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Rashida Tlaib gave Palestinian Americans a voice. Then came the war. [1]
['Kara Voght']
Date: 2024-01-10
Rashida Tlaib gave Palestinian Americans a voice. Then came the war. As Washington watches Israel execute a punishing campaign in Gaza, the Michigan Democrat confronts the limits of her influence Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.), left, and Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) attend a bipartisan candlelight vigil with members of Congress to commemorate one month since the Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
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On the night that the House of Representatives voted to censure Rashida Tlaib, her friend and fellow Democrat Cori Bush sat beside her on the House floor, fidgeting in her seat. For more than an hour, Bush (Mo.) had listened to colleagues accuse Tlaib of calling for “the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews,” as one said, and the “annihilation of a country and its people,” in the words of another.
“I was so uncomfortable,” Bush recalled in an interview. “No one deserves to be told what they mean.”
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The House had convened that evening, Nov. 7, to punish Tlaib for rhetoric she’d used in response to the Israel-Gaza war — in particular, for a video she had posted to social media that included footage of pro-Palestinian protesters chanting “from the river to the sea,” part of a slogan many supporters of Israel consider to be a call for the eradication of the country. Amid the backlash, Tlaib had tried explaining that the slogan was not about belligerence, but peace. Among Palestinians, she said, the phrase — from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free, in its entirety — refers to the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, home to Israel and the Palestinian territories of Gaza and the West Bank. To Tlaib, it is “an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence, not death, destruction, or hate,” she wrote in another post.
That night, she wore a kaffiyeh draped over her purple blazer and clutched a wood-framed photograph of her 94-year-old grandmother, who lives in a village in the West Bank. When it was her turn to speak, she placed the photo of her sity, beaming under a headscarf, in front of her lectern. It was a visual aid for Tlaib’s broader point — one the congresswoman feared her colleagues had missed in their scramble to condemn her.
“I can’t believe I have to say this, but Palestinian people are not disposable,” she said, her voice breaking. “We are human beings. Just like anyone else.”
Once the votes were tallied — 234 to 188, with 22 Democrats joining Republicans in issuing an official reprimand — Bush said, “Come with me, Rashida.” She whisked Tlaib out of the chamber and down a nearby staircase, where the journalists wouldn’t find her. “She needed to be able to have some time to herself,” Bush said. “I just didn’t even want people stopping her trying to ask, ‘How do you feel?’ and all of that. Because I think about how I would have felt at that moment.”
Skip to end of carousel The Style section Style is where The Washington Post covers happenings on the front lines of culture and what it all means, including the arts, media, social trends, politics and yes, fashion, all told with personality and deep reporting. For more Style stories, click here End of carousel How does it feel to be Tlaib right now? The Michigan Democrat, born in Detroit to Palestinian immigrants, is the only Palestinian American member of a Congress — a body that is, like the rest of the U.S. government, very pro-Israel. That distinction has made Tlaib both a powerful figure and a solitary one. To her, “Palestine isn’t a political issue,” says Abbas Alawieh, a former top aide in Tlaib’s congressional office who was born in Lebanon. “For her, it’s her mother, her grandmother. That personal connection makes it such that Palestinian humanity is not theoretical. It’s part of her own understanding of being a human.” During her five years in Congress, her vocal criticism of Israel has led to accusations of antisemitism by colleagues — accusations that, according to Tlaib and her allies, reflect a misreading of who she is and what she means.
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The experience of having her remarks picked apart, taken out of context and read with suspicion has made Tlaib wary of the press, and she declined to be interviewed for this article. Instead, she agreed to provide written answers to questions, wanting time to reflect and carefully choose her words to make sure they expressed how she truly felt, she said.
“Most of my colleagues have probably never served with a Palestinian or Muslim before,” Tlaib wrote. “Maybe that’s why when I share my experiences as a Muslima in America, as a proud granddaughter of a Palestinian living under apartheid, I can feel their discomfort and even hate. But I always tell my colleagues that my door is always open to them. I am always here to sit down with them and answer their questions and share my lived experiences.”
