Ilhan Omar tweeted, “Yesterday at Social Justice Day a
student asked me, ‘How do I stay hopeful that change is going to come?’ This is
tough to unpack,” she responded before going on to give a blab la
meaningless ramble.
More perceptively, @rdunnflorida tweeted, “Only weak
people blame others. Strength is taking responsibility for everything that you
do.”
This set me thinking. How about a different Ilhan Omar and
Rashida Tlaib itinerary for their Tour of Palestine? One based on them educating
Palestinians to take responsibility for themselves based on their social
justice and civil rights principles.
So welcome to my Omar-Tlaib Palestinian Social Justice
Tour.
It will not be the hostile agenda devised by Hanan Ashrawi
and her anti-Israel Miftah group that will never lead to normalization and
peace. Instead, it is one that appeals to anyone genuinely concerned about
social justice, civil and human rights for Palestinian Arabs. Hopefully it will solve all the unsolvable
problems and lead to a better future for those that Omar and Tlaib claim to
care for.
This tour demands a high level of truth and honesty. A
difficult but necessary commodity for these two new Congresswomen.
It begins when their plane lands at Ben-Gurion Airport. This
is their first test of honesty. The two Democratic delegates have to admit they
have arrived in Israel. Don’t let them off the plane until they do. Honesty has
to start with them. Without that, they have no chance of making the world a
better place.
In fairness to them, my itinerary does not force them to meet
Israel’s Prime Minister or President. Nor does it impose on them a visit to the
Knesset, or to attend a wreath-laying ceremony in memory of Holocaust victims
at Yad Vashem. They will have to struggle with their Jew-hatred on another
occasion. Maybe it will come as they strive to establish lasting peace which
will sprout out of my itinerary.
They will head straight to Ramallah and, after a good night’s
sleep in one of the five star hotels there, their schedule will begin.
After breakfast they will be driven to a meeting with
President Mahmoud Abbas. After handshakes, hugs and kisses, they will be
ushered in to a special assembly of the Palestinian National Council. After
initial formalities. The ladies will stress the importance of civil rights and
request to know how many Hamas members are represented in the assembly, based
on the fact that in the last 4-year national legislative elections, which took
place 13 years ago in 2006, Hamas won a majority, 74 of the 132 seats.
The ladies will note than no Hamas representative has ever
attended a council meeting since the Hamas-Fatah split in 2007 and the
resultant Palestinian Civil War in which 600 Palestinians were killed and
dozens more murdered or executed in the following years.
If Omar and Tlaib are insistent on pursuing a policy of civil
justice, they will place a motion for both sides of the Palestinian political
divide to come together and set a deadline to meet again in one years’ time.
Good luck with that.
After lunch with the President, they will be driven to
BirZeit University to meet the student body. Here democracy reigns with Hamas
and Fatah each gaining 23 seats in April 2019 student elections. They will be
disappointed to learn that a progressive movement in Palestinian student
society does not exist. The Progressive Student Union received zero seats,
while the student wing of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine won
5 seats. Which shows the way that future political winds are blowing around
Ramallah.
On the second day, Omar and Tlaib will be taken to a UNRWA
refugee camp to learn that the ethnic
cleansing of the Palestinians does not exist. UNRWA officials will be pleased
to show the two congresswomen the success of decades of dedicated service to
Palestinian refugees that has bloated the numbers from a few hundred thousand
to the amazing figure of over five million registered Palestinian refugees. Enough
to keep thousands of officials in gainful employment for decades to come.
Apart from the propaganda benefits, little has been done to
lift Palestinian Arabs out of poverty. During their visit they will examine
schoolbooks to see that Israel does not exist.
From there, they will be taken to one of the summer camps
where kids and youths are taught the importance of killing Jews, and then taken
out into the open space to learn how to shoot guns and how to stab Jews to
death.
To relieve the tension, they will be given an afternoon
guided tour of Rawabi, the new Palestinian new city with its elegant shops and
luxury homes built for families close to the corrupt plutocracy of the
Palestinian leadership.
Hailed as “the flagship Palestinian enterprise” and built
by Palestinian billionaire, Bashar al-Masri, Rawabi is only 24 kilometers (12
miles) from the Balata refugee camp they had just visited.
The juxtaposition of such wealth with the dire poverty of
Balata will give them pause. Rawabi cost 1.5 billion dollars to build. Balata,
which houses 27,000 Palestinians, was described by Ha’Aretz, Israel’s left wing
newspaper, as “a rat-infested Mumbai-like slum.”
