Prepared by Israel365 in collaboration with Yisrael Medad of Israel’s Media Watch and Gil Hoffman of Honest Reporting.
Updated: November 24, 2024
Journalists bear an ethical and professional duty to deliver facts with the utmost objectivity. Additionally, when presenting opinions, it is crucial to ensure they are conveyed in a fair and balanced manner. The perpetuation of stereotypes and the dissemination of distorted images of people, events, and processes can cause significant harm. Therefore, every media professional—whether correspondent, anchor, panel host, interviewer, or commentator—must diligently avoid bias and propaganda. Their goal should be to present audiences with truth and accurate perspectives, steering clear of any covert partisanship or subliminal messaging.
This guide, similar to others, presents, in alphabetical order, place names, institution titles, and other words and terms most commonly employed. Each is briefly explained with the historical context if necessary and the proper usage suggested.
Among the many buildings and structures within the Temple Mount compound (see: Temple Mount) is the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Over recent years, many have incorrectly sought to apply this term to the entire Temple Mount compound. In Arabic, the compound is called Haram Al-Sharif (the Noble Sanctuary), although some media outlets will use “the Aqsa Mosque compound.” When referring to the whole compound, it is preferred to use the term “Temple Mount” unless specifically referring to the mosque itself.
Suggested usage: “Violence broke out at the Temple Mount when Moslems, who had barricaded themselves inside the Al-Aqsa Mosque, began throwing rocks and projectiles at the police and visitors.”
The term apartheid is an Afrikaans word which characterized the South African system of institutionalized racial segregation that ensured that the country was dominated politically, socially, and economically by the minority white population. Currently, anti-Israel forces seek pejoratively to apply it to Israel. However, Israel’s non-Jewish citizens all have full political, social, and economic rights which include voting for and being elected to the Knesset, serving as Supreme Court judge and even serving in the IDF. Arabs living in Judea and Samaria are governed by the Palestinian Authority. The Palestinian Authority has not held elections since 2006.
Israel conducts, when deemed necessary, targeted killings of terrorists, not political figures. Sometimes called “extra-judicial killings”, targeted killings are deemed legitimate within the context of self-defense in war when employed against terrorists. Since World War II, when Isoroku Yamamoto, Marshal Admiral of the Imperial Japanese Navy and the planner of the Pearl Harbor massacre, was killed in 1943 by the United States, America has employed this method, such as in the case of Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen, killed in a CIA drone strike in 2011.
Anti-Zionists seek to tie Zionism to European imperialism and colonialism and also claim that Jews who came to the Holy Land in the 19th century were only Europeans. This is demonstrably false. Jews have lived continuously in the Holy Land, in greater or smaller numbers, for over 3,400 years. Though the majority of the Jewish population was exiled by the Romans after the Second Revolt in 135, Jews throughout the diaspora continued to support and visit the Jews living in their ancestral homeland. Jews are not colonialists in their homeland but engaged in a national liberation movement and repatriation. The charge of colonialism is antisemitic, for it suggests Jews are not a historically oppressed people seeking self-preservation and survival but are somehow oppressors, colonialists, and even white supremacists, despite being violently attacked all throughout the Mandate of Palestine period by Arabs whose land they legally purchased.
Between 1948 and 1967, following Jordan’s invasion of the newly created State of Israel in May 1948, Jerusalem, for the first time in 3 millennia, became a divided city. Jordan formally annexed East Jerusalem, though its annexation was considered illegal by most of the international community. In 1967, after Jordan attacked Israel during the Six-Day War, Israel liberated East Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria.
On June 28, 1967, the Minister of the Interior ordered the expansion of the municipal boundaries of the Jerusalem municipality in accordance with the boundaries set out in the Law and Administration Order. The municipal area of Jerusalem was extended to the east, north, south, and northwest, and enlarged from 38,100 dunams (prior to unification) to 108,500 dunams. As a result, Jerusalem became the largest city in Israel by area. The areas added to Jerusalem were: Jordanian Jerusalem (6,000 dunams) and areas taken from 28 villages in Judea and Samaria (64,500 dunams). The entire area added to Jerusalem, as described here, has since been called “East Jerusalem.” Israel has applied its full sovereignty to all parts of the city.
On July 30, 1980, at the initiative of MK Geula Cohen, Israel demonstrated its determination to defend the status of unified Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, by adopting the “Basic Law: Jerusalem, Capital of Israel, 5740-1980,” which declares that “Jerusalem, complete and united” is the capital of Israel.
In 1948, the United Nations Genocide Convention defined genocide as any of five “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” These five acts were: killing members of the group, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, imposing living conditions intended to destroy the group, preventing births, and forcibly transferring children out of the group.
