To: Brith Sholom Media Watch Subscribers
From: Jerry Verlin, Editor (jverlin1234@verizon.net)
Subj: Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #727, 12/7/14
WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: It seems to me that three good things happened this week that bear on our struggle for balanced mainstream media coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Come take a look and see if you agree.
Three Big Deals This Week??? Reflections of a Long-time Media Watcher
I’m closing in, if that’s the right term, on completion of 14 years of this weekly media watch, which I began the first week of January, 2001. I point this out because, in my view, three things happened this week which may be among the more beneficially significant over this 14-year period to our struggle to achieve balanced media coverage of the Jewish homeland of Israel.
#1 – Formal Israeli Recognition of the Jewish Refugees From Arab Lands
Alert #1 of Brith Sholom Media Watch, back on January 7, 2001 [I still marvel at my chutzpah in anointing that email to 30 unsuspecting folks with the title “#1” in full confidence that the next week there’d be “#2”] embodied my wrath at the Philadelphia Inquirer (my hometown “Inq”) for defacing its front page with a wire service (Knight-Ridder) dispatch declaring 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)
I railed that “it would be difficult to conceive of a more monstrous misrepresentation of history,” that hundreds of thousands of Arabs, not “nearly four million,” had fled tiny Israel, that they left during a partition-rejecting mutli-nation Arab invasion for Israel’s destruction, not “during the creation of Israel,” and that they were “matched by an equivalent number of Jews from Arab lands.”
Over the ensuing fourteen years, BSMW has chronicled sporadic private attempts to make these media-unmentioned Israel-absorbed Jewish refugees from Muslim lands known to the world. There have been a few articles in recent years, but during the early years when newspaper-reading Americans were being inundated with “millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants” who’d “fled or been forced from their homes” in graphic descriptions including “uprooting … expulsion and exile … forced to leave … forced out … were chased from their homes [that last one by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency [!] 1/16/08),” I encountered all of two references to Arab lands’ Jewish refugees, one that they “emigrated” (1/8/04) and one that they “left” (4/18/03).
So it was with some appreciation that I read this week in the Daily Alert of an AFP article on the State of Israel this past Sunday formally conducting a “state ceremony” recognizing that Israel had absorbed “nearly 800,000” of the c. 850,000 indigenously Middle Eastern Jews who fled Muslim lands in the wake of the 1948 war.
By me, this State recognition, long, long overdue, answers back two of the great canards of the Jewish homeland’s Arab foes and international mainstream media. One is that the “Nakba-driven” Palestinian Arabs – uniquely coddled in “refugee camps” (many in Palestinian Arab-controlled portions of Palestine itself) for longer than half-a-century by the UN – have a unilateral “Right of Return,” as opposed to have been one side, and the smaller side of one of the smaller ones at that, of one the world’s many, many post-WWII population exchanges. Compare, e.g., India-Pakistan.
And these indigenously Middle-eastern Israeli Jews from Muslim lands, some with roots going
back to biblical times, and their descendants, a major portion of Israel’s population, give the lie, along with the Yishuv that never left, to the canard that Israel is a European colonial “Zionist” implant in “the Arab Middle East.” That, by me, is these Jews’ fundamental significance.
#2 – Bibi Betting Premiership on “Israel as Jewish State”
The Inq ran two LA Times articles Wednesday and Thursday (12/3/14 A6, “Israeli Coalition Collapses” and 12/4/14 A6, “Knesset Votes to Dissolve”) this week on Israel heading into early elections. Wednesday’s article cited the “controversial nationality bill declaring Israel to be a Jewish state” as having “sparked” the “latest deadlock.”
Three thousand years’ continuous homeland Jewish history, making Israel the least artificial of Mideast (and other place) nations, San Remo, the Mandate, Israel’s Declaration of Independence, et al establish the Jewish homeland as such, but both Arabs (always) and the mainstream media (sometimes) regard Israel’s “right to be Jewish” to be in issue.
As for Palestinian Arabs, Abbas’ repeated insistence (e.g., Algemeiner, last Saturday, 11/29/14, “Abbas Reiterates Refusal To Recognize Israel as Jewish State”) flouts the U.S. vision of “two states for two peoples,” and, to boot, is hypocritical: Wikipedia, “Palestine Basic Law”:
According to Article 4:
1. Islam is the official religion in Palestine. Respect and sanctity of all other heavenly religions shall be maintained.
