#911, 7/8/18 – This Week: “. . . and Sometimes I Have Doubts of Thee”

This Week: “. . . and Sometimes I Have Doubts of Thee”

It was back in June 2001 that Philadelphia’s Jewish Exponent under then-editor Jonathan Tobin ran an editorial, “Media Bias – It’s Real.”  There were some who’d already long believed that, foremost among them David Bar-Ilan, editor of the Jerusalem Post and its path-breaking “Eye On The Media” column.  Another was the growing U.S. organization CAMERA – Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America.   Another, for at least the preceding six months, was a weekly email, this Media Watch.

Among the questions sometimes asked, following my co-author Lee’s and my Powerpoint talk based on our media bias book, is “How does what you’re doing differ [if at all] from the work of the major anti-Israel media bias fighting group CAMERA?”  We answer, “We take a different approach.”

CAMERA’s Andrea Levin knows, because I told her so in a lengthy one-on-one conversation, that she’s one of my heroes.  She is that because it was CAMERA and her that publicly and vigorously took up the mantle of David Bar-Ilan in contending against anti-Israel media bias well before most Jews recognized and appreciated just how Real, as Jonathan Tobin put it, and severe a problem we face.  But, appreciative as I am of CAMERA’s great and exceedingly necessary work, our media watch, as I said, takes a different approach.

CAMERA, as evidenced by its July 1 post, “CAMERA Prompts Another Los Angeles Times Correction on ‘Palestine’ Terminology,” interacts directly with the media.  It prompts corrections.  It supports a large and effective grassroots letter-writing group that points out media inaccuracies and solicits corrections through letters To and to the editor.  Bravo.

This media watch has had direct and sometimes productive exchanges with newspaper editors and journalists over the years, but our main target has been us, not the media, particularly regarding Arab-Israeli conflict terminology used.  Certainly, it would be great if the media stopped saying “West Bank … Israel’s 1967 borders … Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories,” etc., etc., but, by us, it’s most critical that we stop using these self-disrespecting, counter-productive poisoned pejoratives. At the least, this will make clear to western publics the mainstream media’s blanket adoption of the loaded lexicon designed to delegitimize the Jewish homeland of Israel.

My picque with CAMERA this week is over one these terms, “Palestinian territories.”  Its July 1 post mentioned above cites several instances in which the LA Times had used the term “Palestine” in the context of “Israel and Palestine,” which CAMERA got corrected to “the Israeli government and the Palestinians . . . Israel and the West Bank . . . [Israel and] the Palestinian territories.”

The object, apparently, was to clarify that “the Palestinian territories” are not [yet] a State.

But I think that this is no more helpful and persuasive in making our case that the land of Israel, Palestine west of the Jordan, including Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem, is the historic homeland of Jews than our going around saying that U.N. Resolution 242, in describing the territory taken by Israel in the 1967 war from which Israel was to withdraw, doesn’t say “the.”

The case we must make is that undivided Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria are intrinsic parts of the Jewish homeland, the land of Israel, and aren’t “Palestinian territories”; that “Israel and the West Bank . . . Israel and Palestine” aren’t two separate places; that Palestinian Arabs aren’t “the Palestinians”; that “Palestine” is not a dirty word, but references the historic homeland of the Jews; and that the Palestinian Arab state of “the two-state solution” is Palestinian Arab-majority, 78% of the Palestine Mandate, Jordan.

 

Obiter Dicta:  Fishing for Fish

In its strict legal sense, “obiter dicta,” for those who don’t know, refers to that part of a judicial opinion apart from its “holding,” the precise legal point it decided.  Dicta has no value as precedent.  “Commentary,” Hillel would call it.  You spend most of your three years in law school reading cases and wrestling over which part is which.  In its general sense, obiter dicta includes an appendage to an Israel coverage-focused media watch dealing with its editor fishing for fish.

My son, grandson and I spent this week in Quebec, fishing for fish.  We did well enough (though it was on a previous trip that we confirmed what it says someplace in the Talmud:  “Whoever has not tasted Walleye freshly caught by himself, and by his son and his grandson has truly not tasted fish”).  But, by your leave, what I’d like to tell you about is why I took along to Canada this week a particular paperback book.

Back around 1946, when I started school, my father bought me an encyclopedia set, The World Book, twenty or so hardback volumes I’ve kept in my library shelf all these years because the covers are pretty.  When my son Max was young, before there was Google, he consulted these World Books in doing a Hebrew-school assignment.  “There’s something wrong with your World Book,” he told me.  “The State of Israel is not in your World Book.”

A decade or so after that, a young man working for me asked me what was the book that I’d been reading that I held in my hand.  “Trial and Error,” I told him, the auto-biography of Dr. Chaim Weitzmann.”  This young man, who’d been bar-mitzvahed and observed the major holidays, answered me, “Who?”

I took with me this week a small paperback book on The Six Day War, one that went beyond recounting the battles to include also the impact of that seminal moment in Jewish history on our people in the homeland and the diaspora.  I gave it to Brandon, who has grown taller than me and has reached driving age and did part of the driving.  “Read this,” I told him, “you’re part of this people and soon enough your generation will form the views of Jews in America.”

When I got back, someone asked me “Where’ve you been all week?”  “Fishing for fish.”

Obiter dicta.  Or is it?