An unconfirmed report by Kweansmom on the Elder of Ziyon blog last Tuesday claimed that anti-Israel activist Linda Sarsour enjoyed an unannounced and unpublicized vacation in Haifa over the summer.

Though Sarsour did not announce her visit on her social media accounts, she did make a reference on August 10 on her Facebook newsfeed to her daughters returning from “Palestine,” where they visited with relatives. Another photo on her Facebook feed showed her posing in front of a graffiti of George Floyd on the security wall outside Bethlehem.

Kweansmom wrote that “according to publicly available social media posts from others in her touring group, Linda Sarsour walked along Rehov Yefe Nof (literally, the Street with the Beautiful View) from where she could view the Haifa Bay and almost all of Haifa itself. The view includes the spectacular Bahai Gardens and the spiritual center of the Bahai faith.”

Kweansmom also posted a screenshot from an Instagram video of a woman in a hijab that may have been Sarsour enjoying a boat tour near the port of Acre.

Though Sarsour claims to be Palestinian, she was, in fact, born in Brooklyn, New York. Her husband (by arranged marriage) and her parents’ family are from Al Bireh, located about nine miles north of Jerusalem. 

Sarsour was an activist for the presidential campaign of Barack Obama in 2012 and the presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders in 2016.  She is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. She was also an activist for the Black Lives Matter movement. Sarsour led the 2019 Women’s March on Washington but stepped down due to allegations of antisemitism. 

She strongly advocates the Boycott Divestment Sanctions (BDS) movement. 

In a 2017 speech before the Islamic Society of North America, she called for “jihad” (holy war) against President Trump. She defended her statement, claiming that “jihad” does not inherently refer to violent action, a patently false claim. 

Sarsour has a creative perception of modern Israeli history. In one tweet, she claims, “My grandmother was born in 1927 and was 21 years old when the #Nakba happened. She witnessed the horror & displacement of Palestinians.”

The Nakba (literally, ‘the catastrophe) is how Palestinians refer to Israel successfully repelling Arab attacks in 1948. But Al Bireh, the town where her grandmother lived, was conquered by Jordan in 1948 and illegally occupied by Jordan until 1967. The Israeli “nakba” Sarsour referred to never happened.

In another tweet, Sarsour wrote, “My grandma was born in the 1930s before the creation of the State of Israel. She knows a time when Jews and Palestinians lived in peace.”

Before the creation of the state of Israel, Jews and Arabs did not, in fact, live in peace. Arab hostility towards Jews was ever-present, culminating in the 1929 riots targeting Jewish communities all over the holy land. 

After 1948, Jews were expelled from all Muslim and Arab countries, including the Jordanian-controlled regions of Judea and Samaria. So her grandparents never met any Jews until the Jordanian occupation ended in 1967.