Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #692, 4/6/14

To: Brith Sholom Media Watch Subscribers
From: Jerry Verlin, Editor (jverlin1234@verizon.net)
Subj: Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #692, 4/6/14

This Week In The Inq: “Occupation” and “Settlements”: Poisonous Subtexts in Peace Talks’ News Articles

On Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday this past week, and again this Sunday morning, our Philly Inquirer (Inq) ran full news articles by four different mainstream media news sources on Israeli-Palestinian Arab peace talks, centering on what Tuesday’s Inq’s Washington Post article called “a standoff between Israel and the Palestinians” that “has left the negotiations in deep peril.”

It’s worth taking a quick look at these different news sources’ assessments of blame. Wednesday’s Inq’s Washington Post article (Inq, Wed, 4/2/14, A4) led that Abbas “defied American diplomats Tuesday by unilaterally signing more than a dozen United Nations treaties, endangering the U.S.-brokered talks.” The Post said:

The signing occurred as U.S. and Israeli negotiators were working on a broad outline for a bold plan to extend the talks, which would require Israel to slow settlement construction in the West Bank and release hundreds of additional Palestinian prisoners.

By contrast, this morning’s Inq’s Reuters article (Inq, Sun, 4/5/14, A5) put it:

The talks were catapulted into crisis when Israel refused to act on a previously agreed upon release of prisoners unless it had assurances that the Palestinians would continue negotiations beyond an initial end-of-April deadline.

What’s not in dispute in these news articles is these different mainstream news sources’ assessments of the nature of Jewish presence in Judea-Samaria and indeed heart of Jerusalem.

Inq’s Washington Post article Wednesday

… a bold plan to extend the talks, which would require Israel to slow settlement construction in the West Bank

… an independent state beside Israel, which occupies the West Bank
Inq’s McClatchy article Thursday (Inq, 4/3/14, A8)

Joining the treaties, including the Fourth Geneva Convention on protection of civilians in wartime, would give the Palestinians additional diplomatic leverage to challenge Israel’s occupation and settlement of territory as they strive for a state ….

Inq’s Reuters article This Morning

The talks have struggled from the start, stalling over Palestinian opposition to Israel’s demand that it be recognized as a Jewish state, and over Israeli settlements, internationally deemed illegal, in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

It seems to me insanity for the Jewish people to meekly let this mainstream Western media news article terminology go on and on and on unchallenged. That Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria is not occupation, and specifically that the Fourth Geneva Convention is inapplicable to it, is the very thrust of the Levy Commission Report, which languishes for Israeli government official adoption. That the American media should tell the American public that Jewish presence, after three thousand years, in the very heart of Jerusalem is “internationally deemed illegal” should not be acquiesced in. That we ourselves mouth the loaded lexicon of “occupation … settlements … West Bank … East Jerusalem” is not us sounding dignified but us sounding self-disrespecting.

It seems to me further that there’s no half-way here, that we can’t pick and choose which of these dirty words designed to delegitimize us we can acceptably use. I’m told that Prof. Dershowitz (by me a real if not always realistic supporter of Israel), speaking in Philadelphia last week, responded to a question whether Jews have the right to live in Judea and Samaria by saying “yes, but they don’t have the right to call it Israel.” I’d put it exactly the opposite: Through Israel’s elected government, the Jewish people today has the right to compromise possession and control of the Judea-Samaria part of the Jewish homeland, but not the right to abandon that millennia-honored name and call it “West Bank.”

Point #1 that Lee and I make in our Pressing Israel Powerpoint talk that we’ve been privileged to give to Jewish and Christian audiences some forty times now is to show a slide of Charlton Heston as Moses and say that all these Jewish homeland-delegitimizing terms, from “West Bank” down to “The Palestinians,” weren’t written in stone 3,000 years ago, but are post-Israeli independence creations. We end by pleading for us to cease using them all.

The mainstream Western media is not going to change. As this week’s Inq news articles by the Washington Post, McClatchy and Reuters most recently reveal, its attitude toward Jewish right to the Jewish homeland, including the heart of Jerusalem, across the brief, long-gone Israel-Jordan 1949 military ceasefire lines (the media’s “Israel’s 1967 borders”) is ingrained deep in the Inq et ilk’s DNA. What we can do, by mending our speech, is make clear to publics in the West that the Jewish side of the long Jewish-Arab Palestine conflict utterly rejects the slanted perspectives and loaded terminology that the Arab side and the Western media use. That’s not a cure for anti-Israel media bias, but it will make clearer to people in the West that it is slanted and loaded, mitigating the ongoing poisonous damage it does.

Regards,
Jerry