How the New York Times Celebrates Rashida Tlaib

Palestinian-American Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib was recently the subject of a fawning article by Rozina Ali in the New York Times Sunday Magazine. A report on Ali’s omissions and commissions that managed to present Rashida Tlaib in such a favorable light is here: “What the New York Times Rashida Tlaib Feature Represents,” by Gilead Ini, JNS, March 6, 2022:

The latest New York Times hagiography of an anti-Israel activist has dropped.

The weekend’s fawning feature is about Rep. Rashida Tlaib — or more specifically, about the righteousness of Tlaib’s anti-Israel dogmas. It follows just a few months after the paper printed another flattering story about an anti-Israel (and anti-Jewish) activist, Gaza poetry professor Refaat Alareer.

The premise of the earlier piece was, commendably, retracted with an editors’ note acknowledging failures in reporting. (Alareer was feted as a bridge-builder, though he is a hatemonger.)…

That previous admission of error by the Gray Lady in its piece on the Gaza “poet” and activist Refaat Alabre deserves to be quoted in full:

After CAMERA informed New York Times editors of Alareer’s history of demonizing and misrepresenting Israelis in the classroom, which was essentially the opposite of what the paper had portrayed, the newspaper published the following editors’ note:

Editors’ Note, Dec. 13, 2021:

After publication of this article, Times editors reviewed additional information that is at odds with the article’s portrayal of Refaat Alareer, a literature professor at Islamic University in Gaza, who was described as presenting Israeli poems in a positive light to his Palestinian students.

In the class witnessed by a Times reporter, Mr. Alareer taught a poem by the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, which he called “beautiful,” saying it underscored the “shared humanity” of Israelis and Palestinians. He said he admired how it showed that Jerusalem is a place “where we all come together, regardless of religion and faith.”

However, in a video of a class from 2019, he called the same poem “horrible” and “dangerous,” saying that although it was aesthetically beautiful, it “brainwashes” readers by presenting the Israelis “as innocent.” He also discussed a second Israeli poem, by Tuvya Ruebner, which he called “dangerous,” adding “this kind of poetry is in part to blame for the ethnic cleansing and destruction of Palestine.”

When The Times asked Mr. Alareer about the discrepancy, he denied that there was a “substantial change” in his teaching and said that showing parallels between Palestinians and Jews was his “ultimate goal.” But he said that Israel used literature as “a tool of colonialism and oppression” and that this raised “legitimate questions” about Mr. Amichai’s poem.

In light of this additional information, editors have concluded that the article did not accurately reflect Mr. Alareer’s views on Israeli poetry or how he teaches it. Had The Times done more extensive reporting on Mr. Alareer, the article would have presented a more complete picture.

And now this:

Tlaib seeks an end to Israel. Ali more or less admits it. Tlaib is unhappy about Israel’s life-saving anti-rocket system, the Iron Dome. Ali doesn’t deny it. Indeed, to conceal these beliefs would be counterproductive, since the core premise of the piece is that they are noble positions.

Tlaib was the leader of the group of nine Representatives who opposed funding to replenish Israel’s stock of Iron Dome defensive missiles, which had been depleted in the May war with Hamas. Tlaib does not believe Israel should be helped to defend itself from the missile bombardments let loose on its civilian population. The Iron Dome saves not only Israeli lives, but also those of Palestinians, for if Israel had not been able to intercept 90% of the missiles aimed at it, Israeli civilian deaths would have been much greater, and the IDF’s response would have been much more deadly. Iron Dome saves lives, both Israeli and Palestinian.

In promoting that conclusion [an end to Israel] Ali plays tricks on her readers, with the tendentious characterizations starting at the very first sentence. “Last May,” she writes, “following protests in East Jerusalem over planned evictions of Palestinians, Hamas started firing rockets toward Tel Aviv, and Israeli airstrikes pounded residential buildings in the Gaza Strip.”

Hamas started a war. It did so by launching scores of indiscriminate rockets. Israel responded militarily to bring an end to the attacks. For Ali to be so wishy-washy about the order of events here — the word “and” works to conceal a clear sequence to the attacks — is either a failure at forthright explanation, or a success at disingenuous writing.

