Why is AOC honoring an Israeli war criminal?
Ali Abunimah Lobby Watch 25 September 2020
Men walk and talk
Israeli defense minister Yitzhak Rabin, left, and army chief Lt. General Dan
Shomron tour the occupied West Bank's Jalazone refugee camp on 19 January
1988. Palestinians threw stones at Rabin from behind a building. Anat
GivonAP Photo
This article has been updated since publication.
Update, 26 September: AOC withdraws
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has reportedly withdrawn from the
Americans for Peace Now event honoring Yitzhak Rabin, a perpetrator of
atrocities and war crimes against Palestinians.
The Times of Israel said early Saturday that the decision, "which came after
backlash from pro-Palestinian activists, was confirmed to The Times of
Israel by a spokeswoman for the congresswoman."
Al Jazeera also reported Friday it had received a "brief email" from the
congresswoman's spokesperson confirming her withdrawal.
Even after her withdrawal was originally reported Friday afternoon, the
Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that "the decision was not yet final"
amid last ditch efforts to save her participation.
However, the later reports seem to suggest such efforts failed.
Earlier on Friday, Ocasio-Cortez had tweeted that "this event and my
involvement was presented to my team differently from how it's now being
promoted."
"Taking a look into this now," she added.
That prompted Israel's Haaretz newspaper to report that Ocasio-Cortez was
"reconsidering her scheduled participation" after a "backlash from
pro-Palestinian activists.""
The report cited many tweets criticizing Ocasio-Cortez, including this one,
from this writer a day earlier when her participation in the Rabin memorial
was announced:
Though her spokespersons have confirmed her withdrawal to media, as of
Saturday morning, Ocasio-Cortez had not tweeted about her withdrawal and her
name remained listed as a speaker on the Americans for Peace Now website.
Original article
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is helping a liberal Zionist group
whitewash a war criminal responsible for atrocities against Palestinians.
Next month the progressive standard-bearer will be speaking at an Americans
for Peace Now event commemorating the 25th anniversary of the assassination
of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
"Rabin's legacy inspires us all," Americans for Peace Now stated in their
announcement of the event.
The lobby group urged people to register to hear Ocasio-Cortez "reflect on
fulfilling the courageous Israeli leader's mission for peace and justice
today in the US and Israel."
The only feeling this pack of lies should inspire is disgust, especially at
Ocasio-Cortez's willing participation.
Ever since his assassination by an Israeli Jewish extremist there has been
an effort by liberal Zionists to paint Rabin as a martyr for peace.
For Palestinians, Rabin can only be remembered for his personal role in the
1948 Lydda Death March, and for ordering Israeli soldiers to brutalize and
kill Palestinians protesting the Israeli occupation during the first
intifada of the late 1980s and early 1990s.
The enduring myth of the "peace process" is that Rabin's assassination
derailed the 1993 Oslo accords and led to the current impasse.
Yet the notion that had Rabin lived he would have pursued a "mission for
peace and justice" is grotesque revisionism.
Rabin's crimes spanned the period from the Nakba - the ethnic cleansing of
Palestine - to his death.
It suffices to mention only a few of Rabin's more notorious crimes to
demonstrate how outrageous it is for anyone purporting to be a champion of
the downtrodden and marginalized to glorify him.
Death March
During the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine that began in 1947, some
800,000 Palestinians fled or were deliberately expelled from their homes by
Zionist militias. They were never allowed to return home because they are
not Jewish.
Rabin played a key part in these crimes.
He personally signed off on Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion's order to expel
some 70,000 Palestinians from the cities of Lydda and nearby Ramle in what
is now central Israel.
Rabin issued a written order to the Yiftach Brigade, a Zionist militia: "The
inhabitants of Lydda must be expelled quickly, without regard to age."
As Rabin's thugs worked to carry out that order, Palestinian civilians took
refuge in Lydda's Dahmash mosque, where Zionists massacred some 120 people.
In 2013, Yerachmiel Kahanovich, a fighter in the Palmach Zionist militia,
described to an Israeli interviewer some of what he and his comrades
perpetrated.
"Sometimes we had to shoot one or two, and then the rest got the message and
left on their own," Kahanovich said.
"You need to understand: if you didn't destroy the Arab's home, he will
always want to come back," he added. "When there is no home, no village,
there is nowhere to return."
