If my great uncle was a Palestinian Jew, then who are you, Rashida Tlaib?

Editor’s note: This important and relevant article by Laureen Lipsky, a member of our New York Board of Regents, ran in The Times of Israel on June 1, 2019.

Originally published by The Times of Israel

Recently the latest darling of the left, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D.-Mich.), expressed how calm she felt thinking about the Holocaust – because that is the most appropriate feeling to have regarding the greatest targeted genocide towards a group of people in modern history. To drive a bulldozer through this falsehood requires unearthing a series of historical truths hidden beneath the Arab propaganda cloaked in antisemitism.

Israel was not ‘born’ in 1948. Jews didn’t simply plop down into an oddly shaped, resource-poor land and declare themselves part of a new country. The Jewish people are native to the land of Israel. The very name of the people comes from an area in Israel called Judea. The Romans fought three massively destructive wars against Jews, which cost them more money and men than any other group they sought to conquer. After the Romans forced exile upon Jews from Israel, taking many as slaves to Italy, and killing many others, they renamed the land Palestina, an attempt to erase any Jewish connection to their homeland.

Yet the Romans didn’t kill all the Jews in Israel, and the ones remaining became citizens of the Roman empire. In the town of Peki’in, in northern Israel, many members of the Jewish priestly class found refuge and became farmers. These families lived there continuously for over 2000 years until Arab antisemitism drove them out in the 1930s. The continuous Jewish presence in Israel predates the Roman era. To the leftist antisemitic mainstream media and the terrorist-supporting members of Congress it props up, let me repeat this clearly – Israel was never Judenrein.

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