Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #702, 6/15/14

To: Brith Sholom Media Watch Subscribers
From: Jerry Verlin, Editor (jverlin1234@verizon.net)
Subj: Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #702, 6/15/14

This Week In The Inq: “… the southern West Bank area that Israel calls Gush Etzyon”

A Los Angeles Times news brief that the Philly Inquirer picked up Saturday morning (Inq, Sat, 6/14/14, A4, LA Times, “Large-Scale Search for Three Missing Teens”) referred to the place where three Israeli boys were apparently kidnapped by “Palestinian militants” as being “in the southern West Bank area that Israel calls Gush Etzyon.”

The sense you get from reading this LA Times wordplay in the Inq is that within a region with the unquestioned historical name of “West Bank” is an area that just Israel, not settled historical usage, calls “Gush Etzyon,” that while the name “West Bank” is rooted in history, the name “Gush Etzyon” is an Israeli rechristening of a place historically known by a non-Israeli [read “non-Jewish”] name.

The historical facts are [1] the name “Gush Etzion” is older, has deeper historical roots, than the name “West Bank,” and [2] that when Gush Etzion was built and so-named during the Palestine Mandate, not just the name “West Bank” but the area to which that name was later applied – the portion of Palestine west of the Jordan River that invading Trans-Jordan invaded and seized after the Mandate’s end – had no separate existence.

The Jewish Virtual Library section on “The Etzion Bloc (Gush Etzion)” tells us that in 1927 Jewish immigrants from Yemen along with a few ultra-Orthodox Palestinian Jews founded a community between Jerusalem and Hebron they named “Migdal Eder.” It was destroyed during the Arab riots of 1929. The next year, a Jew named Holtzman purchased the site and named the community “Kfar Etzion,” which included an element of his own name. “The word ‘holtz’ in German literally means ‘wood,’ which is translated into Hebrew as ‘etz.’” These residents too were driven out, in the Arab riots of 1936, but Jews returned “between 1943 – 1947, and established four small communities, which were all subsequently destroyed during Israel’s War of Independence.” Many (Jewish Virtual Library says 240) of the defenders were massacred after surrendering, but their sacrifice was not in vain, as their battle delayed a large Arab army headed for Jerusalem.

It was not until after that 1948-49 war that Jordan named the portion of western Palestine that it held at the ceasefire, marked by the Israel-Jordan Armistice Agreement’s “green line,” without prejudice to either side’s border claims, as “the West Bank” of its kingdom. Its historical name, which the U.N. itself had used in its Arab-rejected 1947 partition resolution, was “Judea-Samaria.” After Israel dislodged Jordan from its 1948 west-of-the-Jordan conquests in the 1967 war 19 years later, Jews, including descendants of those who had died there in 1948, returned to the Etzion area.

The original Palestine Mandate, the small portion of the old Ottoman Empire not awarded to Arabs, included land both west and east of the Jordan. 78% of that was soon lopped for all-Arab Transjordan and the Jewish National Home was confined to the remaining 22% west of the River, which included Judea-Samaria. Gush Etzion was built and so-named by Jews there during that time. After invading in 1948, Jordan renamed that part of Judea-Samaria that it held as “West Bank,” a name unknown to history for a piece of territory not previously differentiated from the remainder of the land west of the Jordan.

What sense of this was purveyed by the LA Times and Inq’s reference this week in the Inq to “the southern West Bank area that Israel calls Gush Etzyon”?

This Week In The Inq; “Hard-Liner” Elected Israel’s President

The Inq’s Washington Post article Wednesday (Inq, Wed, 6/11/14, A7, WP, “Hard-Liner Reuven Rivlin Will Be Israel’s President”) used the expressions “hard-liner” and “hard-line,” which the Inq itself put in its headline, for Israel’s new president. The basis for this characterization is that Rivlin is an Israeli who “is opposed to the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state and who envisions a ‘Greater Israel,’ a Jewish homeland stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, with Jerusalem as its undivided capital.” An Israeli think-tank is quoted that “he supports a Greater Israel, but he also supports giving Palestinians not a state but full and equal rights.”

