Tuesday, May 14, 2019
From Ian:
Rashida Tlaib’s Lies Remind Us Why Israel Must Exist
Rashida Tlaib’s Lies Remind Us Why Israel Must Exist
The Zionist movement long predated Hitler, even if Palestinian leadership had aligned itself with the Nazis during the war. By the time the Holocaust was over, Jews had already gained enough power to defend themselves, and Arabs had already been launching pogroms, terrorism, and political attacks for decades.Rashida Tlaib’s Unbelievable Lies
Although some Arabs initially welcomed Jewish migration in the 1900s, they would become victim to Palestinian leadership—a number of Arab mayors, landowners, and others were assassinated for conspiring with Jews, just as they are today.
After the Balfour Declaration of 1917, a British government document that endorsed “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” and pledged to “use its best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine,” there was immediate and violent anti-Semitic reaction.
This, despite the fact that Jewish migration had been exceptionally beneficial for the Arabs living in the area. Rarely mentioned in the Israeli-Palestinian debate, in fact, is that significant Arab migration into a largely empty land was spurred by Jewish economic development. Jews were not displacing Arabs, they were attracting them.
Not that it mattered. As the Peel Commission Report, a British paper recommending partition in 1936, noted, “the Arabs have benefited by the development of the country owing to Jewish immigration, this has had no conciliatory effect. On the contrary… with almost mathematical precision the betterment of the economic situation in Palestine meant the deterioration of the political situation.”
Even Palestinian “moderates” like Musa Alami told Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion “he would prefer the land to remain poor and desolate even for another hundred years” if the alternative was collaboration with Jews. Neither Alami nor Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem and leader of the Palestinian cause, nor the father of modern terrorism, Yasser Arafat, nor his protégé, Mahmoud Abbas, ever shared in their deprivations of their people. It was the opposite, in fact. Palestinian leaders have always enriched themselves on this conflict.
When Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib stated that she often gets “a calming feeling” when she thinks about the Holocaust, she made it perfectly clear that she is calmed not by the deaths of six million Jews but by the thought that her Palestinian ancestors “lost their land, . . . their livelihood, their human dignity, their existence in many ways [sic], . . . to create a safe haven for Jews.” Liel Leibovitz, rather than attempting to unpack the perverse logic of Tlaib’s words, simply notes some relevant historical examples. Among them is the case of the Polish-born Atara Abramson, who—after surviving Auschwitz, where the rest of her family was killed—came to the Land of Israel and settled in the Kfar Etzion kibbutz in 1946:Rashida Tlaib’s Monstrous Distortion of History
On May 12, 1948, two days before Israel’s declaration of independence, an Arab army consisting of Jordanian legionnaires and local Palestinian gunmen attacked Kfar Etzion with armored vehicles and heavy artillery. The Jewish defenders, armed with just a handful of rifles and mortars, did their best to fight back, but by the following day were no longer able to persist. Their leader, Avraham Fishgrund, who escaped Bratislava just a few years before Hitler’s armies marched in, stepped into the open, waving the white flag of surrender. He was shot on the spot by an armed Palestinian.
The rest of the people in Kfar Etzion, numbering 133 men and women, had no choice but to reiterate their surrender and hope for the best. Again, they stepped into the open waving a white flag and declaring their surrender. Again, they were met with gunfire. They rushed to take shelter in the basement of a nearby monastery; gathering outside, local Palestinians tossed grenades into the building and shot at anyone trying to escape. Like most of Kfar Etzion’s residents, Atara Abramson did not survive. She was twenty-one when she died, one of eighteen women who had survived the Holocaust only to be slaughtered by Palestinians that day. . . .
There were 433 more Holocaust survivors killed by Palestinians and Jordanians violently opposing the creation of a “safe haven” for Jews in the what had historically and spiritually been their homeland. To attempt and rewrite their well-documented experiences is . . . an unforgivable and deeply anti-Semitic act.
More than a radical case of historical revisionism, Tlaib's comments are part of something more sinister: an effort to separate the Jewish people from the land of Israel, in an effort to destroy Israel as the Jewish state. Tlaib grounds Israel's legitimacy, and the moral and historical reasons for its existence, in the horrors of the Holocaust. Forget about the more than 3,000 years of continuous Jewish presence in the land of Israel, and of the deeply entrenched legal, historical, and religious ties that Jews have there; certainly forget about the Jewish people yearning to return to the land throughout 2,000 years in exile, not to mention the modern Zionist movement, which began in the mid-19th century; also forget about Britain's commitments to establish a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine, including the Balfour Declaration, which, far from being a unilateral move, received the contemporary equivalent of the international community's endorsement; and, of course, forget the U.N.'s recommendation to create a Jewish state in Palestine. The Jewish people only have Israel because of the Holocaust, and the sympathy it created for them among Europeans. So the imperialist powers worked with the Jews to kick the Palestinians off of their land. At least that is the Palestinian narrative, which Tlaib seems to endorse. And still, the congresswoman has the audacity to think the Jews of Israel should be kissing the feet of the Palestinians for being so noble, so generous to sacrifice their collective wellbeing to help a people whose population has still not recovered from the six million it lost during the Holocaust.
Ignoring, hoping ultimately to erase, the Jewish people's ties to Israel is part of a campaign to destroy Israel as the Jewish state through demonization and delegitimization. The Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which Tlaib supports, is the leading effort of this vile campaign. That a member of Congress supports this agenda is deeply disturbing. More disturbing, however, is that her deceitful, anti-intellectual approach to issues concerning Israel is a tenet of the progressive movement, which has institutionalized the modern form of anti-Semitism in an effort to undermine Israel to the point that it submits to the mob and ceases to exist as the world has come to know it, leaving millions of Jews vulnerable to the whims of those who are at best indifferent to their fate, and at worst eager to solve the world's "Jewish problem."
Now, it is possible that Tlaib is just unaware of all of this history and does not have malicious intent. If that is the case, then I hope she reads this piece and reconsiders her position with an open mind. That being said, I am not holding my breath.