As the destruction in Gaza continues, the highest-profile Palestinian American in Washington faces an urgent question: What can she possibly do to stop it?
For Tlaib, having a powerful voice is complicated. If people are listening, there’s no guarantee that they will really hear her. At least, not how she wants them to.
“She is the only Palestinian woman in the entire history of the United States to ever serve in this Congress, in either the House or the Senate,” said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), another Tlaib friend, “which means that she is positioned to be fundamentally misunderstood.”
Tlaib’s father was born in Beit Hanina, a neighborhood in East Jerusalem, and her mother grew up in Beit Ur al-Fauqa, a village near Ramallah in the West Bank. By the time Tlaib was born, in 1976, the couple had settled in Detroit, where her father worked on the line at Ford Motors’ Flat Rock Assembly Plant as a member of the United Auto Workers union. “The UAW taught him he deserved human dignity, even though he only had a fourth-grade education‚” she said, tearfully, at a recent event. “Even though he was Palestinian, even though he was Muslim. On that assembly line, he was equal to every single human being.”
But Tlaib got to Washington talking about pollution, not Palestine.
She made her name as a lawyer and community activist, known as a perpetual antagonist of Marathon Petroleum’s facility near where she grew up in southwest Detroit. After six years in the state legislature, Tlaib made history in 2018 by winning the race for Michigan’s 13th district, a swath of Detroit and other nearby cities that, in addition to being some of the most polluted in the country, are also among the poorest.
In a legislative body where much of the heavy lifting is done by lawmakers’ staff, Tlaib gets in the weeds on casework for her “residents” (the term Tlaib prefers over “constituents,” which she finds too formal). Those who have worked with her describe Tlaib as relentless, at times impatient. “Rashida would be like, ‘What are you doing, Get this letter out!’” Alawieh recalls. “She wasn’t as interested in whether or not you had a perfect sentence. ‘You agonizing over this sentence — is that helping my residents or not?’”
Redistricting and House retirements changed the makeup of her residents slightly, so Tlaib chose to run in Michigan’s 12th Congressional District, which includes Dearborn, a city west of Detroit that has one of the biggest Muslim and Arab American community in the country. Even so, her politics remain oriented to the needs of poor people of all kinds, colleagues say. Several of them recall her hounding Democratic leadership about stopping utility companies from shutting off water due to nonpayment during the covid pandemic.
“I was raised to speak out against injustice everywhere,” she wrote to us in December. “I demand always that water is a human right. No one should have their water cut off.”
“It’s happening in the city of Detroit where I live,” Tlaib continued, “and it’s also happening in Gaza.”
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To the extent that she had any policy ideas about Israel and Palestine before coming to Washington, they’d been forged through her experiences visiting family in the West Bank. In interviews over the years, Tlaib has recalled formative brushes with de facto segregation on those trips: the different-colored license plates to distinguish Palestinians from Israelis, or a day at the shore with her headscarf-clad cousins when Israeli swimmers jumped out of the ocean “as if my cousins were diseased,” as she put it in a 2018 interview.
There were anecdotes of peaceful coexistence, too. When she visited her grandmother as a little girl, Tlaib has said, she would play with the children of Israeli settlers, unburdened by the knowledge of generations of conflict. She often talks about her grandfather’s memories of picking olives alongside his Jewish neighbors before the occupation. She saw parallels between the Palestinians living under occupation and Detroiters who fought against racial segregation throughout the 1950s and 1960s.
Her solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict follows the lessons from that example: She says that Israelis and Palestinians should live side-by-side, with equal rights for all, in a single, nondenominational, democratic state, without borders or fences or checkpoints, stretching from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean sea — including the West Bank, Israel and Gaza.
