Rashida Tlaib Wants the US to Commemorate ‘Nakba Day’

Rashida Tlaib (D-Ramallah) is once again on her anti-Israel warpath — she seldom takes a break — introducing a resolution in the House that would recognize Israel’s founding as a “nakba” (“catastrophe”), the name the Palestinians gave to the Arab defeat in the 1948 war, when Jews fought off the armies of five Arab states and the Jewish state was not destroyed, as the Arabs had hoped and predicted. A report on her latest offense to history and the truth is here: “Rashida Tlaib Given Free Reign to Reimagine History While Defending ‘Nakba’ Resolution,” by Rachel O’Donoghue, Algemeiner, May 19, 2022:

In an interview with Mehdi Hasan on his MSNBC show, US Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) set out the reasoning for her latest attack on Israel, which came in the form of a resolution for American lawmakers to officially label Israel’s founding as the “Nakba:”

“I want folks to know, having the creation of Israel is not what’s being discussed. It’s the fact that we have an apartheid government that is targeting a whole people based on their ethnicity, and some even based on their faith. It is so important that I want everyone in Israel, Palestine to be safe and live in peace and we cannot do that if it’s under an apartheid regime — under a regime that doesn’t understand human rights values, that continues to commit war crimes, including the killing of iconic journalist Shireen Abu Akleh and so many others.

Two charges are made in this paragraph. The first is her offhand, casual, who-could-possibly-take-issue-with-it description of Israel’s “apartheid government” that is “targeting a whole people based on their ethnicity, and some even based on their faith.” We are compelled, yet again, to answer this libel with the same litany of inconvenient facts To wit: in Israel, Arabs sit in the Knesset, serve on the Supreme Court, go abroad as diplomats. The chairman of Israel’s largest bank, Bank Leumi, is an Arab. Jews and Arabs attend the same universities, work in the same offices and factories. Arabs and Jews are treated in the same hospitals, by both Arab and Jewish doctors and nurses. Arabs and Jews play on the same sports teams and in the same orchestras. The captain of Israel’s national soccer team is an Arab. Arabs and Jews go into business together, in everything from restaurants to high-tech startups. Only in one respect are Arab and Jewish Israelis treated differently. Jews must, while Arabs may, serve in the military. 

The second is her claim about Israeli “war crimes,” which “includes the killing of the journalist Shireen Abu Akleh and so many others.” No one knows whether a Palestinian or an Israeli bullet killed Abu Akleh. The Palestinians refuse to tun over the bullet, as Israel has requested, for examination. Nor will the Palestinians let any others — the Americans, the EU, the UN – examine the bullet. It is safe to say that the Palestinians are not at all sure that the forensic evidence will confirm their claim that Israel “killed Shireen.” The Israelis do not deny that they may have been responsible for her death, but they need to study the evidence, and the Palestinians won’t provide it. Which side, do you think, is more worthy of our trust – the side that asks to see and study, along with others, the only evidence, or the side that refuses to produce it?

Tlaib mentions Israel’s “war crimes” — note the plural — that consist of the killing of Shireen Abu Akleh “and so many others.“ The Abu Akleh case remains unsolved, but Tlaib’s mind is made up. And who are those “so many others” — victims of Israeli “war crimes” — that she is referring to? Tlaib needs to be reminded of the enormous efforts the IDF makes to minimize civilian casualties. As we saw during the war in Gaza a year ago, and in four previous wars with both Hamas and Hezbollah, Israel routinely warns inhabitants of buildings it is targeting to leave in time. The IDF uses telephoning, emailing, leafletting, as well as its “knock on the roof” practice of dropping non-explosive or low-yield devices on the roofs of targeted civilian buildings, so that the inhabitants have anywhere from 15 minutes to two hours to leave a targeted building.

British Colonel Richard Kemp was the Commander of British Forces in Afghanistan. He fought in combat zones around the world including Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Macedonia and Iraq. He was also present throughout the conflict in Gaza in 2014. Here is some of what he has had to say about the IDF:

Based on my experience and on my observations: the Israel Defense Force, the IDF, does more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare.

Why is this so?

Firstly, Israel is a decent country with Western values, run on democratic principles. Israel has no more interest in war than Belgium does. In fact, Israel has never started a war. The only reason it ever goes to war is to defend itself. And it has to defend itself because, unlike Belgium, it is surrounded by countries and armed groups that want to destroy it.

Secondly, Judaism, with its unsurpassed moral standards, remains a major influence on the citizens of Israel. I say this as a non-Jew.

Thirdly, the army is composed overwhelmingly of citizen soldiers.

Israel is a small country with a small professional army. To fight a war it depends on its conscripts and its reservists. These are ordinary citizens, from professors to plumbers, called upon to defend their homes. They don’t want to be fighting and they don’t want to harm others.

Nowhere was the essential morality and decency of the IDF more evident than in the Gaza War of 2014. If ever there was a purely defensive war, this was it.