The media’s “moderate” Abbas (at least for the moment in bed with Hamas), according, e.g., to his Fatah’s latest General Assembly, or something to that effect, in Bethlehem in 2009, would give Israelis zero rights, through zero presence, in their state, which they demanded would include all [n.b.] of Jerusalem, along with a “right of return” of millions of Arabs to green-line Israel. So who’s “hard-line” and who’s “moderate”?

And “Greater Israel” too is in the eye of the beholder. Starting in just the 20th century, the Jewish homeland has shrunk from both sides of the Jordan to just west of the Jordan; to post-’67 war 242, which did not demand Israeli retreat to the “green line” and did not refer to Jerusalem, to now every inch beyond the old 1949 ceasefire lines and heart of the capital city that’s had a Jewish majority since the 1800’s, no part of which Palestinian Arabs have ruled for one day in history. Belief in “Lesser Israel” seems to me a more appropriate tag to apply to those who would drive Israel back to the 1949 ceasefire lines, even with “mutually agreed swaps” starting from that.

A Spite at the Opera: “Death of Klinghoffer” Embeds a Media Refrain at the Met

There’s a lot that goes on in the world that it’s difficult to believe is actually taking place, and not far from the top of these days’ list is that the Metropolitan Opera in New York (the celebrated “Met”) has scheduled 8 performances and worldwide broadcast of a viciously anti-Israel, anti-Jewish “opera” whitewashing terrorists’ cold-blooded murder of an old disabled Jew on a cruise ship.

What’s fodder here for a media watch is how the ZOA, for one protesting group, characterizes this mockery of a musical artwork’s opening scene:

“Death of Klinghoffer” opens by purveying a key “big lie” that has incited anti-Semitism and attacks on Israel for the past six decades since Israel’s rebirth. The opera’s opening caption is “May 15, 1948, the day after Israel’s creation.” An Arab chorus sings the opera’s first line: “My father’s house was razed in 1948,” . . . . .

This is exactly the line that the mainstream Western media has been purveying to Western publics throughout the thirteen-plus years of this media watch.

*** 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)

*** Just one month ago, BSMW #699:

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)

*** Just one week before that, BSMW #698:

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)

It is insanity, not to say self-disrespecting, for supporters of Israel among the West’s Christians and Jews not just to avert our eyes from, but actually ourselves to use the Jewish homeland’s enemies’ and Western media’s intentionally-crafted loaded lexicon of pejoratives aimed at the Jewish homeland’s delegitimization.

For the moment at least we’re not entirely alone. A website called tabletmag.com reported this week:

Last week, the Australian government caused a stir when it issued a statement declaring that it would no longer refer to East Jerusalem as “Occupied East Jerusalem.” The announcement drew immediate protest from Palestinian representatives, but Australia has shown no signs of backing down. . . .

And the joint UNESCO-Wiesenthal Center exhibition “People, Book, Land: The 3500 Year Relationship of the Jewish People with the Holy Land” [the original title said “Israel”] opened this week in Paris. The Wiesenthal Center said this:

The display is a joint project of UNESCO and the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and “tells the history of the Jewish People in the Middle East from the biblical patriarch Abraham to the present-day State of Israel,” illustrating the indigenous status of Jews in Israel by showing “the uninterrupted presence of Jews in the land of Israel for nearly 3,500 years . . . .

The purpose of this exhibit is very clear: To put an end to the canard that a Jewish State came into being in 1948, not because Jews had any connection with the land of Israel, but because the world took pity on them as a result of the Holocaust.

In the mid-20th century, eminent British historian/theologian James Parkes wrote in a book he called “Whose Land?” that the heroic endurance of the Yishuv all through the centuries, “and in spite of every discouragement,” wrote the Zionists’ “real title deeds.” THIS is the case we have to make to the world, not least in the face of a Western media that insistently tells Western publics about “Palestinians displaced by Israel’s creation.” (BTW, I wrote a book about it, “Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine.” www.pavilionpress.com, or Amazon).

Have a great father’s day.

Regards,
Jerry