Israel Bans Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib Under Pressure from Trump
Under significant public pressure from President Donald Trump, Israel has announced that it will not allow congresswomen Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota—the first two Muslim women elected to the U.S. House of Representatives—to make a planned visit to the West Bank. "As a free and vibrant democracy, Israel is open to critics and criticism, with one exception: Israeli law prohibits the entry into Israel of those who call for, and work to impose, boycotts on Israel,” said prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu of the right-wing Likud party in a statement. "[T]he itinerary of the two Congresswomen reveals that the sole purpose of their visit is to harm Israel and increase incitement against it."
The rationale for the decision, as Netanhyu alludes to, is Tlaib's and Omar's support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, or BDS. BDS supporters, who say they model the movement on anti-apartheid protests in South Africa, seek to use economic pressure to hold Israel accountable for alleged acts of discrimination and persecution against Palestinians. Opponents claim that the movement is anti-Semitic, and in 2017, the Israeli parliament passed a law requiring the interior minister to bar from the country foreigners who support boycotts of Israel.
For the most part, the U.S. government has adopted the latter position. In a statement lauding Netanyahu's decision, U.S. ambassador to Israel David Friedman referred to BDS as "no less than economic warfare designed to delegitimize and ultimately destroy the Jewish State." Last month, the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives voted 398-17 to pass a resolution condemning BDS as "a campaign that does not favor a two-state solution," and affirmed the chamber's opposition to "all efforts to delegitimize the State of Israel." Omar and Tlaib were among the few voting nay.
Omar and Tlaib, of course, are also frequent targets of President Trump's racist vitriol. In July, he opined that the two legislators, along with New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Massachusetts representative Ayanna Pressley, should "go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came." (Tlaib, Ocasio-Cortez, and Pressley were all born in the United States. Omar is from Somalia, and became a U.S. citizen in 2000. All four are sitting U.S. congresswomen.) At a Trump rally a week later, the president paused and smirked as the crowd, echoing his words, chanted, "Send her back!" A subsequent House resolution condemning the president's "racist comments" passed, 240-187.
As the New York Times notes, U.S. presidents "have traditionally not enlisted the help of overseas allies to take action against domestic political adversaries." On August 10, however, Axios reported that Trump privately told advisors that he hoped Netanyahu would use Israel's anti-boycott law to punish Omar and Tlaib. On Thursday morning, he began tweeting about it. Representatives Omar and Tlaib are the face of the Democrat Party," he wrote. "And they HATE Israel!"
In a statement, Omar called Netanyahu's an "affront," comparing it to Trump's Muslim ban implemented against two members of Congress. "The irony of the 'only democracy' in the Middle East making such a decision is that it is both an insult to democratic values and a chilling response to a visit by government officials from an allied nation," she wrote.
In recent weeks, some Republicans have raised the specter of anti-Semitism as a convenient distraction from detention camps and racist tropes. And the Jews are tired of it.
Originally Appeared on GQ
