Update May 3, 2019 link to date of actual Susiya demolition added. Added link to Ben Netanyahu mixed messages, depending on language spoken Hebrew or English, about commitment to peaceful coexistence with Palestine and Palestinians.
What does Benjamin Netanyahu have in common with the late Yasser Arafat? One exploited, and one was accused of exploiting, mixed messages depending on language used by the speaker and audience to delay the 'peace process' and blame the 'other' for failure to agree on a final status, two state, conflict resolution.
In May 2014 before the kidnappings and murders of Gilad Shaer, Naftali Frankel, Uri Yifrach and Muhammad Abu Khdeir or the Protective Edge/Solid Cliff/50 Day War Netanyahu rejected a two state solution, in Hebrew.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahu-finally-speaks-his-mind/
In March 2015 Netanyahu stated there would be no Palestinian state on his PM watch (in his term of office if re-elected) and then tried to retract it when re-elected.
In April 2019, while the votes were still being counted in what turned out to be Netanyahu's election to a fifth term as PM since 1996, he gave a mixed message about commitment to peaceful coexistence in Hebrew compared to what he has stated in English.
The
Trump administration weighed in again on Monday, declaring the Iran
Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization. By Monday night in
Israel, Mr. Netanyahu was boasting on Twitter in Hebrew — but not in English — that this was in fulfillment of “another important request of mine.”
The clear hypocrisy, relative to the way Yasser Arafat was singled out and demonized to delegitimize his peace overtures since Dec 1988, followed by the Sept 13, 1993 Camp David agreement, is only visible to those with a long-term, historic view of the Israeli-Palestinian situation. Of course I am referring to the 'the handshake photo with Yitzhak Rabin moderated by former Pres. Bill Clinton' that started the official 'peace process' for a final status two state solution.
Mentioning and equating tragedies of deaths of innocent individuals in the context of seeking peaceful conflict resolution to prevent more tragedies should not be reflexively dismissed as moral equivalence, relativism or blindness. Indeed equating tragedies was given space in the column "A Price of Fighting Terrorism," in the August 10, 2006 Washington Post,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/09/AR2006080901517.html
when the Israeli bombing of Qana, Lebanon was compared to the USA bombing the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, Serbia as similarly regrettable accidents.
Benjamin Netanyahu's selective Hebrew or English statements reminds me of all the times the late Yasser Arafat was selectively condemned for mixed messages in Arabic and English, as not committed to a final status, two state, negotiated peace.
Here is one example:
http://articles.latimes.com/1996-02-27/local/me-40531_1_west-bank
"...What is really important is not the quotes he gives in English. It's what he says in Arabic to his own people and what he does about terrorism...."
and
"...According to the Norwegian paper Dagen, Arafat spoke a few weeks ago in Stockholm to a group of Arabs, outlining his strategy for Palestinian takeover of Israel. "We of the PLO will now concentrate on our efforts in splitting Israel psychologically into two camps," he was quoted as saying.
"Within five years we will have 6 or 7 million Arabs in the West Bank....We will replace Israel with a Palestinian Arab state....I have no use for Jews, they are and remain Jews."
And this excerpt precedes the Los Angeles Times column with selective focus on Palestinian representatives' lack of willingness to negotiate peace and honor their commitments, even accusing Palestinians of being disingenuous and deceptive. Both attacreport.com and the Los Angeles Times author ignore Israeli representatives' willingness (and lack thereof) to negotiate peace, honor their commitments and their statements and actions that are rejectionist of Palestinians' aspirations to live in peaceful, two state or one state coexistence, anything but the status quo of military occupation for about 50 years.
http://www.attacreport.com/ar_archives/next_target_b.htm
We Are the Next Target
Terrorism and the Betrayal of Israel
(Audiotape documentary, April 1994)
The PLO's war of national liberation
"....At it's closest point, the West Bank's border is only nine miles from the Mediterranean Sea. Half the city of Jerusalem, Israel's capital, lies inside this territory. If a hostile military force were to occupy the West Bank, it would control strategic air space that now buffers against air and missile attacks, and it could position troops near the heart of Israel. A lightning invasion launched from the West Bank would easily cut the tiny nation of Israel into northern and southern halves within minutes, giving an enemy an enormous military advantage during a war.
