What an interesting past couple of weeks it’s been! Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez admitted that “anti-Zionism” is just repackaged anti-Semitism, and New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani promoted aliyah!
Okay, neither one did so blatantly, but they did so, all the same.
When loony Texas Democratic congressional candidate Maureen Galindo expressed her intention, if elected, to turn a San Antonio ICE detention center “into a prison for American Zionists…,” among those condemning her words was AOC, who posted on social media that “This bigoted garbage and anti-Semitism should be nowhere near our politics.”
“Anti-Semitism”? But Ms. Galindo never mentioned Jews, only “Zionists”!
Could it be…that the Congresswoman recognizes, at least in her heart, that hatred of “Zionists” and of Jews, these days, are usually…one and the same? Well, good for her!
Mr. Mamdani’s toothpaste-commercial smile likely beamed bright as he released a video late on Erev Shabbos Parshas Bamidbar commemorating “the Nakba.” He likely figured that those pesky Jews who don’t like him wouldn’t see it until after their day of rest, when the news cycle would have cycled on to more recent happenings.
The coiner of the word “Nakba,” the “catastrophe” that the Arab world calls the establishment of Israel, was Syrian historian Constantin Zureiq. He used it to refer to the shame born of the devastating defeat of the Arab armies that attacked the nascent Jewish state after it declared its independence in 1948. Today, the word is used by Israel-haters to refer to the displacement of Arabs from Eretz Yisrael that resulted from those attacks.
In the video, which has been viewed millions of times, an endearing elderly lady, Inea Bushnaq, leafs through faded family photos and, with a British accent, speaks about her family’s “expulsion” from their home by “Zionists” when she was nine years old.
At the start of the video, a travel poster depicting Yerushalayim, with the legend “Visit Palestine” in large letters across its bottom, is shown hanging on her wall. The viewer is expected to see it, like Ms. Bushnaq apparently does, as expressing a wistful longing the region’s erstwhile Arab inhabitants have for a return to their ancestral homeland.
Ms. Bushnaq’s family, however, was hardly indigenous to the Holy Land. Her grandparents, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and stellar writer Liel Leibovitz reports, “left their native Bosnia and settled in Syria before finding their way to Jerusalem, making them—to borrow a phrase Mamdani voters use often to describe the Jewish citizens of Israel—European colonizers.”
In fact, many who today claim the label “Palestinian” are descended from successive waves of people who came to the area from other places: like Egypt, from where successive waves of immigrants arrived in the 18th century, Algeria and what is now Jordan. Bosnian Muslims, too, like Ms. Bushnaq’s nena and dedo, came in fairly significant numbers.
Back, though, to the poster.
If one pauses the video, one notices Hebrew writing on it. Its creator was a well-known Jewish graphic designer named Franz Kraus (1905-1998). He was born in Austria but fled the Nazis and immigrated to British Mandated Palestine in the early 1930s.
The poster on Ms. Bushnaq’s wall is his most famous piece of art. It was produced in 1936, and Mr. Kraus intended it to promote Jewish resettlement of Eretz Yisrael.
And so, its appearance in the video stands as a rather striking contradiction to the Nakba narrative being pushed by the mayor. Yes, the image expressed a wistful longing for an ancestral homeland—but that of Jews for the Jewish one.
So, while Mr. Mamdani likely didn’t mean to publicize a call to Jews to make aliyah—after all, he believes that a state that self-identifies as Jewish has no right to exist (unlike the eight countries that are officially Islamic, and a slew of others that are de facto so)—his video, at least for a few seconds, featured a call to Jews to return to Eretz Yisrael.
In another, unrelated, recent development, it was reported that the father of New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who has regularly criticized Israel and recently accused it of sanctioning the torture of Arab prisoners, served during World War II in the Romanian Nazi-allied army.
Ah, the ironies and revelations that come into view upon close inspection.
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