2. The principles of Islamic Shari’a shall be the main source of legislation.
3. Arabic shall be the official language. [emphasis added]
As for the media, when President Bush stood at Aqaba with Israeli and Arab leaders to inaugurate the “Road Map,” the U.S. President said in front of them and, inter alia, three Inq reporters including Michael Matza: “America is strongly committed and I am strongly committed to Israel’s security as a vibrant Jewish state.” The Inq’s Three Wise Men (Inq 6/5/03, A1) didn’t quote that statement of President Bush or convey its strong-commitment intensity, but reported the U.S. President as “describing” Israel as Jewish:
Bush surprised some yesterday by describing Israel as a ‘Jewish state.’ Israeli and Palestinian officials said they had not expected that term to be used because it can be interpreted as putting the United States firmly on Israel’s side on one of the most contentious issues to be resolved – whether Palestinian Arabs have a right to return to their family homes in what is now Israel.
There’s debate in Israel today whether the new “Jewish state” bill is needed, but now it is out there and Bibi has bet his continued premiership partly upon it. From the standpoint of contending against a media saturated with Palestinian Arab vociferous rejections of Israel’s Jewish state character, it will be helpful to have a reiterated official Israeli “Yes we are.” (And while they’re at it, formally adopt the Levy Commission Report that Judea and Samaria are not “occupied territories.”)
#3 – Matti Friedman Does It Again
As a third item this week on the good news side, I’d like to give you a sense of how far we have come. About a decade ago, Jonathan Tobin, then editor of the Philadelphia Jewish community’s Jewish Exponent, felt compelled to write an editorial: “Media Bias – It’s Real.” That editorial would not be needed today.
Yet even today, I think, not even most of You-Who-Put-Up-With-Me-Weekly share my own assessment of the Associated Press as the Epicenter of Evil, not just in the solar system or galaxy, but the Universe. Thus, this summer I was buoyed a bit by former long-time AP reporter Matti Friedman’s unexpected Tablet article (8/26/14, “An Insider’s Guide to the Most Important Story on Earth: A former AP correspondent explains how and why reporters get Israel so wrong, and why it matters.”) One telling passage:
It is accepted that the conflict is “Israeli-Palestinian,” meaning that is a conflict taking place on land that Israel controls – 0.2 percent of the Arab world – in which Jews are a majority and Arabs a minority. The conflict is more accurately described as “Israel-Arab,” or “Jewish-Arab” – that is, a conflict between the 6 million Jews of Israel and 300 million Arabs in surrounding countries…. This is the conflict that has been playing out in different forms for a century, before Israel existed, before Israel captured the Palestinian territories of Gaza and the West Bank, and before the term “Palestinian” was in use.
The “Israeli-Palestinian” framing allows the Jews, a tiny minority in the Middle East, to be depicted as the stronger party…. This definition also allows the Israeli settlement project, which I believe is a serious moral and strategic error on Israel’s part [he introduces himself as “a liberal” and critic of many Israeli policies], to be described not as what it is – one more destructive symptom of the conflict – but rather as its cause.
This week, Matti Friedman did it again. In a 11/30/14 Atlantic article, “What the Media Gets Wrong
About Israel,” In this article, challenged for accuracy by the AP, Friedman focuses on mainstream
media miscoverage of this summer’s Israel-Hamas war, and cites the views of an even stronger AP
critic, former long-time AP reporter Mark Lavie. Friedman:
Lavie believes that in the last years of his career, the AP’s Israel operation drifted from its traditional role of careful explanation toward a kind of political activism that both contributed to and fed off a growing hostility to Israel worldwide. “The AP is extremely important, and when the AP turned, it turned a lot of the world with it,” Lavie said.
I’m not buying “last years.” I haven’t forgotten the AP’s role years ago as a prime perpetrator of “millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants from Israel’s creation.” But I do agree that the AP is “extremely important” and that its perspective on the Arab-Israeli conflict influences a great many people. That we now have a couple former AP-niks stating that its Israel coverage is less than pristinely objectively balanced lends a credibility to our contentions of AP imbalance they would not otherwise have. I’ll take it, especially given today’s atmosphere of ill-will in much of the Universe towards Israel building homes for Jews in existing Jewish communities in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria that will remain part of Israel in any “two-state” further partition.
Regards,
Jerry