Sunday, May 22, 2022
From Ian:
Did Abraham use a smartphone?
Jonathan Tobin: Who is really responsible for Palestinian suffering?
Did Abraham use a smartphone?
The question, of course, is anachronistic and the answer is no. The first smartphone was released (by IBM) in 1994, less than 30 years ago. Abraham,,Patriarch of the Jewish nation, lived 4000 years earlier. He could not possibly have used a technology invented thousands of years later.
That is why no-one suggests Abraham Avinu (Hebrew for the Patriarch Abraham), used a smartphone. That revisionist history would be too laughably obvious to try to put over on the public.. However, UNESCO does seriously allege that Abraham and Sarah’s tomb, a world heritage site, is “Palestinian”.
That’s elevating anachronism to sacrosanct status – because the term “Palestinian” is every bit as new an invention as the smartphone is. “Palestinian”, describing members of the Arab Umma who live in Eretz Israel, was coined in the twentieth century – 4000 years after the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron was purchased and consecrated by Abraham Avinu.
Of course, UNESCO has its excuses ready. UNESCO says that the Cave of the Patriarchs is “Palestinian” because Hebron is situated in what they intend to be a “Palestinian” state. But this too is incorrect. First, Hebron belongs to the Jewish people, as recognized by the unanimous and irrevocable internationally legal decision at San Remo. Second, the area allocated to the Palestinian Authority in the Oslo accords does not include the Cave of the Patriarchs. Third, the Palestinian Authority is not a state.
Fibbing has turned into a serious international problem. During COVID, wide-spread fibs caused untold millions to refuse crucial vaccines.
When fibs in the “Palestinian” arena first surfaced, the United States justified its status as the world’s superpower by refusing to take the fibs lying down. In 1989, the PLO first tried to elbow its way into the World Health Organization (WHO). But international organizations like WHO are joined only by states, not by social groups, political parties, or terrorist organizations. The PLO was pretending to be a state, and the international community was expected to acquiesce in the fib.
Jonathan Tobin: Who is really responsible for Palestinian suffering?
Resolutions proposed in the US House of Representatives mean nothing. They give members an opportunity to pay lip service to various causes favored by their constituents but don't commit the government to action. They are almost always not worth noticing. But every once in a while, a resolution is put forward that demands attention. This week that is exactly what happened when Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) proposed House Resolution 1123, "Recognizing the Nakba and Palestinian Refugee Rights."‘Ideology of Rage’ Comes to Congress
The word nakba means "disaster" or "catastrophe," and that is how Palestinian Arabs and their supporters refer to the events of 1948 and the birth of the State of Israel. The text is a thumbnail guide to Palestinian propaganda about their suffering and the events that led to approximately 750,000 Arabs to flee their homes during Israel's War of Independence. What happened to them is a tragedy deserving of sympathy, but the story told in the resolution provides not even half of the truth about the conflict or why nearly 10 times the number of Arabs who fled the war now claim to be Palestinian refugees.
As an attempt at telling this history, the resolution is a despicable farce that deserves little notice. But it's important because it represents the way the left-wing of the Democratic Party led by the so-called "Squad" – of which Tlaib, who is of Palestinian descent, is a charter member – has fully embraced intersectional ideology. Other "Squad" members are co-sponsors, including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Cori Bush (D-Mo.), Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) and Betty McCollum (D-Minn.). This attempt to treat the war on Israel's existence as analogous to the struggle for civil rights in the United States and an integral part of the progressive political agenda represents a sea change in American politics.
So, while the resolution itself is contemptible, it merits a full debate and vote in the House rather than to be tabled and forgotten.
The pro-Israel community has generally ignored the Palestinian narrative about 1948. The story of Israel is one that stands on its own and is widely accepted by the overwhelming majority of Americans. It is the one Jewish state on the planet and represents the 2,000-year-old dream of Jews for a return to their ancient homeland. Israel has not known a single day of peace in the 74 years since its modern-day establishment on May 14, 1948. Few thought it would survive being invaded by five Arab armies immediately after its birth, or the subsequent wars and terrorist campaigns aimed at destroying it. It is the only democracy in the Middle East and one where all people, including its Arab minority, have equal rights under the law. And it has grown from a poor and tiny country into a regional economic and military superpower.
But seen through the funhouse mirror of the nakba rhetoric in Tlaib's resolution, which mimics the rhetoric of the anti-Semitic BDS movement that she and co-sponsor Omar support, Israel is an "apartheid state" whose creation was an injustice. Moreover, the resolution also demands recognition of the Palestinian "right of return" in which the 7 million descendants of the 1948 refugees would have the right to reclaim the homes of those who left and essentially eliminate Israel as a Jewish state.
While Tlaib and the other Progressive Caucus members who co-sponsored the resolution want to frame their gesture as a matter of support for human rights and recognition of the suffering of Palestinians, it is actually nothing of the kind. Its purpose is to place on the record, congressional support for the elimination of Israel.
It is the sort of resolution one would expect to be tabled before the UN General Assembly or even Iran’s parliament, the Majlis, but not the US Congress.
Last week, a group of left-wing Democratic legislators led by Rep. Rashida Tlaib and backed by her House colleagues Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Cori Bush (D-MO), Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), Betty McCollum (D-MN) and Marie Newman (D-IL), presented a resolution on the subject of the nakba — an Arabic word meaning “disaster” or “catastrophe” that Palestinians use as shorthand when talking about the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. In keeping with the language and themes that feature in the UN’s ritual denunciations of Israel, the resolution portrays the Jewish state as an incorrigible colonizer. “[T]he Nakba refers not only to a historical event but to an ongoing process of Israel’s expropriation of Palestinian land and its dispossession of the Palestinian people that continues to this day,” the resolution argues.
We shouldn’t be under any illusions about the core message of this resolution. Without saying so explicitly, the resolution effectively denies Israel’s right to exist by endorsing UN General Assembly Resolution 194 of December 1948, which specifies the right of Palestinians who fled from Israel during the War of Independence in that year to either return to their original homes or receive compensation. Especially as the original 750,000 refugees now number more than 5 million — thanks to the transfer of refugee status to subsequent generations of Palestinians — incorporating such an enormous and largely hostile population within the borders of Israel would almost certainly result in appalling acts of terrorism and violence, as well as the demise of a sovereign Jewish state.
While the resolution doesn’t explicitly demonize Zionism as a form of racism, as the United Nations expressly did in 1975, that is the conclusion its authors would like you to reach. This is no appeal for a historic accord between Zionism and Palestinian nationalism based on compromise and a final partition of the land between sovereign states. Rather, the resolution is an orthodox anti-Zionist screed that denies both the indigeneity of the Jewish population and the legitimacy of its national project. It is, in other words, the “original sin” version of history holding that the Jews stole Palestinian land and then justified the theft by invoking an invented past — the exact same discourse that has bedeviled peace efforts for decades through its insistence that the resolving the Palestinian question requires Israel to cease its independent existence, and the Jews to recognize that they are not a nation but a confession.
Of the many distortions of past and present contained within the resolution, one of the most glaring is its claim that the transfer of refugee status across multiple generations of Palestinians is legally and morally justified.“[P]rotracted refugee situations are the result of the failure to find political solutions to their underlying political crises,” it states. UNRWA, the refugee agency dedicated exclusively to the Palestinians, says much the same: “Under international law and the principle of family unity, the children of refugees and their descendants are also considered refugees until a durable solution is found.”
