Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), a viciously anti-Israel third-term member of Congress, was fact-checked by Twitter’s new “Community Notes” system on Tuesday after she objected to a bipartisan trip to Israel.
Tlaib, who has expressed antisemitic views and has been barred from Israel due to her support for the “boycott, divestment, sanctions” (BDS) movement, which is often described as antisemitic, was reacting to a tweet by Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), who was warmly received in Israel earlier this week.
Tlaib claimed that “apartheid” Israel “was born out of violence and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.”
Speaker McCarthy wants to rewrite history but the apartheid state of Israel was born out of violence and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
75 years later, the Nakba continues to this day. https://t.co/s5P35dgqv0
— Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (@RepRashida) May 1, 2023
She was promptly fact-checked by the Community Notes system, which uses crowdsourcing from a variety of viewpoints rather than outsourcing to third-party organizations (many of which have a partisan bias).
The Community Notes correctly pointed out that Israel was officially created by a United Nations resolution, and not violence — though Palestinian Arabs and surrounding Arab states tried to crush the state in its infancy.
The subsequent war was not, generally speaking, one of “ethnic cleansing”; in fact, Israel often pleaded with Arab populations to stay, but many were encouraged by Arab leaders to leave. Historians debate whether the Israeli military pushed Arab populations out of some areas during inter-communal fighting; what is beyond debate is that Arab armies expelled Jews from certain areas, including the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem.
As for the accusation of “apartheid,” Israel guarantees Arabs equal rights, and an Arab party served in the previous Israeli government — something that would have been unthinkable in any “apartheid” system.
The term “Nakba” (“catastrophe”) is a Palestinian observance of the day on the secular calendar when Israel declared independence in 1948. Like many elements of Palestinian political identity, it is focused on Israel.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.