Following the 1973 Yom Kippur War against Israel, the Communists could see that a People's Republic of Palestine would never replace Israel without first taking control of the West Bank, as well as of the Gaza Strip and Golan Heights, two other territories under Israeli control. Thus in 1974 the ruling council of the PLO officially adopted a two-phase strategy for destroying Israel, in which an armed state of Palestine would be established in the West Bank and Gaza Strip before attacking the rest of Israel. PLO official Abu Iyad boasted in 1988 that "According to the Phased Plan, we will establish a Palestinian state on any part of Palestine that the enemy will retreat from. The Palestinian state will be a stage in our prolonged struggle for the liberation of Palestine on all of its territory."94
Because of the Phased Plan, the PLO claimed that it was willing to allow Israel to exist - if only temporarily- and that it only wished to create Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza. In other words, the PLO could now pretend to be moderate, while actually stepping up the revolution. But to gain control of the territories in the first place, the PLO had to turn to the time-tested Communist strategy of a war of national liberation....and has recently taken the form of the intifada, Arabic for the "uprising," [and since 1994 the second intifada starting on September 28, 2000 with third intifada fear-mongering about Facebook pages around 2012]now seen in the riots of the West Bank and Gaza. A careful analysis of the intifada reveals that it is indeed part of a classic, seven-step Communist revolution.
Even Arabic language class textbooks have become the object of controversy start-ups ('drama') about whether they contribute to peaceful coexistence with civil legal equality for all faiths (represented also by diversity in languages spoken by followers of a religion).
http://www.weeklystandard.com/how-do-you-say-israel-in-arabic/article/14621
written by
David Adesnik, a policy analyst in Washington, is the editor of OxBlog.com
Another controversy start-up impugning Arabic language teaching materials for alleged 'bias' or 'prejudice' occurred here:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/04/AR2008070402093.html
and a response was printed here:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/08/AR2008070802590.html
By the end of the last bilateral, mediated by the USA State Department (not the Quartet of 2 other countries and the EU in addition to the USA), Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in May 2014 and following the Protective Edge/Solid Cliff/50 Day War on Gaza, followed by Israel's appropriation of
990 acres
http://crooksandliars.com/2014/08/israel-swipes-back-huge-chunk-palestinian-land
aggregating
http://www.latimes.com/world/middleeast/la-fg-israel-west-bank-appropriation-20140831-story.html
equivalent to 4,000 dunams
http://peacenow.org/entry.php?id=7871#.WFbRVYW2jwt
of the West Bank (the Etzion illegal settlement bloc of Area C where the 3 hitchhiking and murdered teens lived) supporters of a two state solution had begun giving up with the tragic feeling that 'the window for a two state solution has closed.' Support for a single state with equal rights for all of its citizens regardless of faith, distorted non-specifically into 'the destruction/end of Israel' by fear-mongering supporters of the status quo or at least 'secure borders,' has grown out of the repeated failure of negotiations to reach a final status agreement. A battle resumed during, and after, the Protective Edge/Solid Cliff/50 Day war mirroring past battles, in online 'new media' after long battles in 'old media' (and its online presences in comment sections and sharing the 'old media' content between controllers of social media accounts) over 'who is to blame' to gain an advantage in the court of public opinion if not legal opinion. The battle seeks to influence (pre-judge?) the outcome to be 'better' for 'one side' than another side with a common benefit being secondary, not primary, as part of generally supporting peace over war at least as a 'right of self defense' for one side.
Here are old links, which may or may not still load their original content, of the online 'new' subscription and advertiser-supported and 'old' subscription and advertiser-supported media battles as they were happening 10-16 years ago.
