Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #699, 5/25/14

To: Brith Sholom Media Watch Subcribers
From: Jerry Verlin, Editor (jverlin1234@verizon.net)
Subj: Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #699, 5/25/14

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Our Philly Inquirer spread yet again this week the Arab version of 1948 as “Palestinians’ uprooting in the war that followed Israel’s creation,” a mischaracterization of history of which this media watch took notice in BSMW weekly alert #1 six hundred ninety-nine weeks ago. Time for we Jews to start commemorating annually, along with X years since Israel’s 1948 declaration of independence, three thousand-plus years of continuous homeland Jewish presence.

This Week In The Inq: Arab Narrative is Alive and Well and Living in The Philly Inquirer

Two weeks running now the Philadelphia Inquirer’s (“Inq’s”) news pages have purveyed the Arab narrative’s essence – “Palestinians’ uprooting in the war over Israel’s 1948 creation” – to passively acquiescing Philadelphia newspaper readers.

Indeed, not much (other than mainstream media abandonment of “millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants”) has changed since BSMW Alert #1 of January 7, 2001, noted our hometown Inq telling readers that under then President Clinton’s Mideast peace plan

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 . . . . (Thurs., 1/4/01, article on page 1 and 16) (emphasis added)

Indeed, in that BSMW #1 of thirteen years ago I pointed back to a Philly Inquirer news article of 7/17/00: “[the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is] a conflict that was born in 1948, when Palestinians were displaced to create the Jewish state “, and of 5/31/00: “Lebanon is home to 350,000 Palestinian refugees, forced from their homes by the creation of Israel in 1948 and by the 1967 Middle East War.” (emphasis added)

Fast forward 699 weeks. AP, This Week In The Inq:

On that day [May 15, 2014], Palestinians marked the anniversary of their uprooting in the war over Israel’s 1948 creation …. (Inq, Wed, 5/21/14, A3, AP) (emphasis added)

And AP the previous week, two weeks ago, in the Inq:

Palestinians marched in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to commemorate their displacement in the Mideast war over Israel’s 1948 creation. (Inq, Fri, 5/16/14, A4, AP) (emphasis added) (see BSMW #698)

It’s depressingly astonishing how long the mainstream Western media has persistently touted 1948 Israel-creationism as Middle East history, making it “easy to point fingers – for Palestinians to point to the displacement brought by Israel’s founding” – President of the United States to the world, Cairo, Egypt, June 4, 2009.

The time has come for Jews of all political stripes to confront this mainstream Western media mischaracterization of history that cuts deeper than Judea-Samaria being “the Israeli-occupied Palestinian West Bank” and even the heart of Jerusalem being “traditionally Arab East Jerusalem.” It cuts to the fundamental legal and historical validity of the Jewish homeland itself.

We have to tell the world

[a] that the Jewish homeland, today’s State of Israel, wasn’t “created” and “founded,” as though artificially and out-of-the-blue, in 1948;
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[b] that Western Palestine’s 1948 population wasn’t just Arabs (whom even we gratuitously anoint as “The Palestinians”) who were “displaced … forced out … uprooted” by Israel’s “creation” and “founding,” but was comprised of about a million Arabs and well-over a half-million Jews, both of whom were called “Palestinians,” including by the United Nations itself in 1947, and that there would have been very many more Jews but for the discriminatory policies, working backwards, of the land’s foreign non-Arab British, Turk, Mamluk and Crusader rulers for the past 900 years;

[c] that what did happen in 1948 was that the Arabs rejected a second slicing off for Arabs of what San Remo, in awarding the rest of the Middle East to the Arabs, had recognized for the Jews with a multi-nation invasion for Israel’s destruction and annihilation of its people which – “catastrophe” – was beaten back by a homeland army of homeland Jews; and

[d] that we Jews are not colonial “settlers” in our homeland of Israel, including in Judea, Samaria and the heart of Jerusalem, but have been a native people of the land and Mideast for three millennia, with a large segment of Israel’s population today comprising Middle Eastern Jews and their descendants who were kicked out of Arab lands in the wake of the 1948 war (a somewhat relevant historical fact that somehow just doesn’t get mentioned in all this AP and Inq et ilk writing of “Palestinians displaced by the war over Israel’s creation”).

The saying goes that “it’s better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.” A fortnight ago Lee Bender and I had the privilege of addressing a dinner program sponsored by Stand With Us, an extremely effective truth-telling pro-Israel organization, including on college campuses. The program wasn’t expressly about anti-Israel media bias but on the need for Israeli and Diaspora Jews to commemorate annually, along with the number of years since the State of Israel’s declaration of independence, our people’s continuous presence in the land since biblical times – i.e., that Israel wasn’t “created” and “founded” in 1948, the mainstream Western media – AP and Inq in the van – to the contrary notwithstanding.

Regards,
Jerry