Times of Israel: Start Thinking About What You Write!

Properly naming places in Israel is important. It can be a matter of life or death in our battle for recognition of the truth. In March 2016, the Times of Israel published an article about an archaeological find. Given the number of shares, it was apparently of interest to many people. The fact that someone responded only 8 hours ago to a comment I left last year shows that there is still some interest in the piece.

Screenshot from the Times of Israel article.

Articles highlighting archaeological finds in Israel are important because they show the complex history of our region and demonstrate the long connection of the Jewish people to the land. But all of that can be undone by sloppy writing or editing. This paragraph from the article shows what I mean:

Although many of the tombs have been looted in the past or damaged by modern building, the archaeologists were able to retrieve fine bowls, jugs, lamps, Bronze Age weapons and scarabs — amulets mounted on rings — which, according to Lorenzo Nigro, head of the excavation and professor at Sapienza University of Rome, show the direct connection between the ruling class in southern Palestine and the Pharaonic court of 1750-1650 BCE in Avaris, in the Nile Delta. [emphasis added]

The leftist paper, Ha’aretz, also wrote about this find and directly quoted Lorenzo Nigro:

“They show the direct interconnection and contiguity between the ruling class in southern Palestinian cities (Jericho, Sharuhen, etc) and the Pharaonic court reigning in Tell el-Dab’a, ancient Avaris, the Hyksos capital of Egypt between 1750BC-1650BC,” said Lorenzo. [emphasis added]

My problem here is with the use of “southern Palestine/Palestinian cities”. While I have grown to expect Ha’aretz to be unconcerned with our historical connection with Judea and Samaria, I cannot yet accept that Times of Israel is guilty of that as well. They paraphrased Professor Nigro and could have corrected his misleading statement. A year ago, I posted this comment in the comments section under that article:

I’d like to know why Sue Surkes, the author of this article, writes about southern Palestine as if this part of the world that is now called the Palestinian Authority, was once called Palestine. Use of this term is misleading and helps keep alive the lie that there was once a country named Palestine and that we Jews came and stole it from the Arabs who try to convince the world that they were always here. For greater accuracy, Surkes should have referred to the area as “the southern part of what later became the Roman province called Syria-Palestina”. But even that is a stretch: During the time the Canaanites reportedly built the necropolis, the Roman soldiers were not even a glint in their fathers’ eyes or their fathers’ fathers, etc. So there WAS NO PALESTINE or Syria-Palestina at that time. The area was ruled by Egypt back then – and the Egyptians who ruled it were not Arabs. The Arab Conquest came a thousand years later. This is not a small point and not a small error. When we are fighting for our life, in part by fighting the lies, to find such inaccuracies in our own Jewish press, causes inestimable damage.

Even my own comment was not totally accurate – I should have written that the Arab Conquest took place two- to three- thousand years after the time referred to by Professor Nigro. The Times of Israel did not see fit to change the wording and it remains to this day.

The Arabs are working hard at stealing our history, at stealing our connection with our land — they are operating in the UN, on university campuses, in the media and in academia toward that end. It is about time that Jewish and Israeli news sites properly naming places in Israel about which they publish articles. There are no excuses.