There are several ways to read the Israeli government’s decision to bar Reps. Tlaib and Omar from their planned visit to the West Bank and Israel.
We can look at it in the context of Israel’s laws barring BDS activists from entering the country. That’s the pretext the government is using to bar these members of Congress. Of course, it is a policy that undercuts the Israeli government’s claim to being a liberal democracy.
We could look at it in the context of the far-right, extremist Likud government’s relationship with the far-right, extremist Republican administration in our country. Both have a taste for violating the rights of minorities and out-groups.
We could look at it in the context of the American government. The prospect of an American president preventing members of Congress from embarking on a foreign trip where they intend to study the implications of US foreign policy. It is a direct attack on Congress’s oversight role and the separation of powers, another shuffle towards authoritarianism.
Set all of those aside, and let’s evaluate it in the only context that matters. The human context.
Rep. Rashida Tlaib was traveling to the West Bank to visit her grand-mother and her extended family. Israel controls all access to the West Bank (along with Gaza) and has under a military occupation that has lasted over 50 years. The Israeli government controls who can enter and who can leave, and it has used this power for decades to wantonly violate the right to free movement of Palestinian people.
That is the real story here.
Every single day, Israeli authorities deny tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, the right to visit their family in the West Bank. Every single day, Israeli authorities prevent, with violence, Palestinians in the West Bank from visiting their families in Gaza. Every single day, Israeli authorities turn away hundreds of Palestinians in Jordan, across the Middle-East and across the world, disregarding their right to visit their families in territories held under military occupation by Israel. Every, single day, Israeli authorities disrupt the ability of Palestinians to move about within the West Bank, often employing violent threats and by deploying young conscripts to enforce these inhumane policies.
Thousands of Palestinian parents die without meeting the people their children married. Thousands of ordinary Palestinians cannot attend the weddings or funerals of their relatives. Thousands of Palestinians are prevented from visiting their ailing siblings. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are prevented, under threat of deathly violence from walking the fields that their parents or grandparents tilled.
Thousands of grandchildren will never feel the loving touch of their grandparents.
A million such tragedies are ignored and forgotten.
The vast majority of the US political establishment has for decades, studiously turned its head away from these tragedies. They’ve found these human stories to be inconvenient obstacles to our hegemonic aims in the region. Aims that are furthered by an alliance with the Israeli government. So of course, as with many other tragedies across the world visited upon the vulnerable by our allies, this one too is ignored.
And I want to be very, very clear. The blame does not fall on Republicans alone. You cannot get away with just criticizing Trump and the dastardly Republicans. You have to face the uncomfortable truth here. These tragedies have been enabled and created by very senior Democrats. People like Steny Hoyer, who led an AIPAC propaganda trip to Israel earlier this summer. Other members of Congressional leadership attended this junket.
So I say again, the US political establishment has ignored the millions of tragedies visited upon ordinary Palestinians for decades.
Will it do the same when the tragedy is visited upon one of its own members.
— @subirgrewal