by Rabbi Dov Fischer in The American Spectator

Quite a tempest unfolded this past week in Congress, as House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (D-Calif.) closed down an anti-Israel event that Jew-hater Rashida Tlaib (D-Squad, D.C.) and her Jew-hating Squad had planned to hold in the halls of the United States House of Representatives. Instead, the speaker redesignated the reserved room to hold a celebration on the occasion of Israel’s 75th anniversary.

Tlaib’s program was intended for the opposite purpose: to mourn the existence of the one and only Jewish-majority country in the world, located amid a sea of Arab Muslim countries that want to destroy it. Jews call Israel Independence Day “Yom Ha’Atzma’ut,” which is an exact translation in Hebrew. Arab Muslim Jew-haters call it “Nakba,” which means “The Catastrophe.” Can you imagine Great Britain closing down its country every July 4 to mourn that day as “Nakba — The Catastrophe”? The Brits got over it, and America and the British are incredibly tight. By contrast, Israel has to deal with the likes of Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Cori Bush, and their Mideastern heroes, the terrorists of Gaza, Southern Lebanon, Syria, and the region currently governed by Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas) called the “Palestine Authority.”

No sooner did McCarthy, a great supporter of Israel, act forcefully than Bernie Sanders, the Senate’s own Jewish apostate, who always is in bed with the woke inter-sectionalize Jew-haters of the “progressive” Left, arranged for Tlaib instead to hold her Day of Mourning in the U.S. Senate. By now, my readers of many years know all too well that there are no anti-Semites in all the world who compare in their hatred with Jewish apostates, driven by a deep profound sickness of self-hate and a compulsion to prove to their fellow travelers on the extreme left that, despite their accident of birth, they really are interested in being identified not as Jews but as non-parochial universalists. We know these sick self-haters well by now: Sanders, George Soros, Ben & Jerry, the whole bunch of them. That is why we Orthodox Jews sympathize and empathize so deeply with our devout Catholic friends, who live in the same universe marred by their renegades and apostates who advance the most anti-Catholic positions imaginable and then say they are doing so “As a Catholic.”

So let us offer these Nakba Day wishes to Rashida Tlaib: As long as you and your cohort live, you never will take down Israel. Every year Israel gets stronger. Whatever weapons your terrorist thugs create, Israel will create better defensive ones and will improve her offensive weapons. She will continue to create gifts of life from which the entire world benefits: CT scanning, computer chips, Intel Pentium, Waze, capsule endoscopy, the flexible stent, Azilect for treating Parkinson’s, Copaxone for treating multiple sclerosis, the USB flash drive, the laser keyboard, VoIP, the network firewall, Windows XP, Microsoft Security Essentials, Babylon, Mobileye, and so much more. By contrast, what have your more than 20 Arab Muslim countries created in the past century? I really, sincerely want to know because, as of now, no Zionist who wants to counter your boycotts of Israel can think of a single thing that any Arab country ever has put on the market — except for suicide belts — that is worth boycotting.

There exist no Arab “Palestinian” people and never was an Arab “Palestine.” The dizzying repetition of your Big Lie for so many decades causes people who should know better to speak of yet another “two-state solution.” In the 1920s, at the San Remo conference, a “two-state solution” was implemented. Arabs — “Palestinians” — were given 77 percent of the “Palestine Mandate,” all land east of the Jordan River, while the Jews were left with only 23 percent of what had been promised: all land west of the Jordan, including the totality of Judea and Samaria (the “West Bank”). Jews chose to rename their “Palestine” portion “Israel.” Arabs renamed their “Palestine” by its boundary: “Transjordan,” later shortened to “Jordan.” The majority of all people in Jordan are “Palestinian Arabs.” Jordan is Arab Palestine.

When people talk today about yet another “two-state solution,” the premise is even more absurd and even nonsensical. What are they talking about? Given America’s never-ending nightmares in purgatory holes like Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, and Lebanon — does it really advance American interests to create yet another Muslimarabstan that will be yet another center for international terror that ultimately will bog thousands more American troops and billions more in defense spending in yet another Middle East dirt hole?

