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July 30, 2004/Av 5 5764, Vol. 56, No. 45
Why use vocabulary of our enemies?
STEVE CAROL
Special to Jewish News
It pains me to see any newspaper, let alone the Jewish News, use the vocabulary of the enemies of Israel and the Jewish people.
I doubt Jewish News would refer to Israel as the "Zionist entity." So why use other vocabulary employed over and over again by the detractors of Israel?
Your paper and others have referred to the "creation of Israel" in 1948. Rather, Israel was re-established in 1948 - 1,875 years after the second independent Israeli state was conquered by Roman invaders. If any states in the Middle East were "created," they are Libya, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq - all created by Western colonizers. Saudi Arabia was created by force by one man, King Ibn Saud.
The territories won by Israel in its defensive war of 1967, the Six Day War, are not "occupied territories," a term implying an independent existence before the conflict. According to international law, they are "disputed territories," the future of which is subject to negotiation between Israelis and Palestinian Arabs who want a true peace, not an interim ceasefire between waves of terrorism and war - providing, of course, that such leaders can be found and kept alive.
Concerning one of the disputed territories, it is not correctly called the "West Bank." According not only to the Bible, but also to United Nations documents of the period 1947-49, the area's proper name is Judea-Samaria. "West Bank" was a name concocted by King Abdullah I of Trans-Jordan and his British advisers, to allow the king to annex land outside his artificially created kingdom.
The term "West Bank" eradicates all Jewish historical connection to the area. Besides the political origin phrase, from a geographical perspec-tive how wide can a riverbank be - surely not some 30 miles deep from the river?
The terms "settlements" and "settlers" feed attempts to portray not just the disputed territories and its inhabitants, but all of Israel and its people as a "settler state" akin to apartheid in South Africa.
If Gush Etzion, Hebron and other communities are settlements, so too were Tel Aviv, Rishon L'Tzion and Degania, along with many others. To accept the vocabulary and demands for removing "settlements" and "settlers" is to imply we also would see the dismantling of Tel Aviv and many other cities, towns and villages in pre-1967 Israel and removal of their inhabitants. Towns and villages they are, with inhabitants.
References to "the wall" raise historical analogies to the Berlin Wall. The barrier in fact is a security fence for almost its entire planned length, similar to security fences along the Israel-Lebanon frontier and the Israel-Gaza Strip frontier. India is constructing the same kind of barrier in Kashmir and for the same purpose: to keep out terrorists.
Since before the re-establishment of the state of Israel, those who violently oppose the Jewish state have been called "militants," "fedayeen," "guerrillas" and even "freedom fighters." Time and again, for more than 100 years, we have seen that they are terrorists and murderers bent on the destruction of Israel and the Jewish people. Why dignify their evil intent by repeating their own propaganda?
Attempts to get the world to use anti-Israeli vocabulary have been largely successful, even to the point of referring to the "Nakhba," the "Disaster," rather than the Israeli War of Independence. The term, which is gaining favor worldwide, obscures the fact that Israel fought a defensive war against invading Arab forces to regain its independence.
Similarly, we should refer not to the "October War" of 1973, but rather to the Yom Kippur War, another defensive war against Egyptian and Syrian attacks on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar.
We can only hope that the Jewish News and other media avoid the propaganda trap.
Dr. Steve Carol of Scottsdale is a retired professor of history at Adelphi University, Long Island University, Mesa Community College and Mesa Public Schools. He appears on the Middle East Radio Forum on KKNT (960 AM).
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