Rozina Ali uses an “and” which implies both acts, from Palestinians and Israelis, took place simultaneously: “Hamas started firing rockets toward Tel Aviv,” and “Israeli airstrikes pounded residential buildings in the Gaza Strip.” These seem to be simultaneous acts, when in fact those “Israeli airstrikes” took place only after Hamas had sent hundreds of missiles into Israeli cities. Instead, she ought to have written this: “After Hamas fired hundreds of rockets at Israeli cities, Israel responded by hitting Hamas targets In the Gaza Strip.” Israel never “pounded residential buildings”; its targets have always been military – stored missiles, rocket launchers, control-and-command centers, terror tunnels. Of course, since Hamas deliberately places its missiles, rocket launchers, command-and-control centers, and fighters in or near civilian buildings, including schools, hospitals, apartment and office buildings, there will inevitably be some civilian casualties. But the IDF makes every effort to minimize those casualties; it warns civilians to get away from places it is soon to target, through telephoning, emailing, and Israel’s ‘knock on the roof’ technique. In the case of the Al-Jalaa Building, described by some reports as only an inoffensive “media building” because the AP had its Gaza offices there, Israel made clear that a Hamas command-and-control center in the building was the target. Israel gave a one-hour warning, which allowed the Hamas fighters at the command-and-control center plenty of time to escape; that’s the price the IDF pays for being so solicitous of civilian lives.

A closer look suggests Ali was going for the latter [“disingenuous writing”] as the sentence obfuscates more than just the sequence of events. Hamas, in her account, was merely “firing rockets,” and merely firing them “toward” Tel Aviv. Israel, by contrast, is said to have “pounded residential buildings” with its airstrikes. The message is that, while we don’t know what Hamas was aiming at, Israel’s target was Palestinian civilians.…

Rozina Ali describes Hamas as lobbing rockets rather languidly “toward” – not even “at” – Tel Aviv, while the Israelis quite deliberately, and ferociously, were “pounding residential buildings.” Any reader would subliminally compare those gentle Hamas rockets going “toward Tel Aviv” (Rozina Ali doesn’t tell us whether Hamas was aiming at military or civilian targets) with those Israelis “pounding [mercilessly] residential buildings,” with not a hint about what those so-called residential buildings contained — missiles and rockets, rocket launchers, command centers, and Hamas fighters.

Israel never knowingly targets civilians. It targets terrorists and their weapons, many of which have been hidden in civilian buildings. Israel makes heroic efforts to warn civilians to leave those buildings where it intends to take out the Hamas fighters, and destroy the weapons that threaten Israeli civilians. Israel’s first duty is to minimize lethal harm to its citizens and soldiers; its second duty is to minimize the harm done to civilians In the enemy camp.

If it is still unclear that Ali’s language is designed to downplay Hamas’s provocations, she does it again later in the piece, when describing a prior round of Hamas-Israel fighting, in 2014, as follows: “Israel launched a major military operation in the Gaza Strip after the kidnapping and murder of several Israeli teenagers by the Hamas militant organization.”

But the murders, as terrible as they were, did not prompt Israel’s military operation in Gaza. They prompted a manhunt across the West Bank. Rather, “Operation Protective Edge” was a reaction to incessant and escalating Hamas rocket attacks against Israel. As the Associated Press reported on the day before the operation, “Gaza militants have been bombarding Israel with daily rocket fire, drawing Israeli airstrikes in retaliation.” On that day alone, 80 rockets were launched at Israel.

Ali erases them all.

Rozina Ali refuses to recognize – could it be that she doesn’t know? – that Operation Protective Edge in 2014 was undertaken not to avenge the murder of the three Israeli teenagers, but prompted by the need to put a stop to the increasing number of rocket attacks from Hamas on Israeli civilians. The war was not one of retribution for three dead Israelis, but was intended to put an end to the rockets hurled at southern Israel – 80 had been launched the day before “Operation Protective Edge” began – in order to have a few years of calm, and that’s exactly what was achieved.

Another Rozina Ali error that is both factual and moral is her claim that the BDS movement is directed only at Israel’s “military occupation” of the West Bank, when the real aim – as BDS leaders themselves have insisted – is to destroy the Jewish state and replace it, from the river to the sea, with the Arab state of Palestine. 

Gilead Ini:

And she doesn’t stop there [in attributing Operation Protective Edge to Israel’s need to avenge the deaths of three teenagers.] The tendentious characterizations continue when she claims that the so-called Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement “aims to end military occupation by exerting economic pressure on Israel.”

