Tlaib and Omar Can Make History If They Chose

Tlaib, a Palestinian-American, has said that she wants to visit with family and Omar has stated she is coming to The Holy Land to “learn more.” Although both elected officials have repeatedly offended large swaths of the Jewish community with comments that need no re-hashing, they will travel to the Holy Land with a unique, dare one say transformational, opportunity.

When Representatives Tlaib and Omar step off the plane at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport, they will immediate see a thriving, vibrant Israel, where cranes dot the coastline, where some of the world’s largest and most important technology and life sciences companies have made significant investments, and where the GDP clocked in at 4.4% in 2018. They will see a population — 20 percent of which is not Jewish — in constant motion. The fact is Israel, as a Jewish state, has never been stronger, much to the majority of the world’s chagrin. By acknowledging to themselves that the Jewish state of Israel is not going anywhere, the congresswomen can set the stage for a historic trip.

Tlaib and Omar will also arrive in the region with arguably more cred on the Palestinian street than any American official in recent memory. While many of us don’t care for how they earned their political capital, they can use it to speak truth to the Palestinian leadership and convince them that the future of their children lies in the development of an economy based on the inflow of global investment, one that leverages the Palestinian peoples’ reverence of education. They can also emphasize the fact that establishing a civil society that mirrors Israel — rather than demonizes it — will mean that mothers and fathers no longer have to weep over the graves of their young sons. Surely, they can convince the PA that university graduation ceremonies and weddings are far preferable than funerals. By making these points, they will represent the true voices of the Palestinian people.

If they are to embrace the role as peace ambassadors, they will need to seize the opportunity to speak honestly not just about the dreams of most Palestinians, but also about the forces that undermine these dreams. To wit, they should raise these five issues:

1. Corruption within the PA and Hamas

Courageous Palestinian journalist Khaled Abu Toameh and others have written about increasing frustration on the streets of the West Bank and even in Gaza. This frustration has even led to protests, not against Israel, but against leaders who keep themselves and their cronies in power, while diverting international aid to private coffers.

2. Threatening of journalists who dare to report unfavorable news
Journalists covering developments in Gaza and the West Bank are often threatened and/or jailed. Freedom of the press and free speech are core values of any democracy. Shouldn’t the authorities who are supposedly steering their people towards a Palestinian State to begin to apply such standards?

3. Improving Medical facilities for sick Palestinians
Israel has offered to build a massive field hospital on the border with Gaza to help alleviate the suffering of sick Palestinians — a gesture that even Hamas approves of but not the Palestinian Authority (PA). In fact, the PA’s policy is to oppose anything approaching normal contact with the “Israeli occupiers,” even if it means innocent Palestinians could die.

4. PA’s Pay to Slay
While the PA constantly pleads poverty, it keeps upping payments to terrorists (and their families) who maim and murder Jews. The poorest Palestinians in the meantime have seen their benefits slashed.

5. The future funding of UNRWA

Have either Tlaib or Omar read the United Nations Relief Workers Agency’s anti-peace grade-school curriculum? Not a single map identifies Israel, while terrorists are venerated as heroes.

Yet another generation of Palestinian children in the Middle East are subject to brainwashing that denies the legitimacy and humanity of their Israeli neighbors.

Last month, a working group of economists, diplomats, policy experts, industrialists, real estate developers, and academics gathered in Bahrain for what could have been a historic meeting of the minds. The purpose was to help chart an economic course for the Palestinian people that would dramatically lift the standard of living in the West Bank while turning every single Palestinian man, woman and child into a stakeholder. The problem was that the Palestinian leadership didn’t care what the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. (CIFIUS) had to say. In barring Palestinians from attending the Bahrain conference, the PA sent a clear signal that it will reject any discussion that forecloses on the idea of destroying the Jewish state through the so-called “right of return.”

If the PA rejected a state-of-the-art hospital because it would involve constructive relations with Israel, perhaps $50 billion in direct foreign investment in exchange for peace — a 21^st century Marshall Plan — really is out of the question. Palestinian leadership has shown consistently that it prefers the dead-end of poverty, bloodshed, victimhood, and the false hope of Israel’s destruction. But Representatives Tlaib and Omar, perhaps more than anybody else in the world, can get through to the PA that, as long as they favor despair and certain defeat over human development, they do not represent the public will. While rejecting progress may serve the PA’s myopic self-interest, it is a catastrophic course for their people.

Most Palestinians are frustrated with the lack of progress. They look at Israel and know it is their own government that has prevented them from experiencing prosperity. They also see what happens to journalists who attempt to expose the truth, so they remain quiet. If Representatives Tlaib and Omar are honest with themselves, they know the Jewish state of Israel is a settled question. So these two officials, elected to one of the world’s most esteemed manifestations of democracy, have a choice: They can travel to the Holy Land as beacons of truth and visionaries or they can go as agitators and enablers, inflaming an already volatile situation. However, if they really care about the Palestinian people — if they genuinely believe the Palestinians are entitled to dream about anything other than eliminating the Jewish state — the choice should be easy.

Rabbi Abraham Cooper is the Associate Dean, Director Global Social Action Agenda at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a leading Jewish human rights organization. Abraham Cooper has been a longtime activist for Jewish and human rights causes. His extensive involvement in Soviet Jewry included visiting refuseniks, helping to open Moscow’s first Jewish Cultural Center, and lecturing at the Soviet Academy of Sciences and the Sakharov Foundation. In 1977, he came to L.A. to help Rabbi Marvin Hier found the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and for three decades Rabbi Cooper has overseen the Wiesenthal Center’s international social action agenda including worldwide antisemitism and extremist groups, Nazi crimes, Interfaith Relations, the struggle to thwart the anti-Israel Divestment campaign, and worldwide promotion of tolerance education. Widely recognized as an international authority on issues related to digital hate and the Internet, Rabbi Cooper was listed in 2017 by Newsweek among the top most influential Rabbis in the United States. To read more of his reports — Click Here Now.