The war was started by Hamas, the terror organization, designated as such by the US State Department, that runs the Gaza strip. In the first six months of 2014, Hamas launched hundreds of rockets at Israeli civilians.

After repeated warnings from Israel to stop, the Israeli Air Force finally conducted precision strikes to halt the rocket-fire. And the IDF advanced into Gaza to destroy a network of terror tunnels that Hamas had constructed to attack Israeli communities near the Gaza border.

The IDF took extraordinary measures to give Gaza civilians notice of targeted areas, dropping millions of leaflets, broadcasting radio messages, sending texts and making tens of thousands of phone calls. Let me repeat that. The Israelis called Gazans on their cell phones and told them to leave their residences and move to safety. Never in the history of warfare has an army phoned its enemy and told them where they are going to drop their bombs.

Many IDF missions that could have taken out Hamas military capabilities were aborted to prevent civilian casualties, increasing the risk to Israeli citizens and soldiers.

Despite all of this, of course innocent civilians were killed. Every war is chaotic and confusing, and mistakes are frequent. But mistakes are not war crimes.

Ironically, it’s the leaders of Hamas themselves who best understand the extraordinary measures the IDF will take to protect innocent civilians. They take full advantage of Israel’s decency and adherence to the laws of war.

No army takes such risks in order to protect civilians as the Israeli army does. I say this as a professional soldier. I say it because it’s true. And people who care about truth should know it.

I hope that Kemp’s testimony will be read out on the floor of the House when Tlaib is there, perhaps just after she has made one more of her interminable speeches about Israel’s “war crimes.”

Rashida Tlaib refers to Israel’s “war crimes,” but does not give any details – not a single “war crime” is adduced as evidence, save for the still-unclear killing of Shireen Abu Akleh which, even if the bullet l turns out to have been fired by an Israeli, was clearly an accident and not a deliberate act of murder. Israel has no interest in killing journalists; that is one more tsuris that the IDF does not need. Tlaib should be asked to produce her list of “war crimes” committed by the IDF — including the names of the victims, and the dates, and places — of the putative crimes. Deaths that are clearly the unintended result of the fog of war, or that occurred despite enormous efforts made by Israel to warn people to get out of harm’s way, do not deserve to be called “war crimes.”

Tlaib claims that the “existence of Israel” is not what is being discussed, while in the same breath using the Arab word for catastrophe — “Nakba” — to describe the establishment of the Jewish state.

Of course the “existence of Israel” is not only being “discussed” but is being deplored by Rashida Tlaib, who will be joined by the other anti-Israel “progressives” (her fellow Squadrettes Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — Ayanna Pressley appears to have left the group, at least when it comes to Israel — as well as by new collaborators, including Cori Bush, Jamaal Bowman, and Betty McCollum) in supporting a resolution that describes the establishment of Israel as a “nakba” or “catastrophe.” If Israel’s founding is a “catastrophe,” surely that means, despite Tlaib’s disingenuous disavowal, that the Jewish state’s very right to exist is being called into question.

Her latest foray into the complex, nuanced Israeli-Palestinian issue is part of a problematic pattern of substituting history with histrionics (see here and here).

Aside from the demonstrably untrue “apartheid” slur, Tlaib’s suggestion that Israel is somehow victimizing individuals based on their ethnicity or religion is baseless, not least because freedom of worship is guaranteed under Israel’s 1948 Proclamation of Independence.

Indeed, the Jewish state’s commitment to protecting religious freedom is evidenced in how it facilitates and protects access for all members of numerous religious denominations to their respective holy sites in Jerusalem’s Old City….

Israel guarantees freedom of religion to everyone. Freedom House reports that in Israel “freedom of religion is respected. Each community has jurisdiction over its own members in matters of marriage, burial, and divorce.” The Israeli government guarantees that believers of every sect or faith will have free access to their holy sites. The Islamic sites on the Temple Mount are managed by an Islamic Waqf that answers to the government of Jordan. The only time Israel limits access to the Mount is in times of great tension and violence, when as a security matter, Israel prohibits all Jewish visitors, and limits Muslim visitors to the Temple Mount to those over 50. As soon as the threat of extreme violence subsides, usually within a day or two, access is again provided to all Muslims, whatever their age.

The role of the Israeli police on the Temple Mount is twofold. First, the police are there to ensure security for all believers. In practice, this has meant preventing Arabs on the Temple Mount from hurling rocks and Molotov cocktails at Jewish worshippers at the Western Wall far below, or at Jews and other non-Muslim visitors on the Mount. The other task for the Israeli police is to make sure that Jewish visitors do not pray either aloud, or silently, while on the Mount, though recently some silent praying has been allowed. Tlaib fails to recognize what a concession Israel has made to its Muslim population, by prohibiting Jews from praying aloud at the holiest site in Judaism. Perhaps she does not know about this prohibition; after all, she gets everything wrong about Israel and the Palestinians. The real attack on freedom of religion in Israel is that carried on by Muslims, who have done great damage to several Jewish holy sites, including Rebecca’s Tomb and Joseph’s Tomb, and have even tried to prevent Israel from building an elevator at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron, that would benefit disabled Muslims just as it would disabled Jews, allowing them to finally visit the site.