This is a flagrant mischaracterization of BDS aims, and has even been corrected, twice, by the New York Times. In reality, BDS aims to eliminate the very existence of the country, demographically gerrymandering away its Jewish majority with policies that, as a senior BDS leader admitted, would replace Israel with a “unitary state, where, by definition, Jews will be a minority” (emphasis added). It is this that Ali euphemistically calls “Palestinian rights” throughout her piece.

BDS leaders have repeatedly made clear that they seek the end of Israel. As Ahmed Moor, a BDS leader, has said “Ending the occupation doesn’t mean anything if it doesn’t mean upending the Jewish state itself…BDS does mean the end of the Jewish state.” The founder and moving spirit of BDS, Omar Barghouti, says the same:

Definitely, most definitely, we oppose a Jewish state in any part of Palestine. No Palestinian, rational Palestinian, not a sell out Palestinian, would ever accept a Jewish state in Palestine.

[Palestinians have a right to] resistance by any means, including armed resistance. [Jews] aren’t indigenous just because you say you are….

Going back to the two-state solution, besides having passed its expiry date, it was never a moral solution to start with. We are witnessing the rapid demise of Zionism, and nothing can be done to save it, for Zionism is intent on killing itself.

Good riddance! The two-state solution for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is finally dead.

The Palestinians leading BDS insist its success will be the end of Israel. Rozina Ali, however, claims that BDS has a different goal; it “aims to end military occupation by exerting economic pressure on Israel.”

And yet more facts are twisted or omitted to condemn Israel, such as in the following passage:

During the 1990s the Israeli government and the Palestine Liberation Organization, along with the United States, agreed that the best solution to the conflict was the establishment of two states: a sovereign Palestine and a sovereign Israel coexisting side by side. Though the borders have never been agreed upon, the two-state outcome remains a “core US policy objective,” according to the State Department. But since then, settlements have grown steadily, while military occupation of the Palestinian territories continues.

No, the Israelis, Americans and Palestinians had not agreed that the best solution was “the establishment of two states.” The Oslo peace accords, which this passage describes, say nothing about a Palestinian state. Nonetheless, Israel has offered the Palestinians statehood. So why does the “military occupation of the Palestinian territories,” as she puts it, continue? Because Palestinian leaders have repeatedly rejected such offers. An inconvenient fact, but a necessary one for those seeking to understand the history Ali points to.

Apparently Rozina Ali has forgotten the generous territorial offers made by Ehud Barak to Yasir Arafat in 2000, and by Ehud Olmert to Mahmoud Abbas in 2008 – offers rejected on the spot by both Arafat and Abbas. She doesn’t mention their walking out, without any further discussion or counter-offer from the Palestinians. She doesn’t connect what she calls the “military occupation of the Palestinian territories” – a description that ignores the Mandate for Palestine (1922), the Treaty of San Remo (1924), Article 80 of the U.N. Charter, and U.N. Security Council Resolution 242 – with the refusal by Palestinian Arab leaders to consider offers that would, had they been accepted, have reduced the territory under what Ali calls “military occupation” by more than 95%.

In light of all these distortions, it should only be expected that the author also conceals inconvenient facts about her subject. Rashida Tlaib “has been called antisemitic for her criticism of Israeli policies,” Ali dismissively writes.

She says nothing, though, about one of the more recent controversies. In August, Tlaib told an audience that “from Gaza to Detroit,” the system is “designed by those who exploit the rest of us for their own profit.” And the system was designed by the same shadowy forces: “If you open the curtain and look behind the curtain it’s the same people” who profit from racism.

Who are these mysterious people who “exploit the rest of us for their own profit,” who remain hidden “behind the curtain,” profiting from “racism”? Could it be “Jewish bankers” who control the world, as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion argue? Could Tlaib mean by “racism” those who spread the “hate” of “Islamophobia”? Clearly, unnamed dangerous forces are at work that Rashida Tlaib wants to warn us about, without explicitly naming “the Jews.” But her audience understood, as we understand, whom she was talking about.

Rozina Ali can’t find anything wrong with such sinister remarks. But you can, And I can. Might it be possible for the editors at the New York Times, who were eager to print Ali’s hagiographical piece on Rashida Tlaib, and who in recent years have provided so many examples of what appears to be a pathological distaste for the Jewish state, at last to come to their senses? I can believe six impossible things before breakfast, but not that.