Tlaib’s vision of a single-state idyll is unique on the Hill, however, and her rhetorical style has often put her at odds with other members. She caused offense days into her congressional tenure in January 2019 by claiming in a tweet that pro-Israel lawmakers “forgot what country they represent,” a critique that echoed an antisemitic trope of Jews having dual allegiance to Israel and the United States. That May, Tlaib talked on a podcast about the “calming feeling” she got from the knowledge that her Palestinian ancestors had lost their land to create “a safe haven for Jews” after World War II. Some scholars criticized her characterization of history, while Republican leaders tried to twist the remark as Tlaib saying the Holocaust itself gave her a calming feeling.
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Democrats have defended her against partisan attacks, but she has faced an uphill battle trying to win over her colleagues. In his book “The Squad,” left-leaning journalist Ryan Grim recounts a meeting between Tlaib and Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.), a staunchly pro-Israel Jewish Democrat, a month after her 2019 swearing-in. Gottheimer had called the meeting to discuss why Tlaib’s comments, in particular her January 2019 tweet, had been hurtful. When they met, Tlaib told the story of her grandmother, whose front gate is just a few yards from an Israeli military checkpoint. Gottheimer pulled out a binder full of news clippings with quotes he didn’t like from Tlaib about Israel, some of them quotes from activists that had been misattributed to her.
The exchange had left Tlaib feeling bullied, as if Gottheimer “had the goal of breaking me down,” she later told Grim. (Gottheimer’s office declined to comment on the meeting, but, in a statement at the time, said it was intended as an “open, honest discussion about anti-Semitic comments” and described it as “a mutually productive conversation.” The two have met and spoken regularly in the years since.)
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A month later, in March 2019, roughly a dozen House Democrats, most of them Jewish or Muslim, convened at Rep. Dean Phillips’s (D-Minn.) apartment building to talk through some interfaith tension. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), another newly elected Muslim congresswoman, had recently suggested that Israel-sympathetic lawmakers had “allegiance to a foreign country” and the gathering was meant to clear the air. After nearly two hours of difficult conversations about the lawmakers’ experiences with bigotry, Phillips brought up Omar’s remarks, asking her and the other lawmakers to publicly affirm Israel’s right to exist and protect itself.
Tlaib began to cry and explained, once again, how her grandmother had suffered under Israeli occupation.
Phillips told her about his own grandmothers, who had endured the massacre of Jews during Russian pogroms and the Holocaust.
At the end of it, they embraced, and have since become friends. Phillips told Tlaib he’d like to meet her grandmother someday. “I came to an illumination of how personal it is for Rep. Tlaib,” says Phillips. “Two people from very different life experiences, different states, different roots, can look at the same subject with the same passion and the same integrity, and come to very different conclusions.”
Phillips says he would have voted against censuring Tlaib. “I know her heart,” he says. But he missed the House vote because he’s busy running for president. His campaign against the Biden would be, in theory, a great opportunity to rally Democratic support behind an alternative U.S. policy in Israel. Democratic voters have soured on both Israel’s conduct and U.S. support for it over the last several months, with several polls finding increased sympathy for Palestinians and growing disapproval of Israel’s response to the Oct. 7 attacks.
But while Phillips has called for a permanent cease-fire in Gaza, in the long term he still favors a two-state solution that would grant Israelis and Palestinians land and self-governance, rather than the one-state solution Tlaib favors.
And even if Phillips doesn’t think Tlaib wants the destruction of Israel, he’ll never condone “from the river to the sea” — no matter what he knows about his friend’s heart.
The actual Democratic president doesn’t seem to see a friend in Tlaib.
In 2021, amid another outbreak of violence between Israel and Hamas, Tlaib had the chance to chat with President Biden about the U.S. response for eight minutes on an airport tarmac. But Tlaib found herself on the outs with the White House even before Israel began its assault on Gaza. After the Oct. 7 Hamas offensive, Tlaib put out a statement lamenting “the Palestinian and Israeli lives lost yesterday, today, and every day,” and tracing blame for the bloodshed to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory (an “apartheid system that creates the suffocating, dehumanizing conditions that can lead to resistance”).
“As long as our country provides billions in unconditional funding to support the apartheid government,” her Oct. 8 statement said, “this heartbreaking cycle of violence will continue.”