A common, libelous trope among antisemites is that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. This accusation is a complete inversion of reality. It is Hamas that attempted a genocide on Oct. 7, 2023, breaking the existing ceasefire and invading Israel by land, air, and sea. Many of the terrorists recorded themselves murdering, raping, beheading, and mutilating innocent civilians, including Americans. The terrorists also seized 253 innocent people as hostages.
The Hamas charter of 1988 explicitly calls for the destruction of Israel and the genocide of the Jewish people. “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it” (Preamble). “The day the enemies usurp part of Moslem land, Jihad becomes the individual duty of every Moslem. In the face of the Jews’ usurpation, it is compulsory that the banner of Jihad be raised” (Article 15).
Hamas member Ghazi Hamad stated on October 24, 2023: “Israel is a country that has no place on our land […] because it constitutes a security, military, and political catastrophe to the Arab and Islamic nation.” (October 24, 2023, LBC TV (Lebanon)). He also vowed that Hamas would repeat the October 7 attacks “time and again until Israel is annihilated,” expressing a desire to “sacrifice martyrs” (referring to Gazan civilians) for Hamas’ ideological aim of destroying Israel.
By contrast, Israel has never tried to wipe out the Palestinian people in the fashion of Hamas’s one-state solution plan for Jews. Before October 7, some 20,000 Gazans a day requested to work in Israel, on the correct expectation of much higher wages and humane treatment. Even during heavy fighting, Israel continues to supply Gaza with electricity, water, food, and medicine despite having endured the most brutal massacre ever to occur on its soil.
If Hamas had come out of its tunnels, separated from its civilian shields, released its surviving Israeli hostages, and either openly fought the Israeli Defense Forces or surrendered the organizers of the October 7 massacre, no Gaza civilians would have died.
The Green Line was the temporary armistice boundary between Jordan and Israel in the years 1949-1967 and appeared on maps as a green line, hence its origin. In the official text of the Armistice Agreement, it was called the “Armistice Demarcation Line.” It was never an internationally recognized border and in Article VI, for example, Paragraphs 8 and 9, the lines were specifically not to be “interpreted as prejudicing, in any sense, an ultimate political settlement” nor “to future territorial settlements or boundary lines or to claims of either Party relating thereto.”
Suggested usage: “Israelis who now reside in areas east of the former Green Line number some 750,000.”
The word “Holocaust” refers to the systematic state-sponsored killing of six million Jewish men, women, and children and millions of others by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II. The Germans called this “the final solution to the Jewish question.”
In recent years, pro-Hamas propagandists have distorted this word and accused Israel, the Jewish state, of committing a “Holocaust” against Palestinians.
Dr. Elias Akleh, an Arab propagandist, writes that the “Holocaust is the genocidal crime against people based on their ethnicity. This genocide could be perpetrated through different means such as poison gas, guns, tanks, air raids, biological warfare, economic siege, starvation, destruction of vital natural resources, eviction into the desert, and deprivation of basic vital materials, among others, to produce the same result: mass deaths. For the last sixty years, Palestinians have been victims of all these methods in a deliberate programmed holocaust.”
Israel has never committed genocide or a “Holocaust” against Palestinians (see “Genocide”). The word “Holocaust” should only be used to refer to the Nazi’s attempted genocide of the Jewish people during World War II.
Since Biblical times, the central hill regions of the Land of Israel have been termed “Judea and Samaria.” Those names appear in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. All maps from the Late Middle Ages label these areas as “Judea and Samaria.” These terms were also used during the British Mandate period. To describe the borders of the 1947 Partition Plan, the United Nations “Part II. – Boundaries” section employs the terms Judea and Samaria. These are the proper geographical historical names.
A militant is one who vigorously and even aggressively acts in support of a cause in an overt confrontational but non-violent manner. College protestors who are militant will engage in a sit-in at a dean’s office and union militants will block the entrance of a factory. Members of armed groups who kill civilians, including ISIS, Hamas, and Hezbollah, are not “militants” but rather “terrorists.”
Nationalism is most properly defined as either a) patriotism, the love or loyalty of an individual for his or her own independent nation, or b) an anti-imperialist theory that seeks to establish a world of free and independent nations. Neither of these definitions is pejorative.
Nevertheless, the media frequently misuses the word “nationalist” to brand right-wing and conservative politicians as extremists. The media often uses phrases like “ultra-nationalists” and “far-right and religious nationalists” when referring to Israeli Ministers Betzalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir in an attempt to delegitimize them and the Israeli government more broadly.
The Nazis were a German fascist party controlling Germany from 1933 to 1945 under the dictatorial leadership of Adolf Hitler. Nazi ideology was shaped by Hitler’s belief in German racial superiority. It rejected liberalism, democracy, the rule of law, and human rights, stressing instead the subordination of the individual to the state and the necessity of strict obedience to leaders. It emphasized the inequality of individuals and “races” and the right of the strong to rule the weak.
