To: Brith Sholom Media Watch Subscribers
From: Jerry Verlin, Editor (jverlin1234@comcast.,net)
Subj: Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #680, 1/12/14
This Week In The Inq: Lessons for Us in Adroit Choice of Words
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It was only a 10-paragraph article by a Nasser Ishtayeh of the AP from a place called “Karyout” on Wednesday this week in the Inq (Inq, Wed, 1/8/14, A5, AP, “Crowd Detains Settlers”), but it came packed with lessons for us in adroit use of labels.
Paragraph 1 led: “Karyout, West Bank – Palestinians on Tuesday chased and grabbed more than a dozen Israeli settlers who witnesses said had attacked Palestinian farmers near a West Bank village.” This set the contrast: “Israeli settlers” versus “Palestinians” and “Palestinian farmers near a West Bank village.”
Paragraphs 2 and 3 referred four times to the Israelis exclusively as “settlers,” while referring to the Arabs twice as “people.” E.g., “People kicked and spit at the settlers….”
Paragraph 4 referenced “attacks by militant settlers on Palestinians” and called Tuesday’s incident the first time “settlers were captured and held by Palestinians.” Paragraph 5 indirectly quoted the Israeli military that it had learned of “a stone-throwing clash between settlers and Palestinian farmers” and that it had evacuated the “settlers.”
Paragraph 6 identified “the West Bank village” where the incident occurred, according to a member of the “village council.” Paragraph 7 said “settlers” attacked “farmers in an olive grove,” injuring “a Palestinian boy,” and that the “farmers called for reinforcements and about 100 youths arrived from the village.” Paragraph 8 added: “The settlers ran away and the villagers gave chase” said a “village resident.”
Paragraph 9 said some of “the settlers” sought cover near the edge of a “village,” and paragraph 10 said “villagers” caught them and held them along with other “settlers” they’d chased down.
“Settlers” is a dirty word, but “villagers” and “farmers” aren’t. “There once the embattled farmers stood ….”
String these 10 short paragraph’s contrasting terms together: “[1] West Bank … Palestinians … Israeli settlers … Palestinian farmers … West Bank village … [2] settlers … settlers … [3] settlers … people … people … settlers … [4] militant settlers … Palestinians … West Bank … settlers … Palestinians … [5] settlers … Palestinian farmers … settlers … [6] West Bank village … village council … [7] settlers … farmers … Palestinian boy … farmers … youths … village … [8] settlers … villagers … village resident … [9] settlers … village … [10] villagers … settlers.” Get the idea?
A nice piece of work, from the village farmers’, if not the “settlers’,” perspective, don’t you think?
This Weekend in the Jerusalem Post: His Moderateness Not Sounding Moderate
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Saturday’s Jerusalem Post had a Khaled Abu Toameh article, “Abbas Reaffirms Refusal To Recognize Israel as a Jewish State,” that shows he whom the media calls the “moderate” P.A. President Abbas not sounding “moderate” on every issue (“right of return” somehow escaped) on which the article touched. What’s different this time is that Kerry is 10 trips into a Crusade to achieve a Palestinian Arab-Israeli peace deal by spring. What’s not different is that when this U.S. quest fails, it will be “Israeli settlements,” Israeli “intransigence,” upon which the mainstream media will focus the blame.
The Jerusalem Post directly quoted Abbas:
*** “We won’t accept the Jewishness of Israel,” and “This is a story that we have heard only in the last two years. We won’t recognize and accept the Jewishness of Israel.”
*** “We are asking for the 1967 borders.”
It indirectly quoted him:
*** “He also stressed that the Palestinians would not accept any solution that did not include east Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state.”
*** “He said that Arab League foreign ministers who are scheduled to meeting with US Secretary of State John Kerry this week would tell him that Jerusalem is the occupied capital of the State of Palestine.”
Abbas also said that the current talks will continue only for the agreed nine months, ending in April, and that “after that, we are free to do what we want.”
On these three key issues – Jerusalem, borders, recognition of Jewish state –, just as on the media contrasting “Israeli setters” versus “Palestinian farmers near West Bank villages,” we can try to get through to people that the media is voicing one side of a two-sided claim. We have to do this as simply, clearly and succinctly as our adversaries do in propagating their narrative that “the Zionists stole the Palestinians’ lands.”
*** On “the 1967 borders,” we can cite [1] that the 1949 armistice agreement expressly defined the 1949 ceasefire line (the “Green Line”) that it drew as solely a military ceasefire line, without prejudice to border claims, and [2] that the post-1967 war UN resolution 242 did not require Israeli retreat to those perilous lines or “land swaps” for Israel-retained land beyond them.
*** On any part of Jerusalem being “Arab,” we can cite that Palestinian Arabs have not ruled any part of Jerusalem ever; that invading Transjordan ruled part of it for 19 years ending almost a half-century ago, and that the only other time that foreign Arabs [as opposed to non-Arab Muslims, the Mamluks and Turks who ruled after the Crusades] had ruled Jerusalem was part of the time between 638 and 1099; that in the past 3,000 years Jerusalem has been the capital of 3 states, all Jewish; and that the city has had a renewed Jewish majority since 19th century times.
*** Apart from the land of Israel having been the Jewish homeland for 3,000 years, in which Jewish modern Israel is the land’s next native state after ancient Jewish Judaea, if 20th and 21st century world history has taught us anything, it is that modern Israel as the Jewish homeland today is necessity and not nostalgia. Jews hounded out of lands where they live for being Jews in those lands need a home to which they can go rather than board a St. Louis, and Jews seeking freedom of religion in otherwise-enlightened states enacting bans on, e.g., circumcision and kosher practices need such a home not subject to a non-Jewish state’s laws on immigration.
Jews’ commitment to Israel as a Jewish state began with Moses, not with Netanyahu two years ago. In modern times, the Palestine Mandate, initially encompassing Palestine on both sides of the Jordan, included reconstitution of the Jewish National Home. The1947 UN partition resolution referenced “the Jewish State” and “the Arab [n.b., not “Palestinian”] State,” and as Bevin told Parliament in 1947, “for the Jews, the essential point of principle is the creation of a sovereign Jewish state.” (He added that “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 Arabs are aggressively pushing their point of principle. It’s not less essential that we pursue ours.
Regards,
Jerry