To compound the corruption and criminality of Palestinian
wealth and poverty, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib will be invited to dine with
President Mahmoud Abbas. That was
supposed to have been at his $8 million, 50,000 square feet, mansion complete
with helipad, until uproar and embarrassment at the gross waste of foreign
money turned it into a “national library.”
Instead, Abbas will host them at his more modest several
million-dollar address.
In 2018, Mahmoud Abbas ordered a $50 million private jet from
Boeing. It will be a specially-converted 737, though where he is going to park
it is another matter. The only airport under Palestinian control is in Gaza
occupied by Hamas, his deadly political enemy, and that runway was bombed by
Israel to prevent weapons being flown in and used against the Jewish State.
This economic waste would make interesting conversation for
the Palestinian-supporting American social justice socialists and the PA leader
over dinner.
Day three will be a compulsory visit to Jericho for the
justice warriors. Their visit will include a tour of the detention camp
mentioned in a 2019 Human Rights Watch report.
According to HRW, “Both the Fatah-led Palestinian
Authority and Hamas authorities in Gaza are arbitrarily arresting peaceful
critics and opponents. From January 2018 through March 2019, the Palestinian
Authority admitted detaining more than 1,600 people based on their peaceful
expression, while Hamas authorities arrested more than 1,000 during the March
2019 protests against their rule.
‘The Palestinian Authority and Hamas remain bitterly divided,
but unified in a common approach to crushing dissent,’ said Eric Goldstein,
deputy Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch. ‘Leaders
who have been in power for more than a decade without elections should, at the
very least, listen to criticism, not punish it.’”
In the HRW report, the Palestinian Authority admitted
detaining 65,415 Palestinian in the West Bank in 2018 and the first three
months of 2019. I bet you didn’t read that in your mainstream media.
Is must be an issue for the concerned Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan
Omar to investigate and report on to Congress?
It gets worse.
Tlaib and Omar insist they are champions for Palestinian
human rights. Let them examine this.
Under the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, people are being
detailed, imprisoned and tortured because of their political affiliations.
The Independent Commission for Human Rights has received 455
complaints from Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza of “torture and
mistreatment” in 2018 and the first quarter of 2019. 242 by Palestinian
security forces in the West Bank and 213 by Hamas in Gaza.
Human Rights Watch recommended that, “other countries
should suspend assistance to Palestinian security agencies that routinely
torture dissidents including, for the Palestinian Authority, the Intelligence
Services, Preventive Security, and Joint Security committee, and, for Hamas,
Internal Security, as long as systematic torture and other serious abuses
continue.”
Issam Akel, a Palestinian-American, was sentenced on December
31, 2018, by a Palestinian court to life imprisonment with hard labor for the
crime of selling his Jerusalem property to a Jewish buyer.
He was part of a roundup of 44 Arabs arrested by the Palestinian
Preventive Security forces for selling property to Jews.
This is an opportunity for Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib to
act against this human rights and civil rights abuse of Palestinians by
Palestinian authorities.
It took the protests of the Israeli and American governments,
including the personal intervention of David Friedman, the US Ambassador to
Israel, to force the Palestinian Authority to release Akel into the hands of US
authorities in late January.
Akel is one case. He was lucky. There are at least another 43
other Palestinians who are suffering incarceration for the anti-Semitic and
racist policies of the Palestinian Authority that Omar and Tlaib must examine.
Day four will take them to a place that was on their original
program. They will visit Khan al-Ahmar, the makeshift Bedouin village, but this
time they will visit it with Regavim, the Israeli NGO that will not give them
propaganda. Regavim will give them the facts and show them the maps and the
aerial photos to back up their truth.
Khan al-Ahmar is a real example of “illegal occupation.” This
one is being carried out by the Palestinian Authority with the connivance of
several European nations and the EU in clear breach of the signed Oslo Accords.
The land is in Area C which, according to all parties to the agreement, remains
in Israeli administrative and security control until a future permanent peace
agreement.
The Palestinian Authority have deliberately transferred in
from other areas tribes of Bedouin families, dumped them down in a barren spot
and given them free makeshift housing. The Europeans have brought in prefab
structures, provided solar panels, and constructed a school. All in blatant
illegal breach of international agreements.
Regavim will then take Omar and Tlaib to visit the empty lot
in the Mishor Adumim industrial area which once housed SodaStream, the soft
drink company that employed over 600 Palestinian workers enjoying Israeli wages
and social benefits. They worked alongside and often above Jewish workers as
supervisors. That was before the BDS Movement and the Palestinian Authority
began to exert pressure and threats against this normalization designed to lead
to cooperation and a better future for both Israelis and Palestinians.
