During the Vietnam War, the barrage of televised violence shocked a nation, and the United States has not yet recovered. However, the last month of ever-present and unrelenting confrontation with the mass butchery of civilians in Gaza may well have driven the U.S. House of Representatives over the edge. The occasion was yesterday’s ritualistic censuring of Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), charged with “promoting false narratives” and “calling for the destruction of the state of Israel.”
On the former, Palestinian-origin Tlaib is accused of not rubber-stamping Israel’s account of the Oct. 17 bombing of the al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City. Tlaib had released a statement from her office on Oct. 23: “Media outlets and third-party analysts have raised doubts about claims and evidence offered by both Israel and the Gaza Ministry of Health, and I agree with the United Nations that an independent investigation is necessary.” To make matters worse, she added a link which included the statement: “I cannot uncritically accept Israel’s denials of responsibility as fact. Both the Israeli and United States governments have long, documented histories of misleading the public about wars and war crimes.” Hence, she was found to have “continued to knowingly spread the false narrative that Israel intentionally bombed” the hospital.
On the last, her Nov. 3 defense of the pro-Palestinian chant “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is taken as her call for eliminating the state of Israel. She has responded: “From the river to the sea is an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence, not death, destruction, or hate. My work and advocacy is always centered in justice and dignity for all people no matter faith or ethnicity.” Of some note, Netanyahu’s Likud Party has adopted a very similar phrase—but, in their case, they have been much more aggressive in employing the phrase as a claim to all the land in between and denying a Palestinian state.