Antisemites, including world leaders, frequently and falsely compare Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders to Nazis. In March 2024, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said: “Netanyahu and his administration, with their crimes against humanity in Gaza, are writing their names next to Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin, like today’s Nazis.”
The use of the term “Nazi” to describe Jewish leaders in Israel is classic victim-blaming. Prime Minister Netanyahu is the democratically elected leader of Israel. All Israeli political leaders reject the notions of racial superiority and are committed to upholding human rights, democracy, and the rule of law.
When hostilities occur, and one state assumes control of the territory of the other state, it is termed in international law “military (or belligerent) occupation.” It does not imply that the ongoing occupation is belligerent but simply that it resulted from war. The administration of such territory is termed a military government.
Over time, opponents of Israel’s claims to Judea and Samaria have recast the term so that it now carries negative implications. Considering Jordan belligerently attacked Israel in 1967, and Israel liberated Judea and Samaria in a war of defense, it is defamatory to characterize Israel negatively as an “occupier.”
Suggested usage: “administered territories.”
The term has come into usage following the practice of the Jewish residents in Area C to live on land whose ownership is disputed or is not proven private property or on land defined as “state lands.”
In ancient times, the term “Palestine” referred to a region extending inland from the coast of Syria through Lebanon and into the Land of Israel.
Following the failure of the Second Jewish Revolt against Rome 132-135 CE, the country’s name, Judea, found on the famous Judaea Capta commemorative coins issued by the Roman Emperor Vespasian, was altered to “Palastina Prima” by Emperor Hadrian.
At no time did it exist as a separate, independent entity. Only in 1920-22, when it was defined as the territory to become the reconstituted Jewish national home, was “Palestine” used to describe a national territory. At that time, the Arab residents referred to themselves as “Southern Syrians.”
Suggested usage is “Judea and Samaria”
First begun by Yitzhak Rabin in 1994 and then continued by Arik Sharon in 2004, following intolerable levels of murderous incursions by Arab terrorists from Judea and Samaria, the barrier mostly follows the former Green Line. It is not primarily a “wall” and consists of varied materials from wired fences to concrete slabs. Normally, tens of thousands of workers pass from Judea and Samaria into Israel daily unless there are security concerns.
Suggested usage: “This morning, 17,000 Arabs from Judea and Samaria passed through the crossing points of Israel’s security barrier to work in central Israel.”
A settlement is a place or location, typically one that has previously been uninhabited, where people establish a community. In New York City, the University Settlement Society provides educational and social services to immigrants and low-income families. The League of Nations 1922 Mandate decision, Article 6 declares “The Administration of Palestine, while ensuring that the rights and position of other sections of the population are not prejudiced, shall… encourage… close settlement by Jews, on the land, including State lands and waste lands…”
Nevertheless, in recent years, the term has become pejorative and a new meaning has been applied to the word, implying that all settlements in Judea and Samaria are illegal. One definition of “settlements” reads “Settlements are Israeli civilian communities, overwhelmingly inhabited by Jews, in territories acquired by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War that are not under Israeli sovereignty.” There is also an attempt to imply that these residential locations are somehow foreign, intrusive, or temporary by referring to them as “colonialist units.”
Settlements most certainly are not, as has been falsely asserted, a “war crime,” as no such prohibition exists in international law. That issue is complex and so the suggested usage is that unless quoting directly someone interviewed or an article, the term “Jewish communities” be used, or simply describe them as “villages,” “towns,” and “cities.”
A recent negative trope used by the Biden administration is the notion of “settler violence,” which is intended to imply that all or most of the Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria engage in anti-Arab violence. This, needless to say, is simply not true. Arab terrorists from Judea and Samaria commit thousands of acts of terror against Israelis each year, while Jewish settlers commit only a handful of violent acts each year.
Suggested usage: “violent acts by Jewish residents”.
Purchased by David according to 1 Chronicles 21:24- 25, Moriah, where Abraham bound up Isaac, became the site of the First and Second Temple according to 2 Chronicles 3:1. The site was conquered and occupied by Moslem Arab armies in 638 CE and renamed Haram A-Sharif. The Al-Aqsa Mosque was built at its southern portion.
In an attempt to erase any Jewish identity, in the past few decades, the walled compound has been referred to exclusively as the “Al-Aqsa Mosque” or “the Aqsa Mosque compound,” which is incorrect.
In an immoral effort to protect violent terror groups, anti-Israel media describe Fatah, Hamas, Hezbollah, and other armed groups as “militants” instead of terrorists. These groups, which target civilians of every age, should properly be called terrorists.
The West Bank, a term applied to the territory of Judea and Samaria, was coined only in early 1950 when the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan annexed those regions. At that time, Jordan became the “East Bank” and Judea and Samaria became the “West Bank.”
Suggested usage: “Palestinian Authority President Mahmud Abbas demanded that Arab residents of the West Bank, that is, Judea and Samaria, be allowed to visit the Temple Mount without restrictions.”
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