The danger is so perilous that no one admits they are speaking of giving the terrorists a “country,” not a “state.” Delaware is a state. North Dakota is a state. Iowa is a state. But Muslimarabstanpalestine would be a country. That is a solution? And look at the map of the region. Gaza is on one side, and Judea-Samaria (the “West Bank) is utterly separate. Those two regions are not one entity. Even now, Gaza is ruled by Hamas terrorists, and the “Palestine Authority” is run by Abu Mazen (aka Mahmoud Abbas) and Fatah terrorists. They regularly hate and kill each other. So it is not about a “two-state solution” but a “three-country quagmire.”

Besides, how exactly are 500,000 Jews going to be uprooted from their homes in Judea and Samaria, plus another 325,000 Jews from Jerusalem’s eastern neighborhoods? Is the American “two-state solution,” to send in stormtroopers, round up and shove Jews onto cattle cars, and force march them into concentration camps? Where exactly would they be reconcentrated? In refugee camps in Syria? Will the European Union ask Germany to restore some of its available facilities, perhaps in Dachau and other picture-postcard locations, although it will cost them the tourist trade of those who love to visit concentration camp museums?

These are the facts, Rashida:

First, the Arabs of pre-state Israel were pro-Hitler Nazis. Their undisputed leader, Haj Amin el-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, traveled to Berlin and met with Hitler, counseled Hitler and his Nazi leadership, and urged the eradication of the Jews. Here is the official transcript of the Grand Mufti’s meeting with Hitler on Nov. 28, 1941. Despite falsehoods taught in colleges by tenured professors who cannot be fired, these Arab Muslims were not freedom fighters; they were Hitler Nazis.

The Arabs of pre-state Israel launched vicious pogroms in 1920–21, 1929, and 1936–39. These are facts. Look it up: 1929. 1936–1939. the Hebron Massacre.

The entire “Palestine” myth is built on one Big Lie after another. The New York Times even published an op-ed a few years ago asserting that Jesus was a Black Palestinian. Thanks to Christians who protested intensely, no less than did Jews, the Times published a “correction”: “Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article referred imprecisely to Jesus’s background. While he lived in an area that later came to be known as Palestine, Jesus was a Jew who was born in Bethlehem.” All The Lies That’s Fit to Print.

Roman conquerors under Vespasian and Titus destroyed the Holy Temple in the year 70, and the Romans drove most of the remaining Jews out of Israel in the year 135 under Hadrian and Julius Severus with the fall of Fortress Betar. To extinguish the Jewish bond with the land — and to prevent yet another Jewish return to Israel from Exile, as had happened only 70 years after the prior Babylonian expulsion — the Romans changed the very name of the land to identify it with the pagan biblical peoples who preceded the Jews there before Joshua: the Philistines (“Plishtim,” in biblical Hebrew). That is where the name “Palestine” comes from: Philistine-Palestine. The Philistines clung to the Gaza-Ashkelon corridor along the Mediterranean coast, utterly irrelevant to the Judea-Samaria (“West Bank”) heartland. There were no Arab Muslims in the Bible. Indeed, there was no Islam until Mohammed, half a millennium later in the seventh century.

For the 2,000 years after the Romans renamed Israel, the land of “Palestine” was synonymous with the Land of Israel. Israel’s Jews were recognized as the “Palestinians.” There never was a “Palestinian Arab” nation; no Arabs denominated themselves as “The Palestinians.” Identify the name of any Arab Muslim who ever was the “King of Palestine,” the “Sheikh of Palestine,” the “Prime Minister of Palestine,” or the “President of Palestine.” There never was an Arab anything called “Palestine,” no coinage, no currency. They claim there never was a Jewish Holy Temple on Mount Zion. Open a Jewish Bible: 1 Kings 6–7. Look in the Christian Bible: Matthew 21. Luke 2. John 2. Yet today’s Grand Mufti of Jerusalem preaches that there never was a Jewish temple in Jerusalem. Abu Mazen (aka Mahmoud Abbas), Holocaust denier and leader of the Palestine Authority, likewise denies all such history. That Big Lie negates not only Judaism but also Christianity’s core narrative of the life of Jesus.

