#956 5/19/19 – This Week: Fallout From Tlaib’s ‘Safe Haven’ Claim

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG:  Palestinian-American Congresswoman Tlaib’s absurd claim this week that “Palestinians provided a safe haven in Palestine for Europe’s Jews” was rightly ridiculed as the exact opposite of what happened, but now in Congress, with Tlaib, Omar and others, as has long been in the media, the “Palestinian narrative” genie is out of the bottle and won’t go back in.  From our perspective, who’ll be least effective in pushing it?   

This Week:  Fallout from Tlaib’s “Safe Haven” Claim

On Election Night 2018 (compare Election Night 2016), I fell asleep early.  But I drifted into an uneasy dream.  I was walking along the Mediterranean shore, you know, the eastern part that maps label “Israel” because the country alongside it is too narrow to sport even an “I”.  Inadvertently, I trod on a bottle, smashing it into a thousand of what some archeologist a thousand years from now will gleefully hold aloft as ancient shards.  Out popped, of course, an irate genie, shrieking he’s yet one more aboriginal Palestinian native displaced by No-Prior-Connection-to-Palestine colonizing Jews.  “Just for that,” he shook his fist at me, sizing me up at once as American, “There will be elected tonight to the United States Congress the first female Palestinian-American Muslim.”

But, being by trade a Middle East merchant and hence co-author of the real Art of The Deal, he added, “Tell you what: Find me a new bottle home in the next five minutes, and I’ll grant you three wishes on her first three actions as Congresswoman-Elect.  Else I go to the U.N., which’ll declare my descendants unto the Thousandth Generation refugees displaced by you Jews.”

“UNRWA SHMUNRWA,” I answered him.  “It just so happens I have down in the den of my home the Mother Of All Magnificent Bottles.  Originally it held the finest of bourbons, but now there’s only one good shot or two left in it.  In five minutes, it can be yours.”  “You’re on.”

And so, I toasted the aliyah (“ascent,” Dear Christian Readers) to the United States House of Reprehensibles of Congresswoman Tlaib.  My toast’s text was not “L’chaim!”, though in retrospect perhaps it should have been.  For the genie’s work was as good as his word.  Palestinian-American Congresswoman Tlaib celebrated her election to the American Congress by wrapping herself in the not-American but “Palestinian” flag.  She vowed her first act would be Impeachment of the American President, that “M****r F****r,” as she called him.  Bless her.

This week, Congresswoman Tlaib proclaimed the Holocaust gives her “a feeling of calm” because her fellow Palestinian Arabs, at great sacrifice to themselves, graciously afforded European Jewish refugees before, during and after the Holocaust “a safe haven” in Palestine from persecution in Europe.  Not exactly.  Before the Holocaust, Palestinian Arabs’ revolt helped induce the Palestine Mandate “Trustee” British to slam shut Palestine’s gates to the Jews.  Palestinian Arabs’ Mufti spent much of World War II in Berlin, colluding with Hitler on a Final Solution For Jews.  After the War, Palestinian Arabs joined with their neighboring Arab nations’ brethren to put an end to Palestine’s Jews.  And they still have a Pay-To-Slay plan.  “Safe haven”!?  It would be difficult to draw a more reductio-ad-absurdum depiction of Palestinian Arabs’ own version of Palestine history.  Among Americans, it seems that only that caricature-of-a-commentator Geraldo Rivera was impressed.

But now in Congress, as has long been so in the mainstream media, the Arab version of conflicting Arab-Jewish Palestine claims is not going to go away.  The genie is out of the bottle, and no amount of bourbon that might have been left in it will entice him back in.  So we may be better off with Palestinian flag-wrapping, safe-haven-for-Jews-touting Palestinian-Arab Congresswoman Tlaib and America-criticizing Somali-American Congresswoman Omar carrying the ball on it than, e.g., Jewish Senator Sanders (I read his ‘1948’ speech to J Street), who’s running for President for the second time, and the first time came close to becoming the Democratic Party nominee.

Is there a message in all this for us grassroots American Jews?  I think there is.  We, all of us, have to make our western-Palestine-is-the-Jewish-homeland-land-of-Israel case to Americans as consistently and persistently, as simply and clearly, as those who belittle and outright deny our Jewish homeland claim hammer away that “Palestine,” from the river to the sea, is the heritage of and belongs to “the Palestinians.”

There are three aspects to our making this claim:

[1]  If you personally believe, as do most American Jews and their institutions, that “the two-state solution” would bring peace between Arabs and Jews, your realistic road to that solution is by putting value on the Jewish homeland claim to Judea-Samaria, not starting from conceding that claim before negotiations begin.  [And, btw, whether the Arab side sees or ever saw “two-states” in the American-Israeli sense of “two states for two peoples,” and whether a “demilitarized Palestinian state” (AIPAC’s formulation) will stay “demilitarized” very long, are, at the least, problematical.]

[2]  The Haaretz 5/3/19 article, Two-State Solution: U.S. Jews Won’t Budge.  Will It Cost Them Their Relationship With Israel?, which we discussed a fortnight ago in our #954, cites a deepening divide between Israeli and American Jews on whether “two-states” would bring peace.  If you agree with Israelis that Israel must at least control security to the Jordan River, or believe that this is exclusively their decision to make, with both of which I do, take heart from that Haaretz article that the major American Jewish institutions “faithfully reflect their constituency on this issue [the two-state solution].”  Our task is to make our case, grassroots-to-grassroots, to the constituents of these major American Jewish organizations.

[3]  Whether it’s realistic to believe that Palestinian Arabs will take over Jordan from the Hashemites enthroned by Britain is not for us the crucial Partition-of-Palestine issue.  Jordan does in fact comprise 78% of the original Palestine Mandate, and a majority of its population considers itself “Palestinian.”  Those facts make it, by us, a “Palestinian state,” the excision of which from the Palestine Mandate as an all-Arab state constituted the Palestine Mandate’s partition between Arabs and Jews.