Now that anti-Semitic Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MN) has purveyed her ridiculous notion that Palestinians provided a “safe haven” for Jews, even a Palestinian scholar admits she’s lying.
Tlaib stated:
There’s always kind of a calming feeling, I tell folks, when I think of the Holocaust, and the tragedy of the Holocaust, and the fact that it was my ancestors — Palestinians — who lost their land and some lost their lives, their livelihood, their human dignity, their existence in many ways, have been wiped out, and some people’s passports. And just all of it was in the name of trying to create a safe haven for Jews, post-the Holocaust, post-the tragedy and the horrific persecution of Jews across the world at that time. And I love the fact that it was my ancestors that provided that, right, in many ways. But they did it in a way that took their human dignity away, and it was forced on them.
Palestinian historian Dr. Adel Manna, a senior research fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, told the leftist Israeli newspaper Haaretz regarding Tlaib’s “safe haven” comment, “I don’t know what she meant,” acknowledging that even prior to the Holocaust, Palestinians actively resisted Jewish immigration. He said, “It was natural that when the Palestinians thought that the danger to their existence was real, they started to resist the Zionist project. From the beginning, it was clear to the Palestinians from the history of other indigenous people that when other colonies come to a country … that they will be marginalized, kicked out or exterminated.”
Haaretz wrote, “ … it was ‘not true’ that Palestinians played any role in creating a ‘safe haven’ for Jews, whose leaders were already planning ‘to occupy their country and transform it into a Jewish state,’ Manna said. Zionist leaders of the time, he added, ‘needed people just as they needed the lands,’ in order to make their ‘settler colonial society strong enough to gain independence and occupy the country.’”
Manna, obviously hostile to Jews, minimized the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin Al Husseini’s collaboration with Hitler, saying Husseini’s support of the Nazis was “unfortunate.”
Manna also took a shot at the United States, suggesting that “as an American [politician] living in the United States, Rashida Tlaib is reminding the Americans that in World War II, when the Jewish needed a country to immigrate to, the U.S. did not open its gates and the Zionist leadership did not help them emigrate to the U.S. — when, after all, the U.S. is much bigger than Palestine. They wanted the Jews to come into Palestine to make Jews a bigger part of the population and transfer it into a Jewish state. So Palestine became the ‘safe haven’ for Jews when America wasn’t.”
Professor Benny Morris, whom Haaretz termed “one of the leading scholars of British Mandatory Palestine, the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 and the War of Independence in 1948-1949,” added of Tlaib, “Rashida Tlaib is either completely ignorant of the history or is a deliberate liar … (Palestinians) did nothing to alleviate the suffering of the Jews at Nazi hands. Rather, the opposite: The Arabs of [British Mandatory] Palestine, during the whole period — and supported by the neighboring Arab states — did all they could to prevent Jews trying to escape Nazi hands from reaching the (relatively safe) shores of Palestine.”