{"id":9513,"date":"2014-12-05T00:06:33","date_gmt":"2014-12-05T08:06:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/?p=9513"},"modified":"2014-12-03T14:15:18","modified_gmt":"2014-12-03T22:15:18","slug":"word-choice-matters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/2014\/12\/05\/word-choice-matters\/","title":{"rendered":"Word choice matters"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Jordan River is \u201cthe only river on planet earth that on its good days is a few feet wide, and people claim that it has a bank 40 miles wide.\u201d (photo from Beivushtang via Wikimedia Commons)<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Settlements or Jewish communities? West Bank or Judea and Samaria? East Jerusalem or eastern Jerusalem? Those are some of the language choices that journalists covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are faced with each day \u2013 and those choices should not be taken lightly, experts say.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s the terminology that actually defines the conflict and defines what you think about the conflict,\u201d said Ari Briggs, director of Regavim, an Israeli nongovernmental organization that works on legal land-use issues. \u201cWhereas journalists\u2019 job, I believe, is to present the news, as soon as you use certain terminology, you\u2019re presenting an opinion and not the news anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAccuracy requires precision; ideology employs euphemism,\u201d said Eric Rozenman, Washington director of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA).<\/p>\n

At the conclusion of his essay, \u201cPolitics and the English Language,\u201d George Orwell argues that writers have the power to \u201csend some worn-out and useless phrase … into the dustbin, where it belongs.\u201d Many Jewish leaders, organizations and analysts wish to do just that with the following terms, which are commonly used by the mainstream media in coverage of Israel.<\/p>\n

West Bank<\/strong>: Dani Dayan believes the \u201cfunniest\u201d term of all that is used in mainstream coverage of Israel is West Bank. Dayan is the chief foreign envoy of the Yesha Council, an umbrella organization representing the municipal councils of Jewish communities in an area that the Israeli government calls Judea and Samaria, in line with the region\u2019s biblical roots. Yet, media most often use West Bank to describe the area in reference to the bank of the river situated on its eastern border.<\/p>\n

\u201c[The Jordan River] is the only river on planet earth that on its good days is a few feet wide, and people claim that it has a bank 40 miles wide [spanning across Judea and Samaria],\u201d Dayan told this reporter. \u201cThere is no other example of such a thing in the geography of planet earth. That proves that West Bank is the politicized terminology, and not Judea and Samaria, as people claim.\u201d<\/p>\n

Member of Knesset Danny Danon (Likud) has said it\u2019s \u201cridiculous\u201d that West Bank \u2013 a geographic term that once described half of the Mandate of Palestine \u2013 has \u201ctaken on a political meaning that attempts to supersede thousands of years of Jewish tradition.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe correct name of the heartland of the Land of Israel is obviously Judea and Samaria,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Rozenman, the former editor of the Washington Jewish Week<\/em> and B\u2019nai B\u2019rith Magazine<\/em>, draws a distinction between the context of Palestinian and Jewish communities in the area. \u201cIf I\u2019m referring to Palestinian Arab usage or demands, I use West Bank,\u201d he said. \u201cIf I\u2019m referring to Israeli usage or Jewish history and religion, etc., I use Judea and Samaria. Israeli prime ministers from 1967 on, if not before, used and [now] use Yehuda<\/em> and Shomron<\/em>, the Hebrew from which the Romans latinized Judea and Samaria.\u201d<\/p>\n

West Bank is fair to use, \u201cso long as it\u2019s noted that Jordan adopted that usage in the early 1950s to try to legitimate its illegal occupation, as the result of aggression, of what was commonly known as Judea and Samaria by British Mandatory authorities,\u201d added Rozenman.<\/p>\n

Dayan, meanwhile, prefers to call Palestinian communities in Judea and Samaria exactly that. \u201cThe area is Judea and Samaria and, in Judea and Samaria, there are indeed Palestinian population centres, and that\u2019s perfectly OK,\u201d he said. \u201cWe cannot neglect that fact, that yes, we [Jews] are living together with Palestinians. And, in Judea and Samaria, there is ample room for many Jews, for many Palestinians, and for peaceful coexistence between them if the will exists.\u201d<\/p>\n

Settlements<\/strong>: Judea and Samaria\u2019s Jewish communities are often called settlements, a term that can depict modern-day residents of the area as primitive.<\/p>\n

Settlements \u201conce referred in a positive manner to all communities in the Land of Israel, but at some point was misappropriated as a negative term specifically against those Jews who settled in Judea and Samaria,\u201d Danon said. \u201cI prefer to use \u2018Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria\u2019 when discussing the brave modern-day Zionistic pioneers.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dayan said that \u201csettlements\u201d is not pejorative, but still inaccurate. \u201cIt\u2019s a politically driven labeling in order to target those [Israeli] communities,\u201d he said. \u201cMost communities in Judea and Samaria are not different from any suburban or even urban community in Europe, in the United States, in Israel itself, or elsewhere.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more at jns.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Jordan River is \u201cthe only river on planet earth that on its good days is a few feet wide, and people claim that it has a bank 40 miles wide.\u201d (photo from Beivushtang via Wikimedia Commons) Settlements or Jewish communities? West Bank or Judea and Samaria? East Jerusalem or eastern Jerusalem? Those are some […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":9515,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4329],"tags":[2605,2606,4330,216,2085,1172,2173,479],"class_list":["post-9513","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-israel","tag-green-line","tag-haram-al-sharif","tag-israel","tag-jerusalem","tag-palestine","tag-palestinians","tag-settlements","tag-west-bank"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9513","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9513"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9513\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9515"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9513"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9513"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9513"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}