On the Feb. 18 edition of BBC Radio 4’s ‘World at One’ programme, presenter Sarah Montague interviewed former Israeli government spokesperson Mark Regev.
Montague, while cross-examining Regev on Israeli legislation on land registration in Judea and Samaria, a topic the BBC has been devoting misleading and one-sided coverage on, advances the canard that the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) is all “Palestinian territory” and takes a thinly veiled swipe at diaspora Jews who make Aliyah and choose to live there.
First, Montague falsely suggests – in the clip and several times throughout the full interview – that all territory in the West Bank is, by definition, “Palestinian land”.
Let’s recall that Israel captured the West Bank in 1967 from Jordan, which had illegally occupied the territory since its 1948-49 war with Israel. Prior to 1948, the West Bank, like Israel, was administered by the UK. (Until 1917, the territory was controlled by the Ottoman-Turkish empire, and, at no point in history has there been a sovereign Palestinian state.)
In the 1990s, when Israeli and Palestinian leaders signed the Oslo peace agreements, the sides agreed that the status of the West Bank would be decided in negotiations between the sides, and today its rightful and ultimate disposition remains under contention.
It’s also important to point out that only a tiny percentage of the overall territory in question (6.5%) is privately owned – either by Jews or Palestinians. The remaining territory is either state land, or owned by the JNF
So, while the final status of the territory has yet to be decided, it’s completely inaccurate to claim that the West Bank is currently “Palestinian territory”.
In fact, CAMERA has prompted multiple corrections to articles over the years which initially used language falsely suggesting Palestinian ownership of all disputed territory in the West Bank, including in Area C, which is not governed by the Palestinian Authority.
But, most troubling is the fact that Montague seems particularly hostile to the idea that Jews from “Russia, the United States or the UK” may make Aliyah and live in parts of Jerusalem or the West Bank.
First, it’s telling that the BBC presenter narrowly named three ‘white’ countries while implicitly criticising Jewish immigrants who may live in communities across the green line, when of course Jews from all over the world – of various races and ethnicities – qualify for the right or return.
The image of the white, European or Western alien interloper “colonising Palestine” is a staple of antizionist propaganda.
It’s important to recall that the Law of Return, granting every Jew the right to settle in Israel, was passed by the Knesset on July 5, 1950. This was just five years after the Holocaust, when two out of every three Jews in Europe were exterminated by the Nazi regime, due, in part, to the fact that no country would take in significant numbers of Jews trying to flee Nazi-occupied Europe.
While the new Jewish state codified equal rights for all its citizens, privileged access to rights of immigration for ethnic-cultural kin groups exists in varying ways in many Western European democracies— including in Germany, Ireland, Finland, Greece, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, and Croatia.
So, while the existential threat to Jews’ continued existence by the Nazis campaign of extermination which inspired the law of return was unique, the underlying political principle of privileged immigration within democracies is not.
Though the future of east Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria is highly contested, the right of a historically oppressed minority to a national sanctuary in their historical homeland is not.
