I propose a test: Let’s listen to an anchor presenting a news report on unrest in the occupied territories, without specifying further. Im sure everyone will immediately think of the almost invisible dot on the map called the West Bank or Judea and Samaria. Strange, is it not? Nobody will think for a second that this may be a reference to Northern Cyprus, Tibet, Western Sahara, the Falkland Islands, the Kuril Islands or dozens of other regions or territories that are under dispute worldwide. The list of countries that have border disputes with their neighbors and of territories that are claimed by several parties is very long. But the fact is that the term occupied territories is always automatically linked to Israel. There’s no need to elaborate. Without going into the merits of the debate about the actual legal status of these territories, the size of an average French department, it is very significant that only the Jewish state has been entitled to this privileged terminology. Well, almost: The only other case in recent history where people spoke of occupied territories without having to specify further is that of the countries occupied by Nazi Germany. Mere coincidence? No. Since the creation of the Palestinian national movement in the 1920s, and especially since 1964, the founding year of the PLO, the Palestinian Arab propaganda, aided initially by the Soviet Union, was able to imprint onto the universal consciousness that the State of Israel was an occupying power which “expelled people from their land” and “practiced a policy of genocide.” The terms are clear reference to Nazism. The use of the term occupied territories is by no means the only venomous terminology directed at the Jewish state. We remember the equation of Zionism with Racism in a resolution passed in 1974 by the United Nations with an automatic majority for the Palestinian cause. Ever since the terms Israel and Zionism have been methodically equated with “isms” that are part of an international dictionary of plagues that must be wiped out: racism, colonialism, imperialism, barbarism, genocide, Nazism. What is at play here are the thought shortcuts and vile associations imposed by the steamroller of Arab propaganda and its allies against the one and only State of Israel. The latest case is illustrative: Today, when one reads or hears the word apartheid, one no longer thinks automatically of South Africa but of Israel, despite the fact that there is no apartheid in Israel any more than there are Eskimos in the Sahara.
Posted on: Thu, 22 May 2014 18:45:41 +0000
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