Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #696, 5/4/14

To: Brith Sholom Media Watch Subscribers
From: Jerry Verlin, Editor (jverlin1234@verizon.net)
Subj: Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #696, 5/4/14

Something New Under the Sun (Well, Moon, Anyway): Day Commemorating 3200+ Years

One thing I’ve learned from associating myself in the ZOA with Jews infinitely more religiously observant than me is that there are infinitely more commemoration days than I’d imagined. So it’s perhaps ironic that this month I’m a little involved with some good folks who are hopefully adding one more, well at least adding a deeper meaning to a commemoration we already have. I’ll tie this into countering media bias, the basis on which you put up with me, but come along for a couple pages and see if you agree with what these good folks are starting.

Since 1948, Israeli and Diaspora Jews have been annually commemorating the rebirth of Jewish sovereignty in our homeland of Israel. Well and good, but the folks organizing a program and dinner in Philadelphia this month think this annual homeland presence commemoration has an overlooked deeper dimension. They believe we should celebrate annually both Jewish homeland sovereignty’s 1948 rebirth and the Jews’ continuous homeland-claiming presence in the land since the days of Joshua. (“J Street’s” not joining in celebrating Joshua’s crossing over the Jordan into the homeland. They wait until he went on and crossed over inside the Green Line.)

This event’s organizers have invited Lee Bender and me to present the continuous homeland Jewish presence case in a brief Powerpoint presentation. We recognize, of course, the pervasiveness of the popular perception that, as Jimmy Carter wrote in his Palestine book, the Romans, on defeating Bar Kochba in CE 135, “exiled” Judaea’s surviving Jews, who didn’t “return” until Zionist times. But the historical fact is, as, e.g., British historian Parkes and Israeli premiers Begin, Sharon and Netanyahu have maintained, that the Jews, as such (the Yishuv), remained in The Land all through the centuries in spite of every discouragement, writing the Zionists’ “real title deeds.” We dishonor both the memory and meaning of the Yishuv in ignoring its tenacious continuous presence’s significance. That’s the case Lee and I plan to make at Stand With Us’ “Israel: Birth and Rebirth” event at Philadelphia’s International House on the evening of May 14 (event flyer attached). They bill it “A celebration of 66 Years of Re-Birth and 3200+ Years Presence in The Land.” What better night than May 14, 66 years to the day, in the Western calendar, that Ben-Gurion, standing beneath Herzl’s portrait, called on the Jews of the world to stand by Israel in the great struggle for fulfillment of the dream of generations for its redemption?

What initially set me off on BSMW’s now decade-plus weekly quest for media balance on Israel was a piece of mainstream media contempt for the Jewish people, repeated in substance often thereafter, that appeared, inter alia, on the Philly Inquirer’s front-page on January 4, 2001. Under then-President Clinton’s peace plan, U.S. newspaper readers were told,

Palestinians would have to scale back demands that nearly four million Palestinian refugees and their descendants be able to exercise a right of return to land they fled or were forced to leave in 1948 during the creation of Israel. In exchange, Palestinians would gain . . . .

The contempt wasn’t limited to the “nearly four million,” nearly ten times the actual number, exceeded by unmentioned Israel-absorbed Jews evicted from Arab and other Muslim lands. The contempt’s core, which remains years after “millions” of Arabs leaving Israel was abandoned, is the media’s narrative that Israel was “created and founded in 1948, displacing Palestinians.” The 1948 reality is that when the UN General Assembly sought to slice up for the second time the small piece of the former Ottoman Empire that the San Remo agreement had allocated for renewed Jewish sovereignty, the Arabs rejected partition with a multi-nation invasion for Israel’s destruction, which a homeland Jewish army threw back and then some.

The response we must make to this mainstream media that calls Israel “created” and “founded” in 1948, while saying that India and Pakistan, Syria and Lebanon, “won their independence” in that era, is that a Jewish state in the land where Jews have lived for three thousand years is the most natural and native, not the most artificially “created” and recently “founded” of nations.

That all sounds very nice, but history isn’t what historians (Parkes gets my vote) say it is, but what the mass of people believe it is. And most of the world believes, as Carter wrote in his Palestine book, that the Romans “exiled” Judaea’s Jews, who didn’t “return” until Zionist times.