“Palestine” always meant “Israel.” The American organization that raised money for the Irgun — the Jewish underground that fought alongside the Haganah when England would not allow Jewish refugees from Hitler, fleeing desperately on ships like “The Exodus,” to find sanctuary in Israel — was the “American League for a Free Palestine.” The English-language Jewish daily newspaper in Israel was the Palestine Post. The United Jewish Appeal before 1948 was the United Palestine Appeal. Indeed, Encyclopedia Britannica’s entry on Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, the first chief rabbi of Israel, titles him the “chief rabbi of Palestine.”

Think particularly about that last one, Rashida: The Arab “Palestinians” had a chief rabbi? Arafat had a chief rabbi? Hamas has a chief rabbi? You have a chief rabbi besides Bernie Sanders?

Until 1964, Arabs never undertook to establish a “Palestine” in either Judea-Samaria or Gaza — even though they controlled both regions for two decades from 1948–1967. (Jordan illegally occupied Judea-Samaria, and Egypt illegally held Gaza.) When the “Palestine Liberation Organization” was fabricated by Ahmed Shukairy in 1964, the “Palestine” they wanted to “liberate” was the entire country of pre-1967 Israel. They harbored no designs or interest at all in the “West Bank” or Gaza because Arabs then occupied those regions. Rather, they defined “Palestine” as the map of pre-1967 Israel and nothing more. All PLO terror attacks from their 1964 founding until June 1967 were aimed exclusively at sites within Israeli cities. Only after Egypt, Syria, and Jordan allied for war in 1967 to drive the Jews into the Mediterranean Sea — and lost Judea-Samaria and Gaza in their ensuing debacle (Nakba 2?) — did a new revamped “Palestine Myth” emerge. Suddenly, the PLO now wanted Judea-Samaria and Gaza.

Arabs call Judea and Samaria the “West Bank” because they never had reason to name it. Do people call Jersey City or Hoboken or Secaucus the “West Bank” although those cities lie on the west bank of the Hudson River? Jewish cities in Judea and Samaria are nowhere near the Jordan River. Arabs have names for Egypt and Lebanon but no names for Judea and Samaria. “Judea” (“Yehudah” in the original biblical Hebrew) is eponymously named for the Jewish tribe of Judah (likewise “Yehudah”). Christians find that Luke 17:11 discusses Jesus in Samaria and that John 4:1-4 discusses Jesus going from Judea to the Galilee by way of Samaria. Nowhere in the Jewish Bible nor the Christian Bible is the region called “West Bank.” That name is utter nonsense. Yet the Arabs call it “The West Bank” even though the remainder of that region is known by biblical names: Lebanon, Tyre, Sidon, Damascus, Hebron, Bethlehem, Galilee, Beersheba, Jerusalem.

“One picture is worth a thousand words.” The Al Fatah flag of the PLO of Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas) of the “Palestine Authority” depicts the “Palestine” they seek the entire state of Israel. Same with the flag of Hamas. Also the flag of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. And of their “General Command.” Likewise the flag of Islamic Jihad. Each flag depicts their definition of “Palestine”: not a country composed of “West Bank” and Gaza; rather, the entirety of Israel. That is what they mean when they chant: “From the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea / ‘Palestine’ Will Be Free.” It has been the dream of Nazis from Adolf Hitler to the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and their ilk: an Israel free of Jews once again. After 2,000 years of driving Jews out of European countries and yelling “Go to Israel,” now they would declare Judea and Samaria as the one place on earth barred to Jewish residence. The arrogance.

The opinions of the United Nations, the European Union, the Arab and Muslim World, and the Russia-China-North Korea axis do not matter. Nor do those of Biden, Blinken, Nides, Sanders, Soros, the Squad, and that crew. As Ben Shapiro famously has written, “facts don’t care about your feelings.” Enjoy Nakba, Rashida, and may you celebrate many more for years to come.

Originally published in The American Spectator