WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Rep. Omar had an op-ed this week in the Washington Post, the tone of which was sufficiently distant from that of her characteristic references to Israel and Jews as to constitute it “a curious incident.” What to make of it? Two not-dissimilar takes – Elder of Ziyon’s and mine.
This Week: The Curious Incident of the Omar Op-Ed in The Washington Post
“Is there any other point to which you would direct my attention?” the aspiring young country detective asks Sherlock Holmes in the delightful racehorse-mysteriously-disappears-in-the-night tale ‘Silver Blaze.’ “To the curious incident of the stable dog in the nighttime.” “But the dog did nothing in the nighttime.” “That was the curious incident.” Had a stranger entered the stable, the dog most certainly would have barked an alarm.
A “curious incident” – a character in a drama acting other than as expected – occurred this week with freshman Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s Monday op-ed, “We Must Apply Our Universal Values To All Nations. Only Then Will We Achieve Peace,” in The Washington Post.
Rep. Omar, an open supporter of “Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions” against Israel, has accused American Jews of “dual loyalty” and influencing Congress through money. She has referred on Twitter to “the apartheid Israeli regime.” This is not new. Omar back in 2012: “Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel.”
But such is not the Ilhan Omar that comes through in her Monday Washington Post op-ed:
“U.S. support for Israel has a long history. The founding of Israel 70 years ago was built on the Jewish people’s connection to their historical homeland, as well as the urgency of establishing a nation in the wake of the horror of the Holocaust and the centuries of anti-Semitic oppression leading up to it.”
I quarrel, of course, with Rep. Omar’s expression “the founding of Israel 70 years ago,” as opposed to its re-attainment of independence then, but this misperception is hardly unique to those who believe that this was achieved not through a homeland Jewish army throwing back a partition-rejecting multi-nation Arab invasion but through hypnosis. That said, though, there are two key acknowledgments here to be commended: that Israel “was built on the Jewish people’s connection to their historical homeland,” and that the Holocaust was not an anomaly in the world’s treatment of Jews, but had “centuries of anti-Semitic oppression leading up to it.”
So what peace solution position did Rep. Omar take in her op-ed? A “two-state solution,” recognizing that western Palestine “is also the historical homeland of Palestinians.” Being today “without a state, the Palestinian people live in a state of permanent refugeehood and displacement.” She says that when she criticizes “certain Israeli government actions in Gaza or settlements in the West Bank, it is because I believe these actions not only threaten the possibility of peace in the region – they also threaten the United States’ own national security interests.”
So what about this op-ed of Rep. Omar’s? I’ll give you first my own immediate take on Rep. Omar’s op-ed, and then that, which I then read, of the highly respected commentator Elder of Ziyon.
I don’t agree, of course, that “the Palestinian people live in a state of permanent refugeehood and displacement,” even that they are “THE Palestinian people,” Palestine’s Jews being “Palestinian” too, as indeed they too were called, indeed mainly called, during the Mandate. Nor are the people to whom Rep. Omar refers, Palestinian Arabs, living in stateless refugeehood and displacement. Jordan, 78% of the Palestine Mandate with its Palestinian Arab-majority population, IS a Palestinian Arab state, and so, de facto, is Gaza. Nor are the Palestinian Arabs who live under Palestinian Authority domestic rule in Judea-Samaria areas of a western Palestine that they never left living today as displaced refugees.
But beyond its particular points, what are we to make of this op-ed of Omar’s? This is not the Ilhan Omar we’ve come to know, if not necessarily love, from her Israel comments dating from long before her arrival in Washington. Is this week’s op-ed’s unaccustomed tenor of reasonableness – in contradistinction to her obsessing on world-hypnotising apartheid Israel’s evil doings – how she now really feels? It seems to me more likely that Senator Sanders has moved to Samaria, become a “settler,” and joined the Likud. And might it be that Democratic party concerns over “Jexodus,” over keeping in the fold an up-to-now hyper-loyal Jewish constituency that votes and donates well above its weight had a tone-setting influence here, that at bottom it’s all about the Benjamins, baby? Just my own cynical suspicions, of course.
But talk about cynical, here’s how highly respected commentator Elder of Ziyon titled his blog post Tuesday on Omar’s op-ed on Monday: “@Ilhan Omar’s @Washington Post op-ed – misdirection, projection and dishonesty http://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2019/03/Ilhan-Omars-washington-Post-op-ed.html).”
“Misdirection, projection-dishonesty”? You have to read this blog post yourself, but in essence he says that “even though this op-ed was carefully written to make it appear that Omar is not obsessed with ‘Palestine,’ and “to be as liberal and fair as possible,” nevertheless “her bias shines through.”
Elder of Ziyon states that Omar doesn’t say a word about “Palestinian obligations in human rights, or in bringing peace”; that she doesn’t say the two-state solution must include a Jewish state, “only an Israeli state” [Palestinian Arabs have balked at the U.S.-Israeli interpretation of “two states” as “two states for two peoples”]; that she ignores Hamas; that her references to achieving justice everywhere are inconsistent with her belief in BDS, which is directed only against Israel; and that her reference to Israel’s actions as threatening the U.S.’s own security are imbalanced.
Elder of Ziyon concludes: “This op-ed is not meant to clear up her position on the conflict. It is meant to obscure it using nice words like ‘peace’ and ‘justice’ and ‘equality.’… The entire article is misdirection away from Ilhan Omar’s very problematical biases and positions. If she wants to clear the air, she should speak honestly, and not behind the layers of consultants that wrote and massaged this op-ed to say nothing about her real positions about Jews and Israel.”
The “take-away” for us from this op-ed is to be skeptical that it really represents a change in attitude by Rep. Omar from insults hurled at Israel and Jews to a respectful seeking of ‘peace’ and ‘justice’ and ‘equality’ for both sides. But whether it’s real or not, we have to formulate a clear response to it. I do not think that this response should be an on-the-merits position regarding “the two-state solution.” With due respect to one of Rep. Omar’s targets, AIPAC, which has adopted for itself a pro two-states-solution position (without attracting Democrats to its impending conference), I think our response to this op-ed should be that a two-states or other solution is Israel’s and its Arab adversaries’ decision to make, not Rep. Omar’s or ours.
[A poll of Israelis taken last month by Legal Grounds (https://IsraelUnwired.com/shocking-new-poll-shows-Israelis-are-vastly-against-the-two-state-solution) shows that “the Israeli public are finally understanding that the solution is no longer giving away our land [Judea, Samaria, historic Jerusalem] to form a second [Arab] state on land that belongs to Israel and the Jewish people,” though Israelis are divided on alternatives of total or partial annexation and status of Arabs who live there. All the more reason that this is for Israelis themselves to work out, not ours to point out.]