None-the-less, here are a handful of under-appreciated historical facts:

[1] Next Native State: In 1948, the State of Israel became the land of Israel’s next native state following the Romans’ destruction in 135 CE of Jewish Judaea. Every ruler in between – every one: the Romans-Byzantines; the Omayyad, Abbasid and Fatimid Muslim dynasties; the European Christian Crusaders; Kurdish Ayyubids; Turk-Circassian Mamluks for 200+ years; the Ottoman Turks for 400 – was a foreign invader, and mostly non-Arab at that.

[2] Never Left: The historical fact is that the Jews never left. Continuously unearthed remains of Roman-Byzantine era synagogues, the Mishnah and Palestinian Talmud, Roman-recognition of the Patriarch, the Jews’ joinder in the 614 Persian invasion show that the Romans did not “exile” Judaea’s Jews. A millennium after the fact, archeologist Bahat constructed a map of a hundred ninth century, Muslim dynasty period, homeland Jewish communities all over the land. Crusaders acknowledged that Jerusalem’s Jews were “the last to fall” in defending the city against them, and that for a month Jews, alone courageously defended Haifa against them. We have many, many Jewish and other accounts of the Yishuv’s Jews in Safed, Tiberius, Jerusalem and Hebron, the four holy cities, and in Galilee and elsewhere in the land throughout foreign rule’s final six benighted Mamluk and Ottoman centuries.

[3] Not Just the Bible: Many wrongly deny to the Hebrew bible, because it’s The Bible, the evidentiary credibility accorded ancient documents that fit convincingly by multiple criteria into their historical time and place, but the bible and Dead Sea scrolls fit into a wealth of archeological evidence documenting Judah and Israel, and after them the Jewish kingdom Judaea. Among Israel and Judah’s enemies’ monuments are one, maybe two, referencing “the House of David,” and a huge mural in an Assyrian king’s palace depicts his later war against Judah. There are the still standing Second Temple remains, including the Western Wall, and “Judaea Capta” coins and the Arch of Titus in Rome; sites like Masada, the Elah Fortress; seals bearing biblical names dated to the time of people with those names in the bible; pottery shards with Hebrew writing; Bar Kochba’s letters; and very much more.

[4] Names Now in Vogue Not Known to History: “Judea-Samaria” is not “the biblical name of the West Bank.” Amb. Ettinger has documented that even the Turks and British used “Judea and Samaria” during their modern rule. The United Nations didn’t use “West Bank,” but “the hill country of Samaria and Judea,” in 1947. “East” Jerusalem (the Inq’s Trudy Rubin’s “Arab East Jerusalem”) didn’t exist until the 1948 Jordanian invasion and seizure, and ceased to exist with the city’s 1967 reunification. The UN didn’t seek to partition Palestine into Jewish and “Palestinian” states, but into a “Jewish State” and an “Arab State,” and it didn’t call Palestine’s Arabs “the Palestinians.” It called Palestine’s Jews and its Arabs “the two Palestinian peoples.” And during the Mandate, it was Palestine’s Jews – the Palestine Electric Company, the Palestine Symphony, the Palestine Post (still the incorporated name of today’s Jerusalem Post) – that widely used the term “Palestinian.”

What this month’s Stand With Us event’s organizers are trying to do – to instill in us a fuller appreciation of the Jewish people’s continuous homeland history and historical and legal right to its homeland – has everything to do with the essence of countering anti-Israel media bias, countering the media-purveyed misperception that Israel was “created” and “founded” in 1948, that Jews have no rightful presence in “the occupied Palestinian territories” of “the West Bank” and “East” Jerusalem, etc, etc.

Recent occurrences show some cause for optimism that we’re beginning to appreciate the consequences of our long acquiescence, even intentional joinder, in the loaded lexicon’s pejoratives. Cabinet minister Bennett and just recently ZOA’s Mort Klein have protested media and political leaders’ references to “occupied territories.” Both Israel and (the Inq’s Ms. Rubin not withstanding) the Jewish community rejected Secretary Kerry’s warning that Israel risks becoming “Apartheid.” J Street this week was denied membership in The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. I still cringe at seeing unconscious (and worse) uses of dirty words in our own advocates’ advocacy, but I think things are improving.

Look at the attached flyer for info on the Stand With Us dinner on May 14, commemorating 66 years of Israel’s independence and 3200+ years of Jews in our homeland.

Regards,
Jerry