Last week, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan) announced that she intended to hold a “Nakba” event on Wednesday in the Congress Visitors Center whose event space can only be reserved by a sitting member of Congress. The event would have included anti-Israel groups, some of which have defended terrorism.
Nakba, Arabic for ‘catastrophe’, is the antisemitic term used to describe the failure of five Arab nations to annihilate the newly established Jewish state in 1948, just a few years after the failed Nazi attempt at genocide in the Holocaust.
Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy stepped in, reserving the space himself and hosting a celebration to mark 75 years of US-Israel ties.
But US Sen. Bernie Sanders (Independent-Vermont) countered McCarthy’s actions, allowing her to hold the event in the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions hearing room. Sanders chairs the committee, giving him that privilege whereas McCarthy does not have the ability to block the event.
“We have a right to tell our stories of the Nakba of 1948… because the Nakba never ended,” Tlaib said. “No child should ever have to worry what will fall from the sky,” she added, describing the actions of the Israeli security establishment as a “sustained campaign of terror.”
Coincidentally, while the Nakba event was being held, 500 rockets were fired at Israel from Gaza.
Tlaib posted photos of the event on her Twitter feed, writing, “Let the headlines read “McCarthy tries to erase Palestine but fails.”
Amichai Chikli, Israel’s Diaspora Affairs Minister, responded to Tlaib with a post featuring a photo of Haj al Amin Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem before World War II and the founder of Palestinian nationalism.
Since you insist, let’s remember together the founding father of the Palestinian national movement, the mufti Amin al-Husseini. A mass murderer and the architecture of the “Nakba”. pic.twitter.com/gjTQBKHgZa
— עמיחי שיקלי – Amichai Chikli (@AmichaiChikli) May 11, 2023
In the photo posted by Chikli, Husseini is reviewing Arab troops that had volunteered as soldiers in the Nazi army.
Al-Husseini visited Hitler in Germany during the war and may have visited Auschwitz at the height of its operation, requesting that Hitler complete the genocide of the Jews in order to prevent them from moving to Israel. He also advocated for the Germans to establish death camps in Palestine.
It is also well-documented that Husseini requested and received from Hitler a promise not to permit Jews fleeing Europe to arrive in Palestine, a plan that was being initiated by the English and American governments. This undoubtedly led to many Jews being unable to flee and dying in Nazi death camps.
Chikli made several posts detailing the alliance between the Nazis and the Palestinians, ending with the statement, “…Happily this army established by an ally of the Nazis was destroyed but its sick ideology is still with us.”
The exchange affirmed Godwin’s law of Nazi analogies, an Internet adage asserting that as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison to Nazis or Adolf Hitler approaches 100%.
