ifNotNow, an anti-Israel group that is backed by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, is trying to divert a delegation of freshmen members of Congress from their scheduled tour of pre-1967 Israel. The group that is simultaneously campaigning to get all 2020 Democratic candidates to agree to their position vis-a-vis the Israeli-Arab conflict now wants members of Congress currently in Israel to Hebron to meet a guy named Issa Amro, a “human rights defender from the occupied city of Hebron on the West Bank”.
In their Facebook post, Amro can be seen in the Jewish neighborhood of Beit Hadassah Hebron where he explains that he is “partnering with ifNotNow to kick off the alternative itinerary for first-year members of Congress.”
Amro goes on to decry a “tour sponsored by AIPAC” claiming that it does not show the “occupation” and that it is a “distorted view of the situation that will whitewash and excuse the occupation”.
Amro offers an “alternative digital tour” whereby he invites the members of Congress to “meet people who will describe in courage, the human rights catastrophe over here in Palestine.”
He goes onto explain that Hebron is a “microcosm of the occupation”.
Ironically, just as Amro points to the street he was standing on calling it “segregated streets” while two Jewish Israelis walk by him.
He then falsely claims that Palestinians “to the left are Palestinians under Israeli military law and Israeli settlers to the right are under the Israeli civilian law”. It should be noted that Israelis in Hebron also fall under the jurisdiction of the Israeli military.
Amro then gets vague claiming that “forty-thousand incidents happened here over the last twenty-two years” however he doesn’t explain the nature of those incidents.
He then goes on to claim that the Arabs in Hebron are “always” harassed and “violently attacked” by the “settlers”. He then advises the members of Congress to “skip the trip” with AIPAC.
At that point, Israelis began surrounding him and dancing drowning out the rest of his diatribe.
Hebron spokesman Yishai Fleisher responded to Amro’s claims of apartheid saying: “He is the one not telling the whole story. We Jews live in 3% of the city. 80% of the city never even sees an Israeli soldier. 90% is completely Jew-free.
Oddly, Fleisher agrees with ifNotNow that “congress is not seeing the full picture and should visit Hebron where they can see a city with so much Jewish history and how that very history is being erased” by Jihadi propagandists like Amro and Foreign-funded agents from ifNotNow.
Freshmen congresswomen Rashida Tlaib (D, MI) and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D, NY) announced that they will be not be attending prompting a campaign by anti-Israel group Code Pink to encourage other members of Congress to follow in their lead with the hashtag ‘#skipthetrip’. Breaking Israel News reported last week that AOC thinks that Arabs riot in Israel due to lack of clean water.
AIPAC was not available for comment.
