Fake history: Rashida Tlaib’s grotesque distortion of the making of Israel

Everyone’s heard of Holocaust denial, but there’s a ­related phenomenon, Holocaust distortion, that ­involves taking undue credit for rescuing Jews, claims often made by nations that played a role in the genocide of the Jewish people. A version of Holocaust distortion has now arrived in Congress.

Over the weekend, Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan told a Yahoo podcast: “There’s always a kind of calming feeling when I think of the tragedy of the Holocaust, that it was my ancestors, Palestinians, who lost their land and some lost their lives, their livelihood, their human dignity . . . in the name of trying to create a safe haven for Jews, post-Holocaust, post-tragedy . . . And I love that it was my ancestors that provided that in many ways.”

There’s a lot to unpack here, but the intent is clear: Tlaib used the horrors of the Holocaust to delegitimize Israel. In fact, in the same podcast, Tlaib called for the dissolution of the Jewish state via a one-state solution.

For starters, she casually peddled the commonplace lie that Israel was established only because of the Holocaust.

Last Wednesday was Israel’s Memorial Day for fallen soldiers and victims of terror. Israeli television broadcast all the names — 23,741. The litany begins with Avraham Shlomo Zalman Tzoref, who was murdered by Arabs opposing his work for the Jewish community in Jerusalem.

That was in 1851. The Holocaust took place nearly a century later.

Jews returned to Zion, another name for Jerusalem, before the term “Zionism” was coined in 1885 to mean support for a Jewish state in the historic Jewish homeland. The first major uptick in Jewish return started in 1882. All well before the Holocaust.

In 1917, British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour declared that his government “view[s] with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” The League of Nations, a precursor to the United Nations, gave the British a temporary mandate to govern Palestine, and under that mandate, the Jewish community formed its own self-governing body in 1922.

Not only did Jews want their own state, then, but their efforts received an imprimatur from the international community well before the Holocaust.

More galling was Tlaib’s ahistoric assertion that the Arabs of the region — they didn’t call themselves Palestinians then — provided a safe haven for Jews. Not only did the Arabs oppose Jewish immigration in vehement rhetoric, they resisted it violently. Tzoref was the first of many murdered. Arabs massacred Jews in Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed and many other locales in the decades before the founding of Israel.

The Arab leadership was also openly pro-Nazi. Haj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem and a respected figure in Palestinian circles to this day, met with Hitler and visited German troops. According to the German transcript of the meeting, the mufti said: “An appeal by the Mufti to the Arab countries . . . would produce a great number of volunteers eager to fight.”

To the mufti’s delight, Hitler promised that after conquering the Southern Caucasus, “Germany’s objective would then be solely the destruction of the Jewish element residing in the Arab sphere.”

Meanwhile, the British gave in to Arab demands, sharply limiting the number of Jews who could enter the Mandate during the Holocaust. Ships were turned around and, like in many Western countries, Jews were sent back to certain death in ­Europe.

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After the United Nations voted in 1947 to partition mandatory Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state, five Arab armies invaded in an attempt to make it all Arab. Sounds like a really safe haven, Rep. Tlaib.

She highlighted Arab losses during Israel’s 1948 War of Indepedence while claiming the Arabs had given safe refuge to Jews, which is ahistorical. And her sinister implication is that the Palestinians are somehow the real victims of the Holocaust. This is a tactic used by many who oppose Israel’s existence (and is a theme of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’ doctoral dissertation).

Predictably, Tlaib’s response to outrage over her statements was to chastise those who spoke out against the “calming feeling” she has when thinking of the Holocaust, saying they took her words out of context — and to ignore those who pointed out her lies. On Monday, she doubled down with a statement repeating the lie that Palestinians welcomed Jewish refugees.

Decent Americans of both parties shouldn’t permit Holocaust distortion to stand in Congress.

Lahav Harkov is a senior contributing editor of The Jerusalem Post. Twitter: @LahavHarkov