The first two links died a copy and paste of the original content has been added. (sorry for 😩😩 the need to scroll down the page)
https://web.archive.org/web/2002/1217015731/http://www.jewishsf.com/bk010323/ibritmedia.shtml
copy-paste added:
British media accused of pro-Palestinian bias
RICHARD ALLEN GREENE
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
LONDON -- As clashes between Israel and the Palestinians continue for a sixth month, many Jews in the United Kingdom are concerned that Israel is not getting a fair hearing in the British press.
The Guardian newspaper has been the subject of the harshest criticism, but another daily newspaper, the Independent, and the BBC have also raised concern.
In an unusual move, Canadian publishing magnate Conrad Black publicly attacked one of his own columnists for expressing a hatred for Israel that Black described as "irrational and an offense to civilized taste."
Much of the British Jewish community shares Black's concerns.
"Israel is portrayed as a brutal regime interested only in hurting Palestinians," said Hagai Segal of the World Zionist Organization. Segal was a speaker at a recent panel on the topic, "Does Israel get a fair hearing in the media?"
The British press sees "Israel as a superpower and the Palestinians as poor people who want peace, and neither perspective is remotely accurate," Segal said in an interview.
Part of the problem, he said, is that the British press in general tends to side with underdogs.
D.J. Schneeweis, the Israeli press attaché in London, agreed.
"There is a tendency in many quarters of the media to go softly on the perceived weaker side in any conflict -- in this case, the Palestinians," he said. "The presumption is that if more Palestinians than Israelis are being killed, it must be the Israelis using force."
Yet emphasizing the number of fatalities -- without saying which side is initiating the attacks -- leads to bias in articles, Schneeweis said.
Segal said the problem has gotten worse since the Palestinian uprising broke out at the end of September.
After the Oslo peace process began in 1993 "there was more neutral, balanced, non-emotive reporting," he said.
The paper that has come in for the strongest condemnation is the Guardian, a London daily that is the choice of the left-leaning intelligentsia. Last month it was the target of an email campaign begun by a group called HonestReporting.com.
Started by a couple of young Londoners last October to monitor what they saw as anti-Israel bias in the press, Honest Reporting was soon taken over by Media Watch International, a new group based in New York.
When the Guardian reported that a man who killed eight Israelis by plowing his bus into a group of soldiers and civilians in mid-February was seen "in the Gaza Strip as a sort of Palestinian everyman who finally snapped," Honest Reporting encouraged its 12,000 email subscribers to write to the paper to complain.
"It places no blame whatsoever on the Palestinians. In article after article, and editorial after editorial, The Guardian places sole blame on Israel, on Israel's new prime minister, or on the Israel Defense Force," the monitoring group charged.
The campaign got an immediate response from the newspaper.
Four days after the Honest Reporting petition went out, the Guardian's comment editor, David Leigh, wrote an article saying that hundreds of emails had come in from around the world about the bus driver article.
Leigh traced the campaign back to Honest Reporting and Media Watch International. He linked both groups to the Orthodox group Aish HaTorah, which he described as "widely regarded as right-wing extremists, not people entitled to harass the media into what they would call 'objectivity.'"
Sharon Tzur, the director of Media Watch International, said that some people associated with her group are also associated with Aish, but there are no institutional links between the organizations.
She also said she was disappointed that Leigh responded with an attack on the messenger rather than to the substance of the group's complaint.
Leigh did not respond to inquiries. Guardian policy does not permit journalists to speak to the media about the newspaper.
But Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, said he found the complaints baseless, pointing out that the Guardian has published pieces by Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and writers Amos Oz and David Grossman -- leading leftists who have been highly critical of Israeli policy.
"We are very careful to make sure Jewish and Israeli voices are heard," he said.
https://web.archive.org/web/20031202151038/http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0618/p01s04-wome.html
copy-paste added
from the June 18, 2003 edition
The Mideast wars over words
When Israelis and Palestinians hold talks, as in Gaza this Friday, euphemism and subtext are usually the rule.
JERUSALEM – Israelis and Palestinians are discussing a cease-fire, but even as they use the same word, they don't mean the same thing.
To Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, a cease-fire means an end to all attacks against Israelis while his army continues using helicopter gunships to kill militants.
