No good can come of a visit to Israel by US President Joe Biden. If he does show up, as reportedly planned, at the end of June or beginning of July, it will only serve to enhance the fantasies of the faltering government of Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and Alternate PM and Foreign Minister Yair Lapid.
What such a sojourn will not accomplish is a strengthening of the sane patriotic majority in both countries. Though the administration in Washington reiterates statements about the important US-Israel bond, many of its members have an unhealthy affinity to enemies of the Jewish state.
The Democratic Party from which Team Biden hails includes among its ranks politicians who talk about the need for Israelis and Palestinians to “return to the negotiating table” for the purpose of achieving a “two-state solution.” They suffer from peace-process-related amnesia.
This is a condition whose key symptom is forgetting or ignoring repeated Israeli concessions, all of which were both preceded and followed by an uptick in Palestinian jihadist operations. People suffering from this disorder point to Israel’s “occupation of Palestine” after the 1967 Six-Day War. They continue to harbor the ridiculous notion that the conflict is rooted in real estate, and cling to the failed “land for peace” formula.
BUT THE party favored by American Jews also contains open antisemites. These radicals no longer even bother adding the tired caveat about legitimate criticism of Israel. They go right for the jugular, making no bones about their opposition to the Zionist enterprise.
Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib is a prime example. The House rep from Michigan with Palestinian parents accuses Israel of original and perpetual sin.
To vindicate this hatred, she and her cohorts in the so-called “Squad” spew venom by distorting history and current events. Though such is the stuff that Hamas, the PLO, Islamic Jihad and ISIS propaganda is made of, Tlaib is an elected legislator in the US Congress. And she’s milking that for all it’s worth.
Her latest act of aggression is a resolution that she introduced earlier in the week in honor of the 74th anniversary of the “Nakba,” the “catastrophe” of Israel’s establishment.
“This Sunday was a day of solemn remembrance of all the lives lost, families displaced, and neighborhoods destroyed during the violent [sic] and horror of the Nakba,” she wrote in a press release on Monday. “The scars bourn [sic] by the close to 800,000 Palestinians who were forced from their family homes and their communities, and those killed are burned into the souls of the people who lived through the Nakba.”
Her lies about 1948 wouldn’t be complete, of course, without an equally vitriolic reference to the present. Calling the May 11 killing of Al Jazeera correspondent Shireen Abu Akleh in the crossfire between IDF forces and Palestinian terrorists an “assassination” by Israel, she said that the incident “made all the too clear [that] the violence and war crimes are an ongoing and ever-present assault on the existence and humanity of the Palestinian people. The Israeli apartheid government’s ongoing ethnic cleansing seeks to degrade Palestinian humanity and break the will of the people to be free.”
She then let her true allegiance show, and it’s not to the United States.
“Fortunately, as Palestinians and their allies prove time and time again, we will persist no matter the circumstances, until peace, freedom, equity and respect for all people are secured and protected,” she insisted.
She proceeded to provide background from the Institute for Middle East Understanding, a far-Left, George Soros-funded pro-Palestinian advocacy NGO as proof of Israel’s inherent evil. The Nakba, she explained, is the “mass expulsion of Palestinian Arabs from British Mandate Palestine during Israel’s creation (1947-49).”
This “catastrophe,” she asserted – in a rambling, run-on sentence rife with errors of punctuation and grammar – “did not end in 1948 and continues to this day in the form of Israel’s ongoing theft of Palestinian land for illegal settlements and segregated communities in the Palestinian West Bank, including East Jerusalem, its destruction of Palestinian homes and agricultural land, revocation of residency rights, deportations, periodic brutal military assaults that result in mass civilian casualties such as the one that took place in Gaza in the summer of 2014 and spring of 2021, and the denial of the internationally-recognized legal right of return of millions of stateless Palestinian refugees.”
Tlaib’s proposed resolution, cosponsored by fellow House Democrats Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and Jamaal Bowman of New York, Ilhan Omar and Betty McCollum of Minnesota and Cori Bush of Missouri – and endorsed by the anti-Zionist NGOs Jewish Voice for Peace Action, Americans for Justice in Palestine Action, Project48 and the United States Campaign for Palestinian Rights – “promotes better education about and understanding of the tragedy, while rejecting the efforts of Nakba denialists [sic] to enlist the US government’s support for their deeply bigoted historical revisionism.”
AS OF YET, Biden hasn’t commented on this travesty. Perhaps the press is too fearful of a gaffe on his part to request a reaction. In any case, Biden has been nervous from the get-go about the disproportionate power of and pressure from the loud-mouthed “progressives” in his party.
This is why he sucked up to Tlaib exactly a year ago, in the midst of Operation Guardian of the Walls, Israel’s war against Hamas terrorists in Gaza. Intercepting him as he landed in Michigan to deliver a speech at the Ford Motor Co. truck plant in Dearborn, she dressed him down for expressing to then-Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu “his firm support for Israel’s right to defend itself against indiscriminate rocket attacks, [and] welcomed efforts to address intercommunal violence and to bring calm to Jerusalem.”
He could have reminded her, however sheepishly, that his conversation with Netanyahu included a call for a ceasefire. Instead, he paid tribute to her during his talk at the Ford plant.
Flubbing her first name by referring to her three times has “Rashid,” he announced: “I want to say to you that I admire your intellect; I admire your passion; and I admire your concern for so many other people. And from my heart, I pray that your grandmom and family [in the Palestinian Authority] are well, and I promise I’m going to do everything to see that they are on the West Bank. You’re a fighter, and God thank you for being a fighter.”
THE IRONY is inescapable. Despite Biden’s many moves to reverse his predecessor’s policy of holding the Palestinian Authority accountable for its intransigence and “pay for slay” mechanism, as long as he so much as mentions that Israel is a US ally, he cannot appease the likes of Tlaib.
Nor will he be able to satisfy her quest for the “liberation of Palestine, from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea” – the wiping of the Jewish state off the map – by admonishing the Israeli government for plans to build some 4,000 housing units in the communities of Judea and Samaria.
If Biden thinks, for example, that she was happy with his State Department’s warning against settlement expansion, on the grounds that it “exacerbates tensions, undermines trust between the parties and deeply damages the prospects for a two-state solution,” he’s kidding himself.
Ditto for Bennett and Lapid. If they imagine that their approval of the construction of at least 1,000 additional Palestinian homes will be sufficient to allay White House concerns, they’re living in la-la land.
The rest of us grasp that it would be preferable for Israel if Biden canceled his trip.