Yesterday, I wrote Distorting the Truth to Serve a Supposedly Greater Good Destroys the Credibility of Journalists, and Threatens the Future of Democracy. Yet another example of this disturbing pattern of behavior is that The New York Times Pretends That the Jewish People Do Not Have Ancient Ties to the Land of Israel. The New York Times declares that Israel "insists" that there has been a Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria*--as if the historic Jewish presence there is in doubt--and the newspaper ignores the extensive evidence proving the strong and ancient Jewish connection to the Land of Israel. Keep in mind that this is the same newspaper that declared that "East Jerusalem was exclusively Arab in 1967" while leaving out the apparently inconvenient fact that East Jerusalem had only been exclusively Arab for the 19 years prior to 1967 because Jews had been ethnically cleansed from there. These are additional examples of a media outlet distorting the truth to serve the supposedly "greater good" (and few "greater goods" warm the hearts of self-proclaimed "progressives" more than destroying Israel, whose very existence arouses fear and shame for those who cannot conveniently fit Israel's successes into their worldview).
It is not difficult to find accurate historical information about Judea, Samaria, the pre-modern Land of Israel, and related topics--but such information runs counter to the "greater good" of destroying Israel to create yet another Arab state in the Mideast, so such information is generally ignored by most media outlets.
Here are a few articles worth reading:
Pre-State Israel: Jewish Claim To The Land Of Israel
What Are the Jewish Ties to the Land Where Israel and the Palestinian Territories Currently Exist?
A Brief History of Israel and the Jewish People
It is interesting that Israel's enemies dismiss any historically accurate material that mentions Jewish ties to the Land of Israel because they claim that such material is from biased sources, yet they accept on faith material from obviously biased sources that provide no evidence for ahistorical antisemitic and anti-Zionist claims. Here are a few questions to ponder when trying to evaluate source materials and claims:
1) When someone asserts or implies that "Palestine" was ever an independent Arab/Muslim country--as opposed to a geographical region occupied by various empires since the Roman Empire destroyed Judea--ask that person when exactly did that country independently exist, what were that country's borders, and when/how did that country cease to exist?
2) If such a country ever existed, why are there no credible historical documents or maps referencing an independent country named "Palestine?" One useful way to understand this is to think about the difference between correctly saying that there is a geographical region within America called the Midwest, and incorrectly saying that there was/is an independent nation state called the Midwest.
3) It is often asserted that Zionists "stole" Palestine and colonized it, with comparisons made to how Americans drove Indian tribes off of tribal land--but maps exist showing when/where various Indian tribal nations existed. When/where did Palestine exist as an independent nation?
Once you understand that there is no such thing as a separate Palestinian Arab nation, then you realize (1) the creation of this fictional national identity was meant to delegitimize and destroy Zionism, (2) the solution to the Palestinian Arab refugee crisis involves the affected people (a) accepting Israeli citizenship or (b) relocating to any Arab/Muslim state that will take in people who decline to be Israeli citizens. The notion that a viable Arab state can or should be carved out of Israeli territory not only lacks legal or historical justification but plainly will not work given the realities on the ground (i.e., the PLO, Hamas, and the nation states that sponsor them are not in the business of solving refugee crises but rather they are in the business of killing Jews and attempting to annihilate Israel).
There are some left-leaning people who recognize the historical truth regarding the Jewish people's connection to the Land of Israel but also believe that some sort of national entity should be created for Palestinian Arabs (they are apparently unaware that Jordan currently occupies 80% of the Palestine Mandate). I provide the following link not because I agree with all of the content, but because it shows that even among left-leaning people who have a delusional belief that the 20% of the Palestine Mandate located west of the Jordan River can/should be partitioned yet again it is possible to express sympathy for Palestinian Arabs without completely failing to acknowledge the deep Jewish ties to the Land of Israel:
Don’t erase our history: The Jewish people are indigenous to the land of Israel
After reading an article from a leftist perspective that reaffirms the deep historical Jewish connection to the Land of Israel, it is even more obvious that the self-proclaimed "progressives" who actively deny any Jewish link to the Land of Israel must be defined as who and what they are: antisemites who seek to destroy Israel, and who revel in the persecution and murder of Jews around the world; they consider all Israelis to be "foreign occupiers" and all Jews to be legitimate targets for attack: if you deny that Israel has any right to exist as such, then you support the annihilation of the Jewish people, no matter how you try to dress up your rhetoric, and to argue otherwise is to engage in the kind of sophistry spewed by those like Louis Farrakhan and David Duke who claim that they are not haters but just defenders of their own people.
Has The New York Times ever published articles belittling the historical rights of even a single other country in the world besides Israel? Informed readers should ask themselves why every other country's right to exist is accepted without question--even if that country is a purely modern creation with no ancient history, and even if that country is run by a tyrannical government that primarily creates misery at home and abroad--but that Israel alone is singled out as supposedly illegitimate without the presentation of any objective evidence to support such a heinous assertion.
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*Judea and Samaria are the proper names for the territory that is often misleadingly called "West Bank." The term "West Bank" makes no political or geographical sense to (1) anyone who knows the political history of the region and (2) anyone who looks at a map long enough to realize that the territory in question is both larger than a river bank to the west of the Jordan River but also not coextensive with the complete river bank. The term "West Bank" is preferred by those who, like the New York Times, pretend that the lands described are not ancient Jewish lands; the Romans used the same semantic technique when they razed Jerusalem and then renamed it Aelia Capitolina, and when they termed renamed Judea as Syria Palestina. The use of incorrect names to wipe out the Jewish connection to the Land of Israel dates back thousands of years, and must be opposed by anyone who values the importance of historical truth.
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