Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #697. 5/11/14

To: Brith Sholom Media Watch Subscribers
From: Jerry Verlin, Editor (jverlin1234@verizon.net)
Subj: Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #697. 5/11/14

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: I had a letter this week in The Jerusalem Post. It doesn’t mention “anti-Israel media bias,” and many, if any, who read it may see no connection. But I submit that the deepest of connections exists. This week’s media watch affords me a place to make that case to you who share my concern that the daily media drips poison into Americans’ Arab-Jewish Palestine conflict mindset. So, if you will, come take a look.

Letter In This Week’s Jerusalem Post: “We Never Left”

There are multiple levels to Israel’s advocates’ response to anti-Israel media bias, and we seem to lose focus as we descend through them.

At the surface level are inaccurate and unfairly omitted facts in individual news articles. Thanks substantially to fact-providing, response-generating actions of, e.g., CAMERA and Honest Reporting, we’re good at responding to them.

Just beneath that particular news article surface level is the loaded lexicon in which virtually all reporting on Israel is purveyed to the public. There’s growing awareness, I think, of our folly in ourselves mouthing terms – West Bank … East Jerusalem … Jewish settlements … occupied territories … Palestinian territories … Palestine’s 1947 partition into Palestinian and Jewish states …1948 founding and creation of Israel …Palestinians displaced by the war that followed Israel’s creation … Israel’s 1967 borders … etc., etc. – intentionally crafted to delegitimize us.

And, as exemplified by the still-in-limbo Levy Commission Report and efforts by, e.g., Arlene Kushner and Jeff Daube, to get it adopted, there’s a growing sense that we have to make the legitimacy of the Jewish homeland case. We rightly cite San Remo and the Mandate, etc., but we seem more focused on the legal than historical side of what we all call the Jewish people’s “legal and historical” homeland case.

My Israeli friend Steve Kramer pointed me this week to an Israeli newspaper editorial that reveals, as much as anything, the historical-aspect gap in our making our case.

A little background: In a bitter criticism of us that we should all take to heart, British historian and theologian James Parkes, who was quite sympathetic to the Jewish homeland, wrote in Whose Land? A History of the Peoples of Palestine:

It was, perhaps, inevitable, that Zionists should look back to the Maccabees and Bar-Cochba, but their real title deeds were written by the less dramatic but equally heroic endurance of those who had maintained a Jewish presence in The Land all through the centuries, and in spite of every discouragement. This page of Jewis history found no place in the constant flood of Zionist propaganda, much of it as violent as it was one-sided. The omission allowed the anti-Zionist, whether Jewish, Arab, or European, to paint an entirely false picture of the wickedness of Jewry trying to re-establish a two-thousand-year-old claim to the country, indifferent to everything that had happened in the intervening period. It allowed a picture of The Land as a territory that had once been ‘Jewish’, but which for many generations had been ‘Arab’. In point of fact, any picture of a total change of population is false, as the preceding chapters have shown.

Parkes went on to call the Jews’ “continuous presence and its reduction through oppression and local lawlessness in The Land” a “far more cogent argument” for them than arguments based on the Balfour Declaration’s “legality,” and to fault the international community for framing the Mandate in terms of “Jews” and “Arabs,” omitting “acknowledgment of the presence of an ancient and living Christian community which had held onto its presence in the Holy Land with the same courage and under the same miserable conditions as their Jewish neighbors under centuries of second-class citizenship.”

On Monday, May 5, the Jerusalem Post ran a beautiful editorial, “Indomitable Spirit,” on Remembrance Day for the Fallen of Israel’s Wars and Victims of Terrorism, observed from sunset last Sunday to Monday, and Independence Day, from Monday to Tuesday this week.

Unfortunately, this JPost editorial purveyed a misperception, commonly believed by Jews as by most everyone else, about the Jewish people’s “exile” and “return,” which led Steve to bring it to my attention.

The editorial’s lede cited 1860 as “the year marked as the advent of the modern Jewish Yishuv or settlement in the Land of Israel,” but went on

In truth, 1860 is an arbitrary date. The Jewish people’s yearning to return to its historic homeland extends far back in history to 70 CE, the time of the destruction of the Second Temple. And the Jewish people’s prayers and hopes for an end to exile stored up over nearly two millennia give it unique strength.

I wrote this letter “to the editor,” which appeared in the JPost’s “letters” collection May 8:

Sir, – Your editorial “Indomitable spirit” (May 5) unfortunately conveys a common misperception in expressing “prayers and hopes for an end to exile stored up over nearly two millennia….”

The Jews never left. Roman-Byzantine-era synagogues all over the land, the Mishna and Palestinian Talmud, Roman recognition of the patriarch until the 5th century, and the yishuv’s joinder in the 614 Persian invasion show that the Romans did not “exile” the Jews.

Archeologist Dan Bahat included in his Twenty Centuries of Jewish Life in the Holy Land: The Forgotten Generations a map showing 9th-century Jewish communities all over the land, of which we have knowledge a millennium later.

The Crusaders acknowledged that Jews were “the last to fall” in fighting them at Jerusalem, and that Jews alone “courageously” held them off at Haifa for a whole month.

Evidence abounds of an organized Jewish presence in the four holy cities, in Galilee and elsewhere during the final six Mamluk and Ottoman centuries of foreign rule preceding modern Israel becoming the Land of Israel’s next native state after Jewish Judea.

As eminent British historian James Parkes wrote in Whose Land, the “heroic endurance of those who had maintained a Jewish presence in the land, and in spite of every discouragement,” wrote the Zionists’ “real title deeds.”

It does a disservice to both the memory and meaning of the continuously present Jewish yishuv to speak of “exile” and “return.”

Parkes bitterly criticized us for not making the continuous-presence case, and he was right.

JEROME VERLIN
Philadelphia 
The writer is author of Israel 3,000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3,000 Year Presence in Palestine
 
Regards,
Jerry