Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #683, 2/2/14

To: Brith Sholom Media Watch Subscribers
From: Jerry Verlin, Editor (jverlin1234@comcast.net)
Subj: Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #683, 2/2/14

“Negotiations

“While the PA makes continual assertions about the ‘1967 border’ – which does not exist – and ‘occupation’ and ‘Palestinian land,’ the Israel government tends to talk in terms of security, ignoring the question of rights.

“This is simply not an acceptable situation. Israel must assert her rights with strength. The conclusions of the Levy Report can provide the government with a strong negotiating position and protect Israel from making concessions that should not be made.

“Heritage and National Legitimacy

“The areas to which Jews are told they have no rightful claim are actually at the heart of the ancient history of the Jews in their land. This is true with regard to the Temple Mount and Kotel; where the Tomb of the Patriarchs stands; Shilo, where the Tabernacle stood; and many other sites.

“No self-respecting people sacrifices its own heritage. To surrender this heritage – which is at the heart of the Jewish connection to the land – is to weaken Jewish legitimacy everywhere in Israel.”

– from the website of the advocates for Israel’s adoption of the Levy Report, www.thelevyreport.org

This Week In The Inq: A Term Encapulating Media Delegitimization and Disdain

I’ve recounted in this media watch my encounter years ago with then Inquirer editor Lundy when he addressed the JCRC, at which I asked as my allotted one question: “How can you keep printing ‘millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants’ when Palestine’s entire 1948 population was less than two million, a third of it Jews?” Actually, I snuck in a second question: “And how can you keep printing that “Israel ‘seized’ land in 1967 when it fought a defensive war for survival?”

I got an answer to the second question. He thought “seized” was ok. It wasn’t ok in 2002, and it’s not ok – no matter how many times the Inq has printed the AP and, religiously, the Los Angeles Times, using it – now into 2014.

Los Angeles Times This Week In The Inq (Inq, Friday, 1/31/14, A14, LA Times, “Israel – Actress Cuts Ties With Oxfam.”):

“… Maale Adumim, a Jewish settlement on land that Israel seized in the 1967 war.”

This four-paragraph “Around the World” squib was on actress Scarlett Johansson appearing in a Super Bowl ad for SodaStream, an Israeli firm with a factory in Maale Adumim. The LATimes and Inq didn’t mention that the plant employs both Israelis and Palestinian Arabs, and that the employed Arabs don’t want the plant closed. But it’s the sneering pejorative “seized” that’s most disdainfully and misleadingly delegitimating.

Start with “seized’s” misdescription of the Six Day War. Here’s how Lee and I accurately described the context of that war in our media bias book “Pressing Israel”:

Diaspora Jews old enough to remember May 1967 cannot forget the chilling, encompassing fear that we felt—and could only imagine how Israelis felt—as Arab armies massed on Israel’s narrow boundaries, Jordan signed a military pact with Egypt, Egypt closed the Straits of Tiran, the U.N. folded its tents, and Nasser issued blood-curdling cries for Israel’s annihilation: “We intend to open a general assault. This will be total war. Our basic aim is the destruction of Israel.” And then, as a second Holocaust loomed, tiny Israel–hopelessly outclassed in every war-waging criterion–land, population, armaments–lashed out and, it seemed to us, miraculously overcame those impossible odds. The M.S.M. has repeatedly mocked Israel’s gains in that defensive war for survival as lands Israel “seized” in 1967.
After citing multiple mainstream media (“MSM”) news sources using “seized,” Lee and I suggested to our book’s readers: Reflect on the scope of this “Seized By Israel” club’s membership: the Washington Post, N.Y Times, L.A. Times, A.P., NPR, CNN, Knight-Ridder [RIP], Inquirer staff-writers.

But the disdain and delegitimization exuded by “seized,” encapsulated in “seized,” run three millennia deeper than 1967. The very Los Angeles Times sentence in which “seized” was used this week in the Inq linked it to “a Jewish settlement” on “land” to which it dated Jewish connection to 1967: “… a factory in Maale Adumim, a Jewish settlement on land that Israel seized in the 1967 war.” The Jewish connection to that land on which Maale Adumim is a community, not a “settlement,” dates from biblical times, not 1967. As the Levy Report advocates advocate, “the areas to which Jews are told they have no rightful claim are actually at the heart of the ancient history of the Jews in their land,” and the government of Israel must assert rights as well as security concerns.

But, for a Diaspora pro-Israel media watch, the Levy Report advocates’ website does not go far enough. It rightly asserts:

“No self-respecting people sacrifices its own heritage. To surrender this heritage – which is at the heart of the Jewish connection to the land – is to weaken Jewish legitimacy everywhere in Israel.”

But those last two words, “in Israel,” are unduly restrictive. “To surrender this heritage – which is at the heart of the Jewish connection to the land – is to weaken Jewish legitimacy everywhere,” not just “everywhere in Israel.” It’s for Israel, not Diaspora Jews, to do whatever its decides it needs to do regarding Judea-Samaria, except to call it “West Bank.” But contending with Los Angeles Times and Inq et ilk delegitimization of Jewish connection to the land is in our court. The Levy Report, of which apparently only the Summary has to date been translated into English, can help.

[I have two further bones to pick with the Levy Report’s advocates’ website. It seems to me insanity, given the connotation of illegitimacy universally attached to that term, for Jews anywhere (Inq, Friday, 1/31/14, A14, LA Times, “Israel – Actress Cuts Ties With Oxfam.”) to call communities such as Maale Adumim “settlements.” And, perhaps in the end even more significantly, the Levy Report’s advocates should not rest the Jewish homeland connection exclusively on biblical times, but should heed historian Parkes’ plea for Zionists to recognize and assert that the Yishuv’s continuous tenacious heroic endurance throughout post-biblical times wrote the Zionists’ “real title deeds.” Parkes was right. I wrote a book on it.]

Regards,
Jerry