To the hard-line group Hamas, a cease-fire means an Israeli pledge to end helicopter strikes while they continue attacks against Israelis in the Palestinian territories. The difference in understanding is typical. It may foil ongoing attempts by Egyptian mediators to secure Hamas's agreement to a cease-fire and hopes that Secretary of State Colin Powell will visit Israel later this week.
As Americans saw in Iraq, language is an early victim of war. In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, words are disputed, freighted with hidden meanings, and used as a crucial weapon in both sides' arsenals. "[This is] a battle over language sometimes more than over anything else," says Diana Buttu, legal advisor to the Palestinian Liberation Organization.
While language has tremendous power to heal and reconcile, it is largely used here to shore up deeply held, competing beliefs.
The core Israeli-Palestinian struggle is not about real estate, but identity: who was here first, who belongs, whose story to believe. And so words, which shape the way we see and react to things, matter.
The sensitivity to language explains the furor before and at the Aqaba summit on June 4, where Sharon and Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas were assailed for their word choices.
In urging his government to accept the US-backed peace plan presented at the summit, Sharon told his government that holding Palestinians under "occupation" was bad for Israel. Israel believes it has a legal and historical right to the Palestinian territories and doesn't consider them occupied. Sharon's use of the word created a firestorm and he retracted.
At the summit, Mr. Abbas prompted much the same reaction from his people when he referred to "terrorism," enraging militant and moderate Palestinians who felt he discredited a rightful struggle.
"All the words people use here are codes," says Hebrew University philosopher Avishai Margalit. He cites former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin's drive to use the Biblical names "Judea and Samaria" for the Palestinian's West Bank.
"This is a semantic battle. The idea is to create an attitude to those territories so that it will be inconceivable to give them back. So the battle is for the consciousness of Israelis as well as for the land."
Words matter most when it comes to the terms used to describe this conflict. Palestinians like the word "intifada," or uprising, which fits their David-and-Goliath narrative of a people resisting an occupying power. Israelis, who have fine-tuned their word for the conflict several times, now call it "an armed conflict against terrorism." Language often entails legal obligations. Avoiding the word 'war' frees Israel from international laws that govern war.
Col. Daniel Reisner, head of the Israeli Army's international law department, also points out that using the phrase 'armed conflict' signals that Israel is not fighting another state. By using the word "terrorism," Col. Reisner says, "we're making the point that we're not fighting the Palestinian Authority ... the enemy is the terrorists. If you take any single element of the story, you'll find two different words," he adds.
The verbal battles between Israelis and Palestinians may be particularly intense, but their skirmishes over vocabulary are not new or unique. In 1917, when US Senator Hiram Johnson observed that "The first casualty when war comes is truth," he could have added the words 'and language.'
Conflicting euphemisms
The exact meaning of a word can be hard to pin down in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, because it often means different things to the two sides. More commonly, the two sides use different language to describe the same thing.
Below, some examples:
Israelis say: Israel Defense Forces
Palestinians say: Israeli Occupation Forces
Israelis say: terrorist
Palestinians say: shaheed, or martyr. In the case of suicide bombings, the word glosses over the Muslim prohibition on suicide.
Israelis say: targeted killings
Palestinians say: assassination
Israelis say: they're against unilateral action in the territories that changes their status. What they mean is they are against a Palestinian declaration of statehood.
Palestinians say: They're against unilateral action in the territories that changes their status. What they mean is they are against the Israeli settlement expansion.
In his book "Faces of the Enemy," Sam Keen writes that "in the beginning we create the enemy.... Propaganda precedes technology."
Once physical conflict begins, militaries draw on a rich vein of euphemism. Military language provides the crucial function of legitimizing violent acts of soldiers that would be crimes in a civilian context. It also shields the public from the brutal business of war, helping people accept what they normally wouldn't stomach.
"Collateral damage" has become a familiar substitute for the killing of men, women and children who aren't soldiers. During the war on Iraq, Americans learned new phrases courtesy of some media outlets' use of military terms.
