The War of Words
By Caroline Glick
THE JERUSALEM POST
September. 5, 2003
Two years ago this week, the UN World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance was in the midst of its deliberations in Durban, South Africa. The end result of the weeklong conference was the subversion of the definitions of "racism," "racial discrimination," "xenophobia," and "related intolerance."
At Durban, Israel and the US were isolated, as every other member nation of the UN and every major international human rights organization either stood by and watched or was actively engaged in the systematic criminalization of Israel, the marginalization of the Holocaust, the whitewashing of anti-Semitism, and the demonization of the Jewish people as a nation and of Jews as individuals.
In the course of its deliberations, the terms "Zionism," "anti-Semitism," "racism," "refugees," "colonialization," "terrorism," "civilians," "resistance," and "occupation" were all redefined to one end. That end was to foment a distortion of reality whereby, one week before the September 11 attacks on Washington and New York, Israel was castigated as the single most lethal and virulent threat to the world.
In the two years since the Durban conference, our political language has been distorted by an alliance of the international political Left and the Arab world to the point at which neither Israel nor the US can easily use words to either describe the reality we live in or to motivate others to join us in fighting our enemies.
The fact that the Western media refuse to refer to Palestinians who commit mass murders of Israelis as terrorists, but prefer the term "militants," indicates that from their perspective there is something basically acceptable about these murders.
Referring to Palestinian gunmen and suicide bombers in this manner distinguishes them from other people who commit similar crimes against non-Jews. The fact that the Israeli media also use the term "activist" and "terrorist" interchangeably to describe those who murder us shows that we too have lost the power to describe our enemies.
The subversion of the term "refugee" in the case of Palestinians is equally debilitating for Israel.
For every other group, the status of refugee exists only for those individuals who actually lived in a country and left. But for Palestinians, every relative, child, and grandchild of an Arab who left Israel in 1948 is a refugee.
Under international law, it is the responsibility of the countries that take in refugees to provide them with a home. But for Palestinians, the situation is reversed.
Because we have accepted this subverted definition of refugee, Israelis engage in vacuous and self-defeating conversations about the so-called right of return of millions of people who have never set foot here and who actively seek the destruction of the state.
Because we have relinquished our right to language, for three years we have been unable to have any serious national conversation about the reality we experience every single day. As Prime Minister Ariel Sharon demonstrated when he referred to the disputed territories of Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza Strip as "occupied," we have surrendered our right to define reality to our enemies. We cannot describe our lives.
"Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men," said Orwell, "is the restatement of the obvious."
And so, two years after Durban, 10 years after Oslo, three years after the Palestinian terrorist war was launched, and two years after the September 11 attacks, we must take it upon ourselves to do just that. If we allow our enemies to define our world for us, we are destined to lose our place in it.