The lies that trouble me are those shifting terms that shape political reality for the communication elites, the politicians and the policy makers in our land who tell us about the Middle East. On one of my first trips to Jerusalem in 1975, I wrote an article for the Chicago Sun Times about a visit I made to a once deserted Jordanian army post just outside of the town of Nablus. The post had been taken over by a group of Israeli citizens, some of whom were from Chicago, religious fundamentalists determined to live in what they then called the land of Judea and Samaria. The soldiers were living in tents next to the fort. From the front of that fort I looked across at a Palestinian village across a small valley in which farmers were working on land they had lived on for generations.
Words are tools used to shape reality.
When those tools are used to discriminate and oppress, what we are hearing are lies. Over the years these words slowly changed in order to change the reality there. When words change, reality changes. We need to tell our political and government leaders that we are tired of hearing words that are lies because they seek not to be true, but to discriminate against Palestinians. The truth is that they are an intrusive presence on the land of another people, built to codify an illegal takeover of property.