in 1967.” No Jew old enough to remember the harrowing events of May 1967 would call Israel’s actions in June of that year as Israel having aggressively “seized” lands from its neighbors.
242 – The Abandoned U.N. Resolution: As Dore Gold pointed out, once again, in an 11/18/13 article, “The Assault on Resolution 242,” in Israel Hayom, that resolution adopted by the U.N. after the 1967 war did not call for Israeli withdrawal back to the ceasefire lines of 1949, and did not demand “land swaps” by Israel for areas beyond those lines that it retained. You don’t read that in a mainstream media obsessed with Israeli “settler” presence in “the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.”
“The P.A. is the Side Pushing ‘The Two-State Solution’”: For all that you’ve read about “the Palestinians’ being the side that’s pressing for “the two-state solution,” the facts are the opposite. Both the U.S, and Israel define “two states” as “two states for two peoples,” Arabs and Jews. Abbas (9/23/11, quoted by YNet News): “We shall not recognize a Jewish state.” Senior P.A. negotiator Nabil Sha’ath (quoted by Carolyn Glick, Townhall.com, 8/5/11): ““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.” (emphasis added)
“Settlements” as the Peace-Stumbling Block: The 10/24/10 Inq headlined: “A New Stumbling Block to Mideast Peace Talks; Israel Presses Palestinians to Recognize ‘Jewish’ State.” Its LA Times article suggested: “Some see Netanyahu’s actions as a tactical move to put Palestinians on the defensive, paint them as rejectionists and divert attention from Israel’s controversial settlement construction in the West Bank, which has thrown peace talks into crisis.” Exactly the reverse is true. A Jewish state, alongside close to two dozen Arab states, is what the conflict has always been all about. Bevin to Parliament 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.” The U.N. in 1947, over and over: “The Jewish State” and “the Arab State.”
We ourselves ceasing to use the loaded words is a first step, as Lee and I pitched again this week to a synagogue group. But countering all this propaganda goes deeper than that. Using loaded words is a means to an end. In our context, that end is to tarnish, denigrate and eventually extinguish Jewish homeland equity, first, in “the West Bank” and “East” Jerusalem, and, ultimately, in the Jewish homeland, the Palestine the U.N. sought to partition “between Palestinians and Jews,” as the media misstates it, altogether. There’s no half-way. We have to fight all of it.
Regards,
Jerry