For Rashida Tlaib, Israel — the freest, most open, most moral state in the Middle East – is simply the embodiment of evil. In her venomous view, Israeli Arabs are subject to apartheid; Palestinian Arabs are subject to “war crimes.” The subtext is this: Americans need to make amends to the Palestinians and Israeli Arabs by recognizing Washington’s part in the “Nakba.” I can well imagine Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar (D-Gaza City) going around the country, speaking at BDS-embracing campuses about “America Must Make Amends For the Nakba.” And what fun those Squadrettes could have suggesting the ways that America could make those amends. First, of course, Washington could slash its military aid to Israel, that aggressive little Sparta of a country, with the IDF putting its knee on the neck of the inoffensive and helpless Palestinians. Second, Washington should pressure Israel to return to “its 1967 borders,” which is a deliberately deceptive way of calling for Israel to be squeezed back within the 1949 armistice lines that Abba Eban once called “the lines of Auschwitz.” Israel would be forced to give up the Golan Heights, the Jordan Valley, and the five major settlement blocs in the West Bank – all of which are critical for its defense. It would have to uproot half a million Israelis from their homes on the West Bank. And once the Jewish state was reduced to those 1949 lines – which were never recognized borders, but only reflected where the armies stood when the armistice was declared in 1949 — Israel would be left with a nine-mile-wide waist from Qalqilya to the sea; an invader from the east could cut the state in two within an hour.

Of course, as there was no American aid, military or economic, to the new state of Israel, it will be hard for Rashida Tlaib to hold the United States responsible for what she and other Palestinians call the “Nakba.” The United States, Rashida may not realize, maintained an arms embargo in 1948, as did most of the world, on both Israel and the Arabs. The Israelis managed to buy a handful of rickety Avia airplanes from the Czechs, as well as some guns; American sympathizers with Israel also managed to smuggle in some small arms. Not all of them were Jews. As for the Arabs, the British during the war continued to supply weapons to Egypt, Iraq and, especially, to the British-officered Arab Legion in Jordan. Despite the fantastic imbalance in men, money, and weapons, the Jewish defenders of their new state prevailed against the armies of five Arab states. That terrible defeat of the Arab aggressors was the “Nakba.”

If Rashida Tlaib wants to lay the blame for the Nakba on someone, she need look no farther than the Arab states themselves. For they were so certain that they would crush the Jewish state that they urged the Arabs in what was Mandatory Palestine, and then – after May 14, 1948 — the State of Israel, to leave what was going to be a bloody battlefield. Those Palestinian Arabs were assured they could return in safety after Israel had been crushed, and the Jews expelled or killed.

The Palestinian Arabs believed this because their leaders abroad told them so over and over again. Azzam Pasha, the Secretary-General of the Arab League, in late 1947 warned the Jews that if war came with the Arabs “this will be a war of extermination and momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Tartar massacres or the Crusader wars”(in an interview published in the Egyptian newspaper Akhbar Al-Yom on October 11, 1947). “We will smash the country with our guns and obliterate every place the Jews seek shelter in,” said Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri as-Said. And he added that “the Arabs should conduct their wives and children to safe areas until the fighting has died down.” The Jordanian newspaper Filastin admitted the same after the ceasefire that ended the war: “The Arab States encouraged the Palestine Arabs to leave their homes temporarily in order to be out of the way of the Arab invasion armies.” It was the Arabs’ failure to slaughter the Jews that the Palestinians came to call their “Nakba.” What member of Congress will stand up and respond to Rashida Tlaib, explaining who really caused the Arab “Nakba”: the Arabs themselves.

In the end, as we all know, nearly 700,000 Arabs left, confident that they would soon return. Some Israelis, such as the Mayor of Haifa, Shabtai Levy, pleaded with the Arabs in the city to remain. Other Jews, of course, were glad to see them go.

There was another “Nakba” at the same time as the one Rashida Tlaib wants Congress to recognize. That was: the true “catastrophe” of 850,000 Jews who had to flee for their lives from Arab lands where they had lived for centuries, because the Arabs took out their anger over their defeat in the war with Israel on helpless Jews who lived in their midst. Stripped of all their property, subject to violent riots and pogroms in Morocco, Yemen, Libya, Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, most of those 850,000 Jews found refuge in Israel, where — unlike the Palestinian Arab refugees in the Arab countries who were kept in squalid camps, denied citizenship, and prohibited from practicing many occupations – they were quickly resettled, given educations and vocational training and, within a few years, assimilated.

Which Congressman will take on the task of rebutting Rashida, and setting the historical record straight on the subject of Arab responsibility for the “Nakba.” One who comes to mind is Congressman Ritchie Torres from the Bronx, who is black, an old-fashioned in the Scoop Jackson vein, and staunchly, eloquently, unswervingly pro-Israel.