Ben Cohen
JNS, May 20, 2022
“While the resolution doesn’t explicitly demonize Zionism as a form of racism, as the United Nations expressly did in 1975, that is the conclusion its authors would like you to reach.”
It is the sort of resolution one would expect to be tabled before the U.N. General Assembly or even Iran’s parliament, the Majlis, but not the U.S. Congress.
Last week, a group of left-wing Democratic legislators led by Rep. Rashida Tlaib and backed by her House colleagues Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Cori Bush (D-Mo.), Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.), Betty McCollum (D-Minn.) and Marie Newman (D-Ill.), presented a resolution on the subject of the nakba—an Arabic word meaning “disaster” or “catastrophe” that Palestinians use as shorthand when talking about the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. In keeping with the language and themes that feature in the U.N.’s ritual denunciations of Israel, the resolution portrays the Jewish state as an incorrigible colonizer. “[T]he Nakba refers not only to a historical event but to an ongoing process of Israel’s expropriation of Palestinian land and its dispossession of the Palestinian people that continues to this day,” the resolution argues.
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