Let’s see what Miftah, the group that planned the trip to Israel/Palestine for Tlaib and Omar, left out of their itinerary, and why. No visit, apparently, was to have been made to Yad Vashem, which would have been an easy propaganda win for Omar and Tlaib. Feigned sympathy, a ready tear, some lines written in the guestbook. “How antisemitic can we be, if we went to Yad Vashem and declared our sorrow?” But so implacable were the Palestinian organizers that they would not permit any reminders of Jewish suffering to intrude, even if such a visit would have redounded to the credit of the two Congresswomen.
No visit to the Knesset, to see how Israeli democracy works. That visit would have included the twelve Arab members of the Knesset, and the less the world knows about them, and their complete freedom of expression, the better. Nor would there have been a visit to Israel’s Supreme Court, where one might learn about the Arabs who have served as judges on the Court. Neither visit would serve the apartheid narrative.
No visit to the venerable Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives was planned for Tlaib and Omar. Such a visit to that vast and venerable cemetery would only provide evidence of the long Jewish presence in the land, and there must be no reminders of that. Still worse, a visit to the cemetery might lead others to find out that 38,000 Jewish headstones had been pulled up and used by the Jordanian army to line the floors of their latrines, or crushed into bits to use as gravel at building sites.
Another place in Jerusalem that Tlaib and Omar would not have been visiting is the Jewish Quarter of the Old City. For the newness of the stones in the Jewish Quarter is evidence of the destruction wrought there by the Jordanians from 1949 to 1967. It was during those years that the Arabs destroyed all 58 of the Jewish Quarter’s synagogues, and many other ancient structures besides. If the horde of Western journalists accompanying Omar and Tlaib were to see the “new” Jewish Quarter, they might begin to ask disturbing questions. Why does the Jewish Quarter look so much newer than the rest of the Old City? Tlaib and Omar would have stayed well away from the Jewish Quarter.
Haifa is another place the congresswomen would not have visited. Bustling, high-tech, entrepreneurial Haifa, home to the Technion, shouldn’t be visited, because it is a city that is half-Jewish and half-Arab, where Arabs and Jews play, go to school, receive medical care, obtain higher education, and work together, in peace – a standing reproach to those who describe Israel as an “apartheid state.” It is the very existence of Haifa as a mixed city, and a success in every regard, that must be kept from view.
In Hebron, Miftah had arranged for left-wing Israelis to serve as guides. Much better that the preposterous narrative of Arab victimhood come from Jews. In their telling, the Jewish enclave of Kiryat Arba on the edge of Hebron, by existing at all has only created ill-will among the much more populous Arabs of Hebron. It’s the Jews who should be blamed, in this topsy-turvy moral universe, for any Arab aggression, including terrorism, against the Jews living in Kiryat Arba.
Had the trip to that city been allowed, one hopes that Israeli commentators would have made sure that the horde of journalists received more information about Hebron than Tlaib and Omar’s guides would have wanted them to receive. How many people know that Hebron is the second holiest city in Judaism? And how many people know that there was a continuous Jewish presence in Hebron for thousands of years, until 1929, when the Arabs of Hebron, having heard rumors that the Jews were about to destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque, rose up and massacred, or drove out, all the Jews in the city? A few returned in 1931, but left again in 1936 because of the Arab Revolt. Wouldn’t knowing how important Hebron is to Jews, and about the 1929 massacre that brought their continuous presence in the city to an end, put a different slant on the Jewish desire to reestablish that presence, at the urban settlement of Kiryat Arba, right on the city’s outskirts?
There was no provision made for having Tlaib and Omar visit the Israel Museum, where they might have seen the Dead Sea Scrolls, which date from 150 B.C. to 70 A.D. The Scrolls would have reminded the journalists accompanying them of the Jewish presence in the Land of Israel at least 600 years before Muslim Arabs arrived. No need to draw attention to that.
Skip the museum.
And certainly Tlaib and Omar would not under any conditions have been taken to the L. A. Mayer Museum in Jerusalem, built by Israelis to show the splendors of Islamic art. What kind of “oppressors” of Muslim Arabs would build such a museum? Best not even to mention it.
It is clear from the published itinerary for their trip to “Palestine” that Tlaib and Omar were to have avoided visiting any site that might in any way have helped the Israelis. No visit to Yad Vashem; it generates too much sympathy for the Jews. No visit to Haifa, where Jews and Arabs live, study, work together in complete security, for that gives the lie to the “apartheid state” business. For the same reason, no visits to the Knesset, where Arabs serve as members, or to the Israeli Supreme Court, on which Arab judges have sat. No visits to the “new” Jewish Quarter in the Old City, or to the Mount of Olives Cemetery, where the effects of the Arab destruction of Jewish sites can be seen. On a visit to Hebron, no mention of why that city matters to Jews, and what makes Kiryat Arba, as a consequence, so important to them. No visit to the Israel Museum, where the Dead Sea Scrolls remind us that Jews lived long ago in the Land of Israel 600 years before there were any Muslims. No visits to that Museum of Islamic Art, whose existence shows an Israeli openness, curiosity, and generosity of spirit toward other cultures that Tlaib and Omar, and their backers, would prefer you never learn about.