Tlaib: No ‘bow down’ to Bibi
Israel slaps ‘now I won’t go’ Rashida
Israel ripped Rep. Rashida Tlaib on Friday for rejecting their compromise offer to let her travel to the West Bank to visit her elderly grandmother — saying her “hate” for the country trumped her love of family.
A day after Prime Minister Benjamin Netnayahu banned her and fellow Muslim-American Israel critic Rep. Ilhan Omar from a planned trip there, Israel decided to allow Tlaib to visit her 90-year-old grandmother in the occupied West Bank on humanitarian grounds — but she turned down the offer.
“I can’t allow the State of Israel to take away that light by humiliating me & use my love for my
sity to bow down to their oppressive & racist policies,” Tlaib (D-Mich.) tweeted, using the Arabic word for grandmother.
Israel’s interior minister Aryeh Deri fired back, “Apparently her hate for Israel overcomes her love for her grandmother.”
Meanwhile, Tlaib’s grandmother said she doesn’t understand why her granddaughter was barred from entering Israel in the first place, and applauded her pro-Palestinian stance.
“I am proud of her,” Muftiyah Tlaib, a resident of Beit Ur alFauqa in the West Bank, told The Washington Post. “Who wouldn’t be proud of a granddaughter like that?”
But she wondered what was the use of being a lawmaker if Tlaib could be barred from Israel at President Trump’s recommendation.
“She’s in a big position and she cannot visit her grandmother. So what good is the position?” Muftiyah Tlaib said from her home on Friday, apparently before learning that Tlaib had been given a pass but refused it.
Omar (D-Minn.) also tweeted that Netanyahu was wrong when he said she had no plans to meet with Israeli officials, saying she had a meeting planned with both Jewish and Arab members of the Knesset.
“Let’s be clear: the goal of our trip was to witness firsthand what is happening on the ground in Palestine and hear from stakeholders — our job as Members of Congress,” she wrote.
Tlaib and Omar have voiced support for the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement, which opposes Israeli settlements and policies toward Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.
Under Israeli law, BDS backers can be denied entry, a move Trump had urged in a pair of tweets claiming the two politicians — the only Muslim women in Congress — “hate Jewish people,” a charge they deny.
“Representatives Omar and Tlaib are the face of the Democrat Party, and they HATE Israel!” Trump tweeted.
The two, along with fellow Democratic Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, have traded barbs with the commander in chief.