Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #677, 12/22/13

To: Brith Sholom Media Watch Subscribers
From: Jerry Verlin, Editor (jverlin1234@comcast.net)
Subj: Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #677, 12/22/13

This Year In the Inq: MSM Also Subtly Pushes the “Palestinian Narrative”
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Mainstream Western media (“MSM”) delegitimization of Israel this year took several forms. Our 2014 New Year’s Resolutions should be [1] not to acquiesce in the MSM’s loaded terms, and [2] to assert our Jewish homeland claim, as Arlene Kushner, for one, implores us, as tenaciously as our adversaries push theirs.

“Settlers” in “Settlements” versus “Residents” of “Villages”

One way the MSM purveys its view of Jewish and Arab “West Bank” and “East” Jerusalem homeland equities is to contrast “Jewish settlers” with “Palestinian villagers.”

? A 2/3/13 Inq AP article told readers that “the [Arab] village of Burin has come under frequent attack by hard-line Jewish settlers who live nearby.” (emphasis added throughout)

? Again, AP in Inq, 2/24/13: “Clashes erupted Saturday in the West Bank where Jewish settlers shot two Palestinian demonstrators in the northern village of Kusra, an Israeli military official and Palestinian residents said.”

? Washington Post in Inq, 5/1/13: Lede: “A Palestinian stabbed a Jewish settler to death in the West Bank on Tuesday . . . .” Par. 5 identified the victim as a 31-year-old father of five. “He was killed [i.e., murdered] as he stood at a hitchhiking stop at a major road junction.” The article contrasted “the settlement of Yitzhar,” where he worked, with “farmland near [Arab] villages around Yitzhar.”

An Egyptian on-line site carried a 5/11/13 English translation of an AFP follow-up that drew the same “Israeli settler” versus “Palestinian villager” distinction drawn by the Washington Post in the Inq.

* “Israeli settlers and Palestinians in the northern West Bank hurled stones at each other on Saturday after the settlers marched into the village of Burin, witnesses said.”

* “One villager was slightly hurt ….”

* “An [Israeli] army spokeswoman told AFP that about 50 settlers and 20 Palestinians were involved ….”

* “The Israelis came from the settlement of Yitzhar, home of a settler [31-year-old father of five] stabbed to death by a Palestinian ….”

* “The killer [murderer] came from the town of Tulkarem ….”

? A 6/27/13 Inq AP article contrasted two housing approval acts of an Israeli government committee. Paragraph 1 called Har Homa “a contentious east Jerusalem settlement.” Paragraph 6 characterized that same committee’s approval at that same meeting of homes for Jerusalem Arabs as the committee having “also approved 22 homes in Arab neighborhoods of the city.”

? Occasionally, Israeli media at least, answers back. The 10/31/13 Inq ran a Washington Post article on new housing plans for “East Jerusalem Jewish settlers.” That same day, the Jerusalem Post referred, accurately and non-pejoratively, to those “building plans for 1,500 residential units beyond the 1949 armistice line.” (And the JPost refreshingly called Judea and Samaria “Judea and Samaria.”)

? A 1/23/13 USA Today article by expert Alan Baker, “Israeli Settlements’ Legal Basis: Opposing View,” stated bluntly that “the territories are neither occupied nor are they Palestinian,” but are “’disputed’ pending a negotiated solution,” and that the Oslo accords “contain no prohibition whatsoever on building settlements on those parts of the territory agreed upon as remaining under Israel’s control.” Mr. Baker pointed out: “Israel has a very well-based claim to sovereignty over the area, more so than any other people,” citing “the undeniable historic fact that the Jewish people are, for more than 3,000 years,” an indigenous people to the region, and citing Balfour, San Remo and the League of Nations Palestine Mandate with its Jewish National Home.

[So why call them “settlements”? See, e.g., Israel Hayom 2/22/13: “Don’t Call It a Settlement, It’s a Community.”]

MSM Begins Jewish “East” Jerusalem and “West Bank” Connection in 1967

A pet MSM Jewish equity delegitimizing expression is its dating of Jewish connection to “East” Jerusalem and “the West Bank” to Israel having “captured,” sometimes “seized,” these areas in 1967. That Jerusalem has had a Jewish majority since the 19th century, that Judea and Samaria (Hebrew-origin names) were included in the Jewish National Home in the Mandate, isn’t part of the MSM narrative.

? AP in Inq, 8/5/13: “The Palestinians want to establish a state in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem – lands Israel captured in 1967 ….”

