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THREAD: Cleaning Up Rashia Tlaib’s Messy and Warped History in Eight Points cc: @RashidaTlaib @Ilhan @TheDemocrats 
1) Jews were building a state in British-Mandate Palestine well before Hitler came to power and before the Holocaust began (remember the Balfour Declaration in 1917?). The state would have come into being regardless. The Holocaust only reinforced its necessity.
2) Everyone from the “Arab street” to Arab leadership was antagonistic to Jewish presence as was evident in the Hebron massacre of Jews in 1929 and the many that followed in the 30s and 40s.
3) And everyone knows the Mufti conspired with Hitler specifically to neutralize the “threat” Jews (their shared “problem”) had already posed towards the creation of a Jewish state.
4) There never was a “welcome mat” in British Mandate Palestine: not from the British, and certainly not from the Arabs who had fought so hard by lobbying London for the White Paper which put an end to Jewish migration (see the famous Exodus ship filled with Holocaust survivors)
5) There was no “wiping out of Palestinians” -they were mostly displaced not murdered. There were particularly difficult battles, but the Jewish state existed de facto before it was announced and largely consisted of lands legally owned by Jews dating way back in the Ottoman era
Coexistence was still an option and something the Zionists were fighting for, but the Arabs chose war.
6) Had the Arabs accepted partition, there would have been no war, and no refugees or displacements. When war was waged by the Arabs and they were displaced, it was largely because they were told to leave by their own leaders and generals.
Why? Well, when more than five Arab armies converged on the nascent state to “annihilate it,” (their words) you can imagine how confident they were that they’d rid themselves of those pesky Jews in a matter of days and weeks.
7) It’s only when they lost that their defeat and displacement became a naqba, a catastrophe. To this day, by their leadership’s own words, the greater catastrophe wasn't the many Arab refugees bc of war, but that they didn’t succeed in pushing the Jews into the sea.
8) Rashida also conveniently left out that just as many, if not more, Jewish refugees were expelled and forced from their homes throughout Arab lands from Tunisia to Iraq, Lebanon to Yemen;
Within a decade of the Arab’s failed “war of annihilation” & the resulting shame, more than 90% of their Jewish populations were gone. Only difference is that those Jewish refugees didn’t hold onto refugee status unlike the Palestinians who maintain refugee status generationally
This is the history that Rashida has attempted to twist into a narrative that literally flips every well documented fact on its head. To allow it to stand is to be willfully blind and ignorant; it’s to sell one’s soul to the devil of intellectual corruption. We cannot allow it!
