A maelstrom around Rashida Tlaib shows how broken discourse about the war has become
Rep. Rashida Tlaib holds a sign that reads “War Criminal” as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks on July 24 in Washington, D.C. Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
Lux Alptraum September 24, 2024
The shocking recent media treatment of Rep. Rashida Tlaib — in the form of a widely condemned comic that ran in the National Review and false accusations that she used antisemitic rhetoric against Michigan’s attorney general — concisely reflects everything that is wrong with our poisonous public discourse around the Israel-Hamas war.
In the months since Hamas terrorists brutally attacked Israel, triggering a war that has left tens of thousands dead and almost the entire infrastructure of Gaza eradicated, the world has seen a massive surge in antisemitism, Islamophobia, and both anti-Israeli and anti-Palestinian bigotry. There has been so much hate casually tossed around that it is difficult to single out any one comment or headline or speech as uniquely horrific.
Well, until now.
In the comic, drawn by Detroit News staffer Henry Payne and published after last week’s pager attack on Hezbollah, Tlaib is depicted sitting at her desk, staring in confusion at a smoking beeper. “Odd, My pager just exploded,” she is shown thinking.
The cartoon manages to be offensive in an outrageous variety of ways. It suggests that Tlaib, whose parents were born in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, is somehow connected to a paramilitary group that operates in Lebanon, a wholly separate country, seemingly only because she is of Arab descent. (On Payne’s website, the comic was titled “Cartoon: Tlaib Pager Hamas,” suggesting that he sees Hamas and Hezbollah as one and the same as well.)
It ignores Tlaib’s extensive history of calling for peace between Israelis and Palestinians in order to suggest that she’s a covert member of a paramilitary organization — which looks a lot like the kind of anti-Arab racism that frames all Muslims and non-Jewish people from the Middle East as terrorists.
Most egregiously, it trivializes an attack that left thousands wounded and at least 12 dead, including two children, as little more than a minor annoyance. The destroyed pager in the cartoon has the appearance of a toaster that’s been left on too long: It issues only a petite puff of smoke, a tiny ring of destruction. It does not appear to be capable of the kind of violence that could kill a 9-year-old by mangling her face.
It would be bad enough if the cartoon were a standalone, just one crank making a cruel, racist joke about one of the first Muslim women to serve in Congress. But it’s not.
Over the weekend, even mainstream outlets began to spread a story that Tlaib had suggested that Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel had only filed charges against pro-Palestinian campus protesters in the state because she is Jewish. There’s just one problem: It’s not true.
What Tlaib actually did was criticize Nessel for filing charges against pro-Palestinian protesters, particularly given that she has not taken similar action against environmental activists and Black Lives Matter protesters, among others. Tlaib did not in fact make mention of Nessel’s religion, only her actions. All she said was that “it seems that the attorney general decided if the issue was Palestine, she was going to treat it differently, and that alone speaks volumes about possible biases within the agency she runs.”
And yet the false story that Tlaib had spotlighted Nessel’s Jewishness was repeated even by respected journalists, including CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash. Yes, even the best journalists make mistakes, and stories get mis-reported. But it’s hard not to feel that because of Tlaib’s race and religion, and because of her willingness to speak out against Israel’s military actions, she has been flattened into a violent, Jew-hating caricature.
In combination, these incidents feel like a culmination of the dehumanization that has run roughshod through discussions of Israel, Palestine, and conflict across the Middle East since Oct. 7. Throughout this devastating conflict, too many people who vigorously support either Israel or Palestine have found that it is easier to justify their allegiance by reducing the “other side” to a grotesque, simplistic caricature.
In this toxic black-and-white framework, Palestinians are not victims of ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and genocide who simply want to safely return to their historic homeland; they are natural-born terrorists whose sole desire is to spill Jewish blood. Israeli Jews are not themselves victims — nor descended from victims — of ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and genocide who sought peace and safety through the creation of a nation in their historic homeland. They are conniving colonizers whose sole desire is to sow terror around the globe.
It should go without saying that none of this rhetoric has moved the conversation forward — just the opposite. It has made us more likely to mistrust one another; more likely to tune each other out; more likely to keep jockeying for the moral high ground when we could be advocating for changes that might lead to a real and lasting peace.
For decades, Israelis and Palestinians have attempted to “defeat” each other. For decades, our two peoples have only wound up further mired in an increasingly brutal war, one that now threatens to engulf an ever-increasing expanse of the Middle East. Continuing to dehumanize one another will not lead to a peaceful end. It will only further entrench both sides in violence and hate.
Payne’s comic has been denounced by a range of Michigan political leaders, including Tlaib herself and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who also refused to condemn Tlaib for her criticisms against Nessel. But responding well to isolated incidents is not enough. We need to understand that these individual controversies aren’t isolated at all, but rather linked to a larger anti-Palestinian narrative — and larger, systemic problems with many conversations about this war.
If we truly want peace, we need to do more than just rebuke the most obvious, most vicious racism. We need to look at the ways that all of us have been responsible for dehumanizing “the other side,” and begin the process of unlearning our ignorance.
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