SodaStream moved out of the area and opened a new factory in the Negev, north
of the Israeli city of Beer Sheba, where Palestinian workers have been replaced
by local Bedouin who now enjoy the Israeli good life.
Omar and Tlaib should visit the 600+ unemployed Palestinians,
thrown on the scrapheap thanks to BDS and anti-normalization Palestinian
officials, many living the luxury life in Rawabi.
Miftah was determined to take them to Bethlehem. They should
go there to visit the miracle checkpoint that “imprisons” the Muslim
Palestinians of Bethlehem, but not the Christians.
When Israel governed the holy Christian town of Bethlehem,
the population was 80% middle class Christians. Tourism was good and Bethlehem
folk lived free and productive lives. Then came the peace agreement and
Arafat’s men moved in. What followed were threats and violence against the
Christian community and terrorism from Bethlehem against Israeli civilians in
Jerusalem, Hebron, and other places.
A security barrier was built in the north of the town and a
check point was needed to stop armed terrorists infiltrating into Israel. Meanwhile,
in Bethlehem, Christians were harassed and threatened by their new Muslim
neighbors and fled.
Today, the Christian population of Bethlehem is below 20% and
falling. Omar and Tlaib would learn a lot by listening to those who barely
escaped with their lives.
Bethlehem is a once-Christian town with an overwhelmingly
Muslim majority. Those who have been “ethnically cleansed” have been the
Christians by the Palestinian Muslims. Fact!
In other words, the “oppressive” Bethlehem checkpoint
is a place that lets Christians out and lets Muslims in. It’s a new form of replacement theology.
Simply put, since Israel moved out and the Palestinians moved
in, Bethlehem has gone from being a thriving Christian town to a poverty-ridden
Muslim town. This is due to corrupt and lawless Palestinian occupation, not a
non-existent Israeli occupation.
Next stop Hebron
Omar tweeted, before she had visited the place, that Hebron
was, “Once a bustling economic hub, settlement expansion has resulted in a
two-tier city, with Palestinian living under military occupation forced to walk
on the other side of the street from Israelis.”
Who is giving her this propaganda crap? How dare she write
such nonsense, as if she is an expert and before she has even visited the
place?
Hebron is the place where the Jewish Abraham bought a plot of
land and where the Jewish Patriarch and Matriarchs are buried. A truly
significant Jewish town.
Jewish did I say? Jewish
“settlement expansion” in Hebron?
Only 3% of Hebron is Jewish today. That may be because Hebron
is the place where Arabs massacred the Jews in 1929, and continue trying to
kill them.
Settlement expansion? Today, there are 220,00 Palestinian
Arabs living in Hebron and barely 700 Jews. Who is expanding? Palestinians or
Jews? You decide.
The few Jews are protected by IDF soldiers because Hebron
Arabs, affiliated to Hamas, want to kill them. Jews dare not set foot in 97% of
Hebron. You wouldn’t know that from the anti-Israel propaganda.
But how about Omar’s “once a bustling economic hub”? Today, Hebron accounts to 30% of the West
Banks GDP.
Omar tweeted on August 16, “77% of shops have closed bc of
military occupation.” In my tour
Ilhan Omar will visit the thriving shopping malls and markets of Hebron. In
fact, Hebron has more shops than any other Palestinian town. So much for 77%
shops closed.
I told you I would bring you facts and truth in my Omar-Tlaib
tour of Palestine.
Throughout their Palestinian tour to Ramallah, Jericho,
BirZeit, Rawabi, Hebron, Bethlehem, they will not meet a single Jew. Jews are
banned there. This is genuine racist apartheid. It is also the official policy
of the Palestinian Authority.
But, when my tour demand that they walk through the Jaffa
Gate to the most holy site for all three of the world’s great religions, they
will be blown away, peacefully, as are all tourists who visit Jerusalem, at the
intermingling of Jews, Muslims, Christians and others, walking freely among
each other in the bustling alleyways of the Old City.
When they approach the Western Wall of the Temple Mount they
will see hundreds of Jews praying with Muslims passing by undisturbed. But when
they reach the plaza of the Al-Aqsa mosque they will witness Muslim women
abusing any Jew that may have ventured there due to a personal sense of
holiness in being on the spot of the ancient biblical Jewish Temple. The
harmony they may have enjoyed in arriving at this location is ended by Muslim
hostility to Judaism.
And this is the core of the whole problem.
Solve that, and you solve everything.
Barry Shaw is the International Public Diplomacy Director at
the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies. He is the author of ‘Fighting
Hamas, BDS, and Anti-Semitism.’
