by Kenneth Levin
Why the leftist Jewish media leaped to the defense of a Jew-hater in Congress.
Attacks on Israel that distort the reality of the Jewish
state’s past and present in the service of undermining its well-being
and its very survival have become ever more widely disseminated in
bastions of the Left in America. This is occurring most strikingly in
academia, among both students and faculty, but also in prominent
mainstream media and even within the Democrat party. At the same time,
those Jews who align themselves with the Left often resort to the most
contrived of contortions to mitigate the message of such attacks.
A representative example of this phenomenon was recently provided by
the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA)’s editor-in-chief, Andrew
Silow-Carroll. The context was his contribution to the storm of comment
in response to Rashida Tlaib’s remarks in a May interview on the podcast
Skullduggery. Silow-Carroll’s article was entitled, “What did Rashida
Tlaib say about the Holocaust? It’s probably not what you think.” What
makes the piece particularly noteworthy is that the JTA is a news
service whose stories are picked up by Jewish papers around the world
and the rhetoric of its articles, not least that of pieces by its
editor-in-chief, is shaped to have a desired impact on the service’s
Jewish readership. In Silow-Carroll’s gloss on the Tlaib interview - as
in many other articles put out by the JTA having to do with Israel and
its critics on the Left - the rhetoric is clearly intended to reassure
readers that attacks on Israel from the Left, in this case the Democrat
Congresswoman’s statements, were not so problematic and that reactions
to the contrary are overwrought.
Tlaib had
been asked in the Skullduggery interview about her support for a
one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and how she
envisioned a single state that would meet both Palestinian and
Israeli-Jewish national aspirations. She never answered the question.
Instead, she remarked, as transcribed by Silow-Carroll in his piece,
"...two weeks ago we celebrated, or took a moment I think in our country
to remember, the Holocaust. And there's a kind of a calming feeling, I
always tell folks, when I think of the Holocaust and the tragedy of the
Holocaust in the fact that it was my ancestors - Palestinians - who lost
their land and some lost their lives, their livelihood, their human
dignity, their existence in many ways had been wiped out, and some
people's passports - I mean, just all of it was in the name of trying to
create a safe haven for Jews, post-the Holocaust, post-the tragedy and
the horrific persecution of Jews across the world at that time. And I
love the fact that it was my ancestors that provided that, right? In
many ways. But they did it in a way that took their human dignity away,
right, and it was forced on them."
In his
column, Silow-Carroll first goes after Republicans who attacked Tlaib
for saying she gets a "calming feeling" when she thinks about the
genocide. Well, she did say that. But Silow-Carroll insists all she
meant was, as she states, "...it was my ancestors... in the name of
trying to create a safe haven for Jews... I love the fact that it was my
ancestors that provided that..." Silow-Carroll next goes after those
who pointed out that, far from welcoming Jewish refugees during the Nazi
era, Palestinian leaders worked against their immigration to British
Mandate Palestine and collaborated with the Nazis during the war. (He
does note Palestinian collaboration in the war against the Allies; he
could also have noted collaboration in the murder of the Jews.)
Silow-Carroll particularly cites Benny Morris as erroneously accusing
Tlaib of crediting Palestinians with welcoming Jewish refugees. She did
say they "provided" the haven but acknowledged "it was forced on them."
But what is Silow-Carroll's point? With regard to Tlaib's "calming
feeling" on thinking of the Holocaust, he writes, "she is saying that
even if the Jews did come and take [her people's] land and rights away,
at least it was for the alleviation of another people's suffering." But
she clearly hates Israel, feels its creation was a great injustice to
her people, and wants to undo it with her one state solution that would
ultimately make Jews a minority in a Palestinian Arab state..
Even the descendants of people who genuinely did help the Jews during
and after the Holocaust, descendants of people who often put their lives
at risk to extend that help, are unlikely to have - in response to
their forebearers' heroism - a "calming feeling" on thinking of the
Holocaust. They are much more likely to be pained, saddened, appalled by
the scale of the atrocities whenever they think of it. "Calming
feeling" is a bizarre statement whose meaning, for those trying to
fathom it, is no less plausibly closer to that inferred by Tlaib's
critics than to the gloss Silow-Carroll struggles to put on it.
