Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #676, 12/15/13

To: Brith Sholom Media Watch Subscribers
From: Jerry Verlin, Editor (jverlin1234@comcast.net)
Subj: Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #676, 12/15/13

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: An article our hometown Philly Inquirer (“Inq”) deemed front page newsworthy this week, though not for that reason, reveals the price that we pay for averting our eyes from the loaded lexicon of Israel-delegitimizing pejoratives in which the mainstream media reports Israel news. Come now and see.

Front Page News This Week In The Inq: “At Swarthmore, Jewish Group Sets Own Path”
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Vice President Biden made two solid points this week to an American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee meeting in Washington:

* He called current anti-Israel campaigns abroad “the most concentrated effort, in the 40 years I have served, to delegitimize Israel”; and

* He told the JDC: “The preservation of an independent Jewish state is the only certain guarantor of freedom and security for the Jewish people.”

Closer to home, those of us who agree with our VP on the independent Jewish state’s significance have cause to be disconcerted by the news in the lede of an Inquirer Staff Writer’s article that made the front page of Saturday’s (12/14/13) Inq:

Jewish students at Swarthmore College have become the first in the nation to break with the global student association Hillel and agree to open their doors to groups and speakers who do not support Israel.

The Hillel International policy against which these kids are rebelling “bars chapters from sponsoring events, hosting speakers, or partnering with groups that oppose Israel’s right to exist or support a movement for universities to end investments in Israel because of its policies toward the Palestinians” (Inq article, par. 2).

But what has all this to do with a pro-Israel media watch?

For openers, I wonder whether Greek or Italian or Irish-American college kids bucking their parent group’s ban on hosting speakers asserting that Greece or Italy or Ireland had “no right to exist” would have made the front page of an Inq. But more fundamentally troublesome is this Inq news article’s exposure of failings by us.

Our first glaring failing is failing to appreciate the destructive impact of the mainstream media’s loaded lexicon on ourselves, most especially upon American Jews not old enough to have personally witnessed the Holocaust and its aftermath, Israel’s struggle for independence, or the even harrowing weeks preceding the 1967 war in which the media sneers Israel “seized” land from Arabs.

Towards the end of this Inq article is a quote of a young Harvard graduate who was involved in “Open Hillel,” local chapters’ rebellion against Hillel International’s ban on “advocates for the destruction of the state of Israel.”

Emily Unger, the Harvard graduate who co-founded Open Hillel, said students of her generation have only known Israel as “being very powerful … and being an occupying power in Palestinian territories,” while she understood that older generations who witnessed Israel’s difficult beginnings might feel the need for a vigorous defense.

Who is responsible for our young people seeing Israel as “an occupying power in Palestinian territories”? Certainly, in the first instance, the mainstream Western media for purveying the Arab war for Israel’s destruction in this pejorative terminology. But more fundamentally, us. No, we can’t get the world’s APs and its Inqs to call what had been called for thousands of years “Judea and Samaria” Judea and Samaria, and not “the West Bank” and “occupied Palestinian territories,” but we could have made clear to the West’s APs and its Inqs, and to our kids, that we utterly reject these Jewish homeland delegitimizing pejoratives, instead of shamefully shrugging our shoulders that “the battle against using ‘West Bank’ [which never was fought] has been lost.”

Alas, our shortcomings run deeper yet than that. This Inq article quotes these sagacious Swarthmore scholars: “All are welcome to walk through our doors and speak with our name and under our roof, be they Zionist, anti-Zionist, post-Zionist or non-Zionist.” Hillel International’s leaders responded: “… anti-Zionists will not be permitted to speak using the Hillel name or under the Hillel roof….”

My heart’s with the Hillel adults here, certainly, and it’s at least a little ironic that the Jewish icon under whose roof these Hillel kids would welcome “anti-Zionist” folks began his famous advice to the Jews: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?….”

But I think both that the adults and kids here miss the point. “Zionism” – by some defined as a Jew giving money to a second Jew to send a third Jew to Israel – is a means, not an end. And even as a means, it isn’t new. Katz, Battleground, p. 97:

Modern Zionism did indeed start the count of the waves of immigration after 1882, but only the frame and the capacity for organization were new: the living movement to the land had never ceased.

The endgame is what Vice President Biden this week rightly called it: the preservation of the Jewish state of Israel as the independent homeland of the Jewish people. And that’s not new either. Settlements, shmettlements, the Arab war on Israel today is about what the Arab war on Israel has always been about. Foreign Minister Bevin (no friend of ours) to the British Parliament, 1947:

There are in Palestine about 1,200,000 [Katz thought too high] Arabs and 600,000 Jews.  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.” (Great Britain, Parliamentary Debates, Commons, vol. 433, col. 988, quoted in Bell, Terror Out of Zion, New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1977, p. 188)

The bottom line of this news article that appeared on the front page this week of the Inq is what Jonathan Tobin, then Jewish Exponent editor, told our Brith Sholom’s Board of Governors when I asked him to come speak to us a decade ago when I had the honor to be that century old fraternal order’s president. Jonathan said back then that anti-Israel media bias’ biggest victims are Jews. On that, he’s still right. We – both the conservatives and liberals among us – really ought to try to do something about it, at least make clear to the West, starting with ourselves and our kids, what Israeli cabinet minister Naftali Bennett made clear to CNN’s Christianne Amanpour last week: “Occupied territory” may be an international term, but we don’t accept it.

Regards,
Jerry