? Los Angeles Times in Inq, 8/23/13: “… Jewish housing on land it [Israel] seized during the 19676 Middle East war” (see also AP in Inq, 7/31/13, LA Times in Inq 7/20/13)

MSM Jewish Homeland Delegitimization Doesn’t Begin at the Green Line

When the media refers to “warfare after Israel’s founding in 1948,” to “the war that followed Israel’s creation,” it’s signaling to readers that Jewish presence in all of Palestine is recent, sudden and artificial, and is responsible for 1948 “displacement of Palestinians.”

That Jewish homeland nationalism antedated Arab Palestine nationalism and was recognized by international documents, San Remo and the Mandate, and that it was a homeland Jewish army, Haganah, that became the IDF, that threw back and then some the 1948 Arab invasion for Israel’s destruction, doesn’t make it into this narrative.

? An Inq-crafted Inq photo caption in an article about Jerusalem on 3/31/13 showed “A Turkish-period building in the Musrara neighborhood, which was a scene of warfare after Israel’s founding in 1948.”

? An 8/2/13 Inq editorial drove home the Inq’s view of Palestinian-Arabs-as-Palestine’s-aboriginal-owners even more literally. Here the Inq included among the core issues: “… whether displaced Palestinians can return to their original homelands.”

The people whose “original homelands” that land had been were the Jews. The 1948 UN test for Arab refugee-hood was two years’ Palestine presence.

For years, several years ago, MSM, including AP, news articles carried on about “millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants,” a monstrous misstatement given that Palestine’s entire 1948 population was less than two million, a third of it Jews. We media watchers thought we’d driven stakes through its heart in 2003 and 2004. But at least twice, this monstrous misstatement has reared its ugly head again in 2013.

? An 8/14/13 Inq AP news article enumerated among the “truly explosive issues” of the conflict “dividing Jerusalem and finding new homes for millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants.”

? AP in Inq, 9/5/13: “… the thorniest issues, such as the fate of Jerusalem and the status of millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants.”

MSM’s View of What Jews and Arabs Can Do During Negotiations

? The Inq’s 11/10/13 AP article stated that 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.” The MSM’s concept of balanced reporting is thus that only Arabs, and not Jews, can build on land – Judea, Samaria and the core of Jerusalem – disputed between Arabs and Jews while they negotiate with each other over those places.

? But, here too, there has been some answering back. In a lucid interval (or perhaps a New Year’s Eve hangover) the liberal Washington Post wrote in a 1/1/13 editorial that over-the-top criticism of Israeli building activities is ““counterproductive because it reinforces two mistaken but widely held notions: that the settlements are the principal obstacle to a deal and that further construction will make a Palestinian state impossible.”
The editorial acknowledged that “Mr. Netanyahu’s government, like several before it, has limited building almost entirely to areas that both sides expect Israel to annex through territorial swaps in an eventual settlement.”

? And Eli Hertz wrote on 6/27/13: “U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s calls for a freeze on Jewish construction in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem while Arab construction, which far exceeds Jewish development continues unfettered – are clearly biased.” Hertz cited a former Israeli policy planning official that “the tempo of Arab construction is ‘more than 10 times the number of buildings under construction than those approved’” by the Israeli government for Jews across the old green line.

A New Year’s Resolution for 2014

Cogent Israeli commentator Arlene Kushner, an activist in the newly organized campaign to convince the Israeli government to formally adopt last year’s cryingly-needed Levy Commission Report that expertly debunked the widely-held view that Israeli presence over the old green line is “occupation,” recently wrote in her influential newsletter:

What I suggest here, and what I hope to focus on in the weeks and months ahead, is the need for us to emphasize the facts, again and again and again.  [emphasis original] To talk about our rights until an obtuse public begins to absorb the reality of those rights.  “The ’67 line was only a temporary armistice line.  When Jordan signed the armistice agreement with Israel in 1949, it was agreed that the line would not prejudice final negotiations on a permanent border.”  “The ’67 line was only a temporary armistice line.”  “The ’67 line was only…”  In talks, and op-eds and radio call in shows, and talk-backs on the Internet. Time to take the offense across the board.  We’ve been too passive, too Western, in dealing with people who readily distort truth.

Also in her newsletters, Arlene Kushner uses “Palestinian Arabs,” not “the Palestinians,” which is at the root of it all.

Regards,
Jerry