We all know that politicians lie, but hand it to Rashida Tlaib for the sheer audacity of her doublespeak in suggesting that “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” is actually “an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence.”
This call for the abolishment of Israel in the name of such aspirations is at worst genocidal and at best a laughable contradiction:
Israel is the sole island of freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence amid a sea of tyranny, dehumanization, and violent oppression.
Israel is the only island of freedom and coexistence in the Middle East
Of the 39,000,000 sq. km. of Middle East and North Africa (MENA) in which Jews and Muslims once coexisted for centuries, the world now singles out as an “apartheid” regime the only 20,000 sq. km. in which they still do.
When European Jews began migrating to this obscure, arid, and sparsely populated corner of the Ottoman Empire in the late 19th century, MENA was filled with Jews.
At the turn of the 20th century, in the far eastern reaches of the Ottoman Empire, Baghdad was – incredibly – more than 25% Jewish; meanwhile, at the western extreme of North Africa, Morocco had over 250,000 Jews. And while the current Jewish population of Morocco is less than 2,000, Morocco is nevertheless the anomaly in this region.
In Iraq, the Jewish population is effectively zero, and that is a far more typical result.
Every country of MENA was home to Jews and Muslims in significant numbers as recently as 1948. Today, Israel is the sole area in which this still holds true.
For those purporting to aspire towards coexistence, Israel is the region’s best – and only – model.
On the subject of human rights, Tlaib might deputize her ministry to former commander-in-chief, Barack Obama, whose recent keynote, at his namesake foundation’s Democracy Forum, recalled a scene from The King’s Speech. While watching footage of Hitler’s Nuremberg rally, a young Princess Elizabeth asks her father: “Papa, what’s he saying?” to which the recently crowned King George IV replies: “I don’t know, but he seems to be saying it rather well.” Former US president Barack Obama, someone who ostensibly cares for human rights said this rather well for anybody who bothered to decipher, through his signature style of cautious yet insidious speech: The actions of Israel and Hamas are made equivalent by their both existing under the shared umbrella of “complexity.”
Nothing could be farther from the truth.
History can be complex, and it is so here, but there is nothing morally complex about putting a baby in an oven.
EVEN ADOLF Eichmann, who was largely responsible for orchestrating the mass murder of 6,000,000 Jews, was given a trial and a clean death by hanging; his son was left untouched, even though it was his boasting about his father’s Nazi exploits that led the Mossad to Eichmann.
Morality is not what we’re willing to do for the things we believe in. Rather, it’s the restrictions we put on ourselves in the pursuit of a result that we know to be right.
Very few people act in a way that they themselves feel to be unjustified. Hitler thought that he was saving the German people – and it follows that the strength of conviction can never be seen as the justification for heinous acts.
The October 7 actions of Hamas were heinous. That the history of Israel is “complex” is totally irrelevant. Our leaders should have the moral clarity to say so.
Finally, there is the matter of freedom, or a “free Palestine, from the river to the sea.” It is worth noting that a free and independent Palestine has never existed.
It was Syrian Palestine, Roman Palestine, Byzantine Palestine, Umayyad, Abbasid, Fatimid Palestine, and then Saladin’s Palestine and Mamluk Palestine and Ottoman Palestine and British Palestine and Hashemite Palestine, but never has a free Palestine existed. This is not to say that free Palestinians have not existed: they have, and at present, they all live in Israel.
Israeli Arabs, or Israeli Palestinians, account for nearly a quarter of the population and are citizens with full rights and freedoms. There are more Palestinians in the Israeli government than there are in the governments of all of Israel’s neighbors combined, although Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt are all home to significant numbers of Palestinians.
In countries like Egypt and Lebanon, which at least occasionally feign representative government, Palestinians are excluded because they still carry the non-citizen status of refugee. Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Jordan are monarchies.
Jordan, in particular, is worth looking at more closely, and Queen Rania of Jordan, who recently told CNN that a “free, sovereign and independent” Palestine was the only path to peace, is the front-runner for freedom minister in Palestine.
WHEN THE Sykes-Picot Agreement carved up Ottoman territory, the thing called “Palestine” that was handed to the British comprised included Gaza, Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), and all of modern-day Jordan. Compelled by Abdullah bin Hussein, a non-Palestinian Hashemite from Mecca, Palestine was split: The 80% east of the Jordan river was to be called “Transjordan,” and although it had (and still has) a majority Palestinian population, it was given to Abdullah as a kingdom.
Immediately, Jews who had lived in this region for centuries were either slaughtered or forced to flee to the far side of the Jordan, where it was determined that both Palestinians and Jews should have autonomy only in regions in which they constituted the majority, a division which Jews accepted and Palestinians violently opposed.
The aftermath of the ensuing conflict was the establishment of a Jewish state, the occupation of Gaza by Egypt, and the occupation of Judea and Samaria by Jordan. Jews who had remained in Judea and Samaria and Gaza were – once again – either slaughtered or forced to flee, and their villages and towns were razed. Palestinians who remained in Israel following the conflict were, by contrast, given full citizenship with all of its rights and freedoms. They retain that citizenship today.
Israel is the only Middle Eastern country where Jews and Muslims coexist.
It is the only Middle Eastern country with a commitment to human rights and an impartial court that upholds them. It is the only functioning democracy in the region and the only place where freedom, including the freedom to disagree with government, exists.
There are free Palestinians “between the river and the sea.” They are the ones who live in Israel.
The writer is a Jewish author living in New York. His last novel, The Family Morfawitz, was a “Jewish Book to Look for in 2023” in several publications.