Whose Land Is This, Anyway?

Misleading: References to Palestinian Arabs as ‘The Palestinians’”

Actually, they’re not. The U.N.’s own 1947 Palestine partition resolution referred to Palestine’s Jews and its Arabs as “the two Palestinian peoples.” There were at that time about a million Arabs in Palestine, that’s all, and some 600,000 Jews. There would have been many more Jews but for the actions of the Turks, Germans and British. During the League of Nations’ Mandate preceding the U.N.’s attempted partition, the term “Palestinian” was more often applied to and typically understood to be Palestine’s Jews and not its Arabs. Jews have continuously lived in the land throughout three millennia, half of that time before Arabs arrived.


The Jewish homeland’s detractors label Israel “the Zionist entity,” even “colonial Zionist entity,” to brand it as an artificial implant in the “Arab Middle East,” implanted there, if not in the heyday then at least in the latter days of the European colonialism era. Israel was not “colonized” by Europeans bent on establishing a colony there; Jews have continuously lived in the land, more than half of the Jews are from neighboring Arab lands. When Israel’s enemies admit that the Holocaust happened, they append: “But why should The Palestinians suffer?” Say rather: Israel is the historic, continuous Jewish homeland, not “the Zionist entity.”



Misleading: “Ultra-Nationalists’ Greater Israel”

The media sometimes refers to “ultra-nationalist” Israelis as Believers in a “Greater Israel,” i.e., a Jewish National Home extending beyond “Israel’s 1967 Borders,” i.e., the 1949 military-only ceasefire lines. But from our perspective, it’s the media that believes in a “Lesser Israel,” i.e., less than Palestine west of the Jordan, including Judea, Samaria and historic Jerusalem. The Jewish people has a solid historical and legal claim to the land of Israel, i.e., Palestine west of the Jordan. When a Jew sticks a toe over the ‘green line,’ the old military ceasefire line between Israel and the Arab invaders, he is reclaiming what was taken from him by that Arab invasion, not staking a new unsupported claim to land that was never Jews’. He can site homeland Jewish history, San Remo and the Mandate in support of his claim. Jews claiming the entirety of western Palestine as Jewish are no more “ultra-nationalist” than so-called “moderate” Palestinian Arabs, who claim it as well.


With as great contempt for Christian as well as Jewish heritage, European nations have shamefully joined Muslim nations in recent U.N. resolutions applying exclusively Arabic names to the Temple Mount and its components, down to the “al-Buraq Wall Plaza,” and declaring Rachel’s Tomb and the Patriarchs’ Cave to be Muslim mosques. The western media has gone along with much of this, using Arabic names for the Temple Mount, sometimes appending “known to Jews as Temple Mount.” Use the historic terms: Temple Mount, Western Wall, Western Wall Plaza, Rachel’s Tomb, Patriarchs’ Cave, and Judea-Samaria, instead of “West Bank.”