Television reporters for CNN told American audiences about Iraqi bunkers being "softened up" when they meant the soldiers inside were being ripped apart by bombs. Instead of using plain language to explain that US soldiers were slowly killing the Iraqi soldiers who resisted them, CNN borrowed Pentagon jargon to tell viewers that the opposing divisions were being "degraded" or "attrited."
An article about CNN's wartime vocabulary by Canadian columnist Russell Smith likens it to the language writer George Orwell had in mind when he coined the word "Newspeak."
The Israeli and Palestinian dialects of Newspeak are mostly political, but they have their military terms as well. Israelis speak of "focused intervention" to describe killing a man by firing missiles at his car on a narrow, thickly crowded street.
When Palestinian militant groups praise "successful operations" in "target rich" areas, often they really mean a nail-studded bomb exploding in an area full of people who subsequently die.
Yet words can have a powerful effect in countering violence and fostering understanding, say scholars.
"Right now the world operates in the language of militarization, which assumes that when a society is under threat, the resolution can be overcome ... by strengthening a military response," writes Dr. Nancy Snow, a professor at the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Southern California, in an email interview. [Editor's note: The original version of this story incorrectly placed Dr. Nancy Snow at the University of California.]
"A language of peace emphasizes connection over separateness, a one-world consciousness - that what affects one affects me - and disengages from dichotomous language construction: me/other, us/them," she writes.
http://www.economist.com/node/3798515
The Israeli identity of a "Jewish and democratic" state should be implemented by the enforcement of civil legal equality, as practiced by state and non-state civil society institutions, for people of all faiths regardless of demographic majority or minority status. The USA Constitution's 1st amendment establishment clause separating religion from state would be most helpful and should be replicated, in some form, in Israel's and Palestine's (if two states) or Israel's (if one state new name discussions are another subject) constitution(s) or equivalent. Civil legal equality for all faiths is not the case now as Israel enforces laws that specifically favor Jews over Christians or Muslims, for example, in land ownership or tenancy including on the land appropriated in Area C. The Palestinian villages of Wadi Foquin and four others
https://twitter.com/Nyr194/status/536956081759875072
were threatened with loss of land for subsistence farming and youth recreation under Israeli appropriation (to start the annexation process) orders in Area C, for Jewish-only tenancy and ownership, under COGAT IDF occupation laws mirroring JNF/KKLI laws inside the Green Line/1967 pre-war borders/1949 armistice lines.
The Palestinian village of Susiya nonviolently resisted a similar appropriation order, to Wadi Foquin and 4 other villages, and demolition order by the end of 2015. In early 2016 the Israeli government broke the promise of its own IDF (military) and ordered 40% of Susiya could be demolished at any time. The following nonviolent resistance ensued:
http://www.rebuildingalliance.org/new-blog/2016/3/2/inviting-you-contact-congress-conference-calls-to-save-palestinian-villages
Three weeks after an Israeli election returning Netanyahu's coalition to power narrowly over a coalition of parties that had moved from the left to center-right on the political spectrum, before a new coalition was seated, the IDF carried out demolitions in Susiya. No legal order was presented to Palestinians in Susiya. Buildings in Susiya were demolished despite resistance.
Israel's increasingly right-wing party dominated Unity (Knesset majority coalition) governments [at least since 2009, 2013 and 2015 elections
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-31815481
and arguably since the 1996 initial election of the first coalition government with Netanyahu as Prime Minister have demonstrated a pattern and practice of fewer investigations leading to prosecutions of Jewish settlers who harm Palestinian life and/or property in the Samaria Judea (SJ) district (West Bank).
https://twitter.com/rzabaneh/status/600253726817845249
http://www.yesh-din.org/userfiles/Yesh%20Din_Akifat%20Hok_%20English.pdf
The relationship between Israel and the Palestine Authority (divided between the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem with similar Druze faith/ethnic-group unmet minority needs in the Golan Heights) is becoming less and less sustainable under the status quo of Israel simply maintaining 'secure borders' for itself without allowing equal physical and economic security for people of all faiths. Either resumed negotiations for a two state solution or a confederation of two states or a one state solution are three options that are more sustainable than the status quo.
