#789 – 2/14/16 – Urgency re Terms of Debate

Media Watch 2/14/16 (#789) – Urgency re Terms of the Debate

This Week in the Fight Against [inter alia] Anti-Israel Media Bias:  “The Urgency of Being More Vigilant About the Terms of the Debate”

FrontPageMag.com this week ran an article titled

Israel and the Reconquista of Language

The Urgency of Being More Vigilant About the Terms of the Debate

The article’s message is addressed to Israeli officials responsible for making Israel’s case to the world, not to American Jews contesting anti-Israel bias in western media reporting on the Jewish homeland of Israel.  But that message applies no less to us, particularly, I think, to those who agree with “realists” who’ve unsubscribed over the years to this media watch who’ve advised me, “the media will never change, so give it up.”

789 weeks into this, I’ll concede that these realists are likely half-right.  The mainstream western media is unlikely to cease writing headlines like “Israel Kills Palestinians” [who were attacking Israelis] or to stop referring to “Jewish settlements in occupied East Jerusalem and West Bank.”

But what we can do is make vividly clear to western publics that the language employed by the mainstream western media, the terms of the debate, is not balanced reporting terminology but is the loaded lexicon of Jewish homeland-delegitimizing pejoratives conjured by the Arab side.

We, grassroots western supporters of the Jewish homeland of Israel, have to begin by purging these pejoratives from our own vocabulary and calling upon advocates for Israel in the West to cleanse their mouths of them too.  I include in the loaded lexicon “1948 founding and creation of Israel [as though artificial and out-of-the-blue] … the war that followed Israel’s creation [suppressing that it was a multi-nation Arab invasion for Israel’s destruction, thrown back, btw, by a homeland army of homeland Jews] … East Jerusalem … West Bank … Jewish settlements … occupied, occupation … Israel’s 1967 borders … captured/seized by Israel in 1967 [as though there were no prior Jewish connection] … etc., etc.

What particularly struck me about this week’s FrontPageMag.com article was the very first term that the author called upon Israeli officials to cease using.  Lee Bender and I, in our Pressing Israel: Media Bias Exposed From A-to-Z book, call on Israel’s supporters, when we get down to “P,” to cease using this term, but, truth to tell, I’ve felt a little far-out in saying it.  But here’s Hugh Fitzgerald this week in FrontPageMag.com (emphasis original):

  1. The first phrase to go should be “Palestinian people.” Prior to the Arab defeat in the Six-Day War, no Arab leader, diplomat, intellectual, anywhere used that phrase; they always spoke about “Arab refugees.” It only began to be employed after the military defeat in June 1967, when it became clear that the Arabs would, before attempting another military assault, have to soften up Israel, isolating it diplomatically, and making the world forget that the Arabs started the war, and the one in 1948, long before the “Palestinian people” came into existence.  From1967 on, Arab propagandists have been involved in the “construction-of-the-Palestinian-identity” project, creating a “people” by promoting a word from geographic adjective (“Palestinian” Arab) to ethnic noun (“Palestinian”).  This sleight-of-word contributed mightily to the invention of the “Palestinian people” – a “people struggling for its legitimate rights” and doing it “in Palestine, where it had lived since time immemorial.”

The FrontPageMag.com article says “Israel should use every occasion to bring up” this 1974 Arab “admission” to a Dutch newspaper:

The Palestinian people does not exist.  The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity.  In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese.  Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a distinct “Palestinian people” to oppose Zionism….

Here’s Lee and me in our media-bias-from-a-to-z book (emphasis original):

P – The Palestinians – Really, the Jews

No single term is so determinative of Western public perception of right-and-wrong in the Arab-Israeli conflict as is reference to Palestinian Arabs as “the Palestinians.”  Even Israeli and Diaspora Jews join in this usage, and recoil from suggestion they stop.  But, as shown below (Section 2, IV), “Palestinian” used to mean primarily Palestine’s Jews, and not that long ago.

But our struggle against (inter alia) Western media anti-Israel imbalance only begins with Jews ceasing to use terms designed to delegitimize us.  We have to start speaking the terms that do legitimize us.  A sympathetic critic in this regard was eminent British historian Parkes, who wrote in Whose Land?, approvingly quoted by Katz in Battleground, that we greatly err in not affirmatively making our case to the world that Jews’ continuous post-biblical as well as biblical tenacious presence in The Land wrote the Zionists’ “real title deeds.”

The irony is not just that Abbas et al are ludicrously wrong in claiming that Palestinian Arabs descend from pre-Israelite Canaanites, but that if anybody in Palestine today has Canaanite blood, it’s Palestine’s Jews, not its Arabs.  In chapter 1 of my first book, Israel 3000 Years, I discuss the debate among today’s archeologists whether, c. 1200 BCE, the Israelites arrived by conquest or arose through indigenous origin out of the Canaanite population.

But, nilly-willy, homeland Jewish history, starting but not ending with biblical history, happened.  The Jews were not exiled in CE 135 by Rome (President Carter to the contrary notwithstanding), but stayed on, as Parkes and others show, all through the Roman-Byzantine-Muslim dynasty-Crusader-Mamluk-Turk foreign rule centuries, with modern Israel becoming the land of Israel’s next native state after Roman-destroyed Jewish Judaea.  So talk about Palestinian ….

And, finally on the subject of legitimizing-vs-delegitimizing Jewish homeland terminology, reflect on the reason Arabs and Iranians call Israel “the Zionist entity.”  E.g., the Arab statement in the Dutch newspaper quoted above:   “Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a distinct “Palestinian people” to oppose Zionism….”

There’s a nugget of truth in the quip that “Zionism,” which began in the late nineteenth century, “is a first Jew giving money to a second Jew to send a third Jew to Palestine.”   It wasn’t doing something new.  As Katz wrote in Battleground (p. 97):  “Modern Zionism did indeed start the count of the waves of immigration after 1882, but only the frame and the capacity for organization were new.  The living movement to the land had never ceased.”

And the land, from the Late Bronze-Iron I Age transition onward, has never been a land without Jews, who’ve been a sovereign native state there three times, while no one else has been once.  It’s for the State of Israel, which can do anything it needs to do regarding Judea-Samaria, except call it “West Bank,” to decide about borders and such.  But it would immeasurably strengthen both the Israeli government’s and Jewish people’s homeland case hand – and weaken the mainstream Western media’s loaded lexicon’s deleterious impact – for we ourselves to cease  gratuitously participating in our delegitimization through our own use of, e.g., “East Jerusalem … West Bank … Jewish settlements … occupied … etc.” and Palestinian Arabs as “the Palestinians.”