Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #690, 3/23/14

To: Brith Sholom Media Watch Subcribers
From: Jerry Verlin, Editor (jverlin1234@verizon.net)
Subj: Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #690, 3/23/14

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Our Philly Inquirer ran a Reuters news article this week charmingly misdescribing two major Jewish neighborhoods in its capital city that has had a Jewish majority since 19th century Ottoman times as “two Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank.” But our Inq didn’t content itself this week with “only publishing Reuters.” Ms. Rubin begged a fundamentally contested question as well.

This Week In The Inq: “Two [Jerusalem] Jewish Settlements in the Occupied West Bank”
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Thursday’s Inq (3/20/14, A6), Inq-headlined as “Israel: Building Plans Approved in Two Jewish Settlements,” sported a Reuters piece teeing off (emphasis added):

Israel’s Jerusalem municipality approved building plans on Wednesday for 184 new homes in two Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank, drawing anger from Palestinians engaged in faltering statehood talks.

Har Homa and Pisgat Ze’ev: What and Where They Actually Are

First, a bit about these “two Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank,” named in the article as Har Homa and Pisgat Ze’ev. They lie within what has been “Jerusalem’s municipal border since 1967,” respectively south and north of the Old City, and a little west of Mt. Scopus. (See Jerusalem Demographic Map in a 2/13/14 www.camera.org article “NY Times Transfers Jerusalem Land to Palestinians.”) Thus, they’re no more located in “the occupied West Bank” than are Mt. Scopus and the rest of Jerusalem [and no more “cut the West Bank in half,” turning it into “disconnected cantons,” etc., etc.]

Wikipedia, citing go.jerusalem.com, describes Pisgat Ze’ev as “the largest residential area in Jerusalem with a population of over 50,000.” Much of it had been purchased in the 1930’s by European Jews who later died in the Holocaust. Ibid. Har Homa was built on uninhabited land, most of which had also been owned by Jews. www.peacefaq.com/harhoma.html. In its first ten years it grew to 25,000 residents, and is “a 15 minute drive from the center of town.” Ibid.

Judea-Samaria Jewish Communities versus “Jewish Settlements in the Occupied West Bank”

But even those Jewish communities that are in Judea-Samaria are grounded in substantial legal and historical Jewish rights. It’s a total endorsement of the Arab side of a totally contested Arab claim for the Western media to call Judea-Samaria Jewish communities “Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank.”

“Jerusalem Neighborhoods” versus “Settlements”

Jewish leaders as far apart on the political spectrum as Bibi and the Reform’s Rabbi Yoffie have lashed out against misdescription of Jewish Jerusalem neighborhoods beyond the long-gone Israel-Jordan 1949 military ceasefire line as “Jewish settlements.”

Netanyahu told AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) in March 2010:
The Jewish people were building Jerusalem 3,000 years ago and the Jewish people are building Jerusalem today. Jerusalem is not a settlement. It’s our capital.
This view is held also by the majority of Diaspora Jewry, regardless of political persuasion and religious movement. In that same month of March, 2010, the now-retired leader of the liberal Union of Reform Judaism, which represents America’s million Reform Jews, Rabbi Eric Yoffie, told an assembly of URJ leaders:
The Union of Reform Judaism, like most American Jewish organizations, supports a united Jerusalem under Israeli sovereignty.
This means that we believe housing units constructed in Jerusalem by Israel are not settlements and they are not illegal….
All right, Yoffie appended advocating a “temporary moratorium,” that “a great many things that are legal are not prudent or wise,” but the balanced reporting issue here is not whether Israel okaying homes for Jews in Har Homa and Pisgat Ze’ev, as it did this week, is prudent or wise, but whether those Jewish Jerusalem homes are in “settlements.” (BTW, Jewish Virtual Library points out (in “Har Homa”) that “the original decision to go forward with construction on Har Homa was made by Labor Prime Minister Shimon Peres in 1996.”).

CAMERA pointed out last month (posting by Ini, 2/13/14) that back in 2001 the New York Times somewhat corrected its reference to Pisgat Ze’ev as a “settlement,” stating it had “referred imprecisely to Pisgat Ze’ev, a Jewish neighborhood built in 1984 …. While Palestinians consider it a settlement, the Israelis say it is part of municipal Jerusalem.”

And from a media bias standpoint, that’s the key point, isn’t it, that while “Palestinians consider” Jewish Jerusalem neighborhoods across the old green line to be “settlements,” the media itself acknowledges that this is contested: “Israelis say” that they’re neighborhoods in their capital. In echoing the Arab line, the media is taking sides in the conflict, engaging in bias. (BTW, “imprecisely” is the term the NY Times likewise used in self-characterizing the magnitude of its inaccuracy in calling the some hundreds of thousands of Arabs who left Israel in 1948 “millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants.”)

This Week In the Inq: The Inq’s Ms. Rubin Begged a Fundamental Question As Well
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Perhaps playing off President Obama’s recent partial quotation of Hillel to Bibi, the Inq’s house foreign affairs columnist, Trudy Rubin, on Thursday titled her “Worldview” column “If Not Two States, What?” Therein, she stated as among “the nuts and bolts of ending the conflict” the issue of “how to divide Jerusalem into two capitals.”

A February 6, 2014, Herb Keinon Jerusalem Post article, “EU Condemns Building in Har Homa, Neveh Ya’akov¸ Pisgat Ze’ev” (sound familiar?), quoted the EU’s tireless foreign policy chief , Catherin Ashton, that “these plans could put at risk the prospects of Jerusalem becoming the capital of two states….” Keinon responded:

Despite Ashton’s adoption of the Palestinian position that Jerusalem will be the capital of a future Palestinian state, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has said repeatedly that he is opposed to dividing the capital.

Bibi is Very Far from alone on this. The Reform’s Rabbi Yoffie: “The Union of Reform Judaism, like most American Jewish organizations, supports a united Jerusalem under Israeli sovereignty.” In framing “the nuts and bolts of ending the conflict” as not whether Jerusalem, that’s been the capital of three Jewish states and no others, and has had a renewed Jewish majority since 19th century times, will be divided between Israel and Palestinian Arabs, who’ve not ruled one inch of it for one day in history, but how to go about so dividing it, Ms. Rubin, like Ms. Ashton, has adopted the Palestinian Arab position that Jerusalem will be the capital of a future western Palestine Arab state.
As an opinion columnist, Ms. Rubin is entitled to try to persuade Inquirer readers that Jerusalem should be redivided between Arabs and Jews along the long-defunct 1949-1967 Israel-Jordan military ceasefire line, but not to tell readers, as she did this week, summarily dismissing the Israeli and indeed Jewish position, that the peace process issue is merely how to divide it, or, as she has done previously (at least on 12/6/12 and 3/18/10), label fundamentally-contested over-the-green-line Jerusalem “Arab East Jerusalem.” aHaH

What we have witnessed over the past almost century is a long withering of Jewish state recognition from San Remo and the original Mandate down to just Palestine west of the Jordan; to 242’s partial withdrawal from that to “secure and recognized boundaries” without land swaps; to now “the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps” and severance of the Old City and historic Jerusalem, in a peace with Palestinian Arab “peace partners” who further demand a judenrein “West Bank” and Arab “right of return” to a non-Jewish-state inside-the-old-green-line Israel.

Regards,
Jerry