And what is his point in his retort to Benny Morris for noting what
Palestinian attitudes and actions towards the Jews actually were before
and during World War II? Yes, Tlaib did not say that the Palestinians
welcomed the Jews but she certainly doesn't acknowledge the murderous
violence with which they opposed both Jews in the Mandate and those
trying to survive in the Arab world and in Europe.
In addition, Tlaib insists it was the
Palestinians' land to which Jewish survivors came after the war. In
fact, it had been Ottoman Turkish land and, in the wake of the First
World War, had been given by the League of Nations as a homeland to the
Jews, both those already living there - including those who had been
either a plurality or majority in Jerusalem for more than a century -
and those who would immigrate there. The League of Nations did so in the
context of creating or recreating many nations from the lands of the
German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman empires. These nations
included Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czechoslovakia,
Syria and Iraq, with Syria, Iraq and the Jewish national home all being
held as mandates by Britain or France to foster nation-building. In
every instance, there were ethnic and religious groups within the new
nations that were not happy with the new situation, but nowhere else was
this seen as delegitimizing the nation-building project.
Silow-Carroll never directly addresses Tlaib's false characterization
of the land on which Israel was established as appropriated Palestinian
land. Nor does he note that it was in defiance of League of Nations
objections and in the service of what it construed as its imperial
interests that Britain severely restricted Jewish admission to the
Mandate in the years before and during World War II while allowing in
large numbers of Arabs from neighboring states, people who then became
“Palestinians.” Nor does he address the fact that it was not Israel's
establishment that led to, in Tlaib’s words, "my ancestors -
Palestinians - [losing] their land and some their lives, their
livelihood, their human dignity, their existence in many ways..." In
fact, they would have suffered none of that if they had accepted the
United Nations' 1947 division of the Mandate - all of which had been
intended by the League of Nations for the Jewish homeland - into two
states, one Jewish and one Arab. It was the Palestinians' rejection of
the UN plan and their going to war to prevent its implementation and to
destroy the Jewish community that led to the losses she laments.
Even as he is silent on these truths and tries to put the best
possible gloss he can contrive on Tlaib's remarks, Silow-Carroll
ultimately acknowledges that that gloss still reflects her echoing the
false "...anti-Zionist refrain that the Jews escaped the window of a
burning house only to land on someone else's head."
Still he is determined to put a positive spin on Tlaib's rhetoric and
to take to task her critics among Republicans, the "Jewish commentariat
and media," the Israeli press and many other voices in the Jewish
world, as well as some Democrats who want "to separate themselves from
the increasingly diverse insurgency on their left."
But, again, what is Silow-Carroll’s point? What drives his strained
arguments? In trying to discern the answer, it is worth noting once more
that a central recurrent theme in left-leaning Jewish media, including
the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, is insistence on downplaying the
extremism of anti-Israel voices on the Left, to rationalize their
rhetoric and arguments and even to cast them in positive terms. They do
so to oppose an Israeli government and Israeli policies with which they
disagree. They do so to counter Israel's supporters on the American
Right and in the mainstream American Jewish community and even in the
American Center-Left, and often as well to make common cause with more
radical elements of the American Left even as those elements embrace
increasingly strident anti-Israel positions. And they do so not least to
sway a worldwide Jewish readership to be less critical of, and more
receptive to, Israel’s attackers on the Left.
These ideologically driven stances by a significant segment of Jewish
outlets and Jewish commentators do a gross disservice to the reality of
Israel's history, current situation and challenges. In prioritizing
promoting their leftist allegiances over informing and educating their
Jewish readership, they routinely obscure the truth-telling that is at
once the most ethical and most effective response to those such as Tlaib
who seek to undermine Israel and ultimately to see it destroyed.
Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274172/straining-defend-rashida-tlaib-jewish-telegraphic-kenneth-levin
Follow Middle East and Terrorism on Twitter
No comments:
Post a Comment