They didn't stop at that.
"I don't like to remember this so much," Kahanovich said. "We shot shells
into a mosque where many people were hiding."
The dead were "all scattered on the walls," he recalled. Asked how many,
Kahanovich replied, "I don't know. Many. I didn't count. I opened the door,
saw what I saw, and closed it."
The Israeli organization Zochrot has collected more harrowing testimonies of
the crimes committed in Lydda, both from perpetrators and survivors.
Audeh Rantisi was 11 years old when Israeli soldiers ordered his family out
of their home in Lydda on 13 July 1948.
He described the terror people felt as they began streaming toward the
mountains, not knowing that they were leaving their homes forever.
"By this time the number of people had grown and panic began to set in," he
wrote in 2000. "Word had spread about the mosque."
He recalled how in the summer heat, "Women in black abbahs and heavily
embroidered Palestinian dresses hysterically clutched their infants as they
stumbled forward to avoid the expected spray of machine gun fire."
Over three days without food, water and in the heat, many would die, until
finally trucks came to transport the survivors to Ramallah.
"Our death march was over," Rantisi wrote. "Our life as refugees had begun."
That is Yitzhak Rabin's legacy.
Breaking bones
Two decades after the Lydda Death March, in June 1967, Israel occupied the
West Bank and Gaza Strip, completing the Zionist takeover of Palestine.
Twenty more years would pass until in December 1987 an unarmed popular
uprising broke out in the West Bank and Gaza against Israel's brutal
military occupation.
As defense minister and effective military dictator over millions of
Palestinians, Rabin embraced his task of crushing the intifada.
He publicly ordered Israel's army to use "force, might and beatings" - as
well as live ammunition that took the lives of young Palestinians almost
daily for years.
This video from Al Jazeera includes one of the most notorious scenes from
the first intifada, broadcast all over the world at the time:
It shows Israeli soldiers methodically beating two Palestinian youths using
rocks, trying to break their bones. The two boys, both 17, were cousins Wael
and Osama Jawdeh.
Recall that this was before cell phones and widespread ownership of video
cameras, so Israel's abuses were even less visible than they are now.
The video caused global outrage - but sadly not enough to bring any real
accountability or pressure on Israel to end the occupation.
Rabin denied accusations that he directly ordered soldiers to break bones
and Israel's parliament declined to investigate him.
Despite this, damning evidence emerged about how Rabin and his senior
officers ordered extreme violence.
As The New York Times reported in 1990, Israeli army Lieutenant Eldad
Ben-Moshe testified that his commander Colonel Yehuda Meir told him to
"break the arms and legs" of Palestinians "because the detention camps are
full."
Another officer, identified as Lieutenant Colonel Zvi, testified that Rabin
himself "told me to lash into them forcefully and beat them" without
restraint in 1988.
Myth of a peacemaker
The myth that is supposed to redeem Rabin is that he became - albeit
reluctantly - a "peacemaker" whose courage would one day lead to the
creation of a Palestinian state.
But this too is a lie.
More than a year after the White House lawn handshake when the Oslo accords
were signed in 1993, Rabin still staunchly opposed a Palestinian state.
A few years ago, Israeli media revealed that in December 1994, Rabin's
bureau issued a formal letter stating that "The prime minister is of the
opinion that there is no room for a Palestinian state."
However, his position was always clear to anyone paying attention.
The most that Rabin ever thought Palestinians would get from Oslo was a
"state-minus," according to Shlomo Ben-Ami, a former Israeli negotiator and
foreign minister.
"This was Rabin's expression," Ben-Ami told Democracy Now in 2006.
"He never thought this will end in a full-fledged Palestinian state."
Ben-Ami conceded that the Oslo accords had always been an "exercise in
make-believe."
Those who still lionize Rabin as a "peacemaker" perpetuate that fiction
today.
Rabin was not assassinated because he embraced peace, nor for being too
forthcoming to Palestinians. He was assassinated for not being
anti-Palestinian enough.
In his life, Rabin never expressed regret for his crimes, let alone faced
justice.
At the very least, we must ensure that his record is not whitewashed and the
lives of his victims are not devalued and erased.
For Ocasio-Cortez to participate in an event honoring a monstrous war
criminal shows utter contempt for Palestinians and deserves the strongest
condemnation.