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre called Tlaib’s words, along with those of other lawmakers calling for a cease-fire, “repugnant” and “disgraceful,” and Tlaib has not spoken directly to Biden since the attack. She was not among the group of Muslim leaders invited to the White House in late October, an attempt to mend relations with Muslim and Arab American communities revolting against the president amid the conflict. (The White House did not respond to a request for comment.) In the meantime, the administration has taken extraordinary measures to arm Israel.
And so the first Palestinian American congresswoman has found herself outside the palace walls, with the rest of the protesters. She’s joined nearly every major pro-Palestinian protest in Washington — including one outside the White House during one of the president’s Hanukkah receptions, where she joined a hundred Jewish activists for a cease-fire vigil to honor Israeli and Palestinian victims, “recognizing the humanity in every person, no matter faith and ethnicity,” as Tlaib told the crowd.
Few days go by without Tlaib tagging the White House’s Instagram handle on the latest nightmare image of death that’s emerged from Gaza. In the same video that prompted her censure in the House, she said: “Joe Biden supported the genocide of the Palestinian people.” In October, she blamed Israel for rockets launched on al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City, even though independent analyses could not prove the source and U.S. intelligence determined with “high confidence” Israel was not responsible for that attack. To many Jews, her assertion was tantamount to “propaganda,” as in the words of Mark Mellman, the president of Democratic Majority for Israel. Tlaib defended her statement by noting that “the Israeli and United States governments have long, documented histories of misleading the public about wars and war crimes.”
In the weeks since Israel’s retaliatory strikes on Gaza began, Tlaib’s staff began receiving phone calls from Muslim and Arab Americans from all over the country. Some were Palestinian Americans trying to evacuate fellow citizens out of Gaza. Others pleaded on behalf of their noncitizen family trapped there — begging for food, water, medicine, or, simply, for the violence to stop. Tlaib said callers reported that the State Department sent them auto-replies, that the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem had abandoned them, that their own members of Congress wouldn’t respond, that they don’t trust the president. So her staff has taken on the workload of helping whoever they can. Tlaib herself has been making calls and sending emails to contacts at the State Department and embassies.
“I feel this overwhelming weight and responsibility to show them that not everyone in our government thinks their family members are disposable,” Tlaib wrote to The Post. “They need to hear me say, ‘Your mother deserves to live. Children in Gaza deserve to grow up. I am so sorry for your loss. Our country should not be funding more weapons to kill more innocent civilians. Our president should be advocating for a lasting ceasefire and helping to stop this madness.’”
As for how it feels to be Tlaib right now — there are only a few public servants who know anything about that.
“My grief and my anger is constantly being nitpicked by everybody,” says Ruwa Romman, who serves in Georgia’s House of Representatives.
“Part of my job is making sure that we save as many Palestinian lives as we can — as they come under really dramatic, vicious, indiscriminate violence,” says Abdelnasser Rashid, a lawmaker in Illinois’ general assembly.
“To some extent, we’re all experiencing what she’s going through,” says Iman Jodeh, who serves in Colorado’s statehouse.
Romman, Rashid and Jodeh are among the few Palestinian American lawmakers serving in statehouses across the country. They get reports of violence in Gaza firsthand but wait for Western media to confirm them, lest they be accused of spreading misinformation. They are avoiding votes that ask them to pledge solidarity with Israel at the expense of Palestinian casualties — “a political ‘gotcha’ game,” as Romman put it, that forces her to stand before her colleagues and ask: “Please don’t make me support the ongoing bombardment and killing of my people.” Some of them have seen their offices become lifelines for Palestinian Americans desperate to help loved ones in Gaza.
Like Tlaib, they are all the first Palestinian Americans to serve in their respective legislatures. And, like Tlaib, they know the challenges of practicing politics in a country that can be hostile to the perspectives of Arab Muslims.
“As a rule for myself, I do not think about changing my communication for those who are insisting on misunderstanding me,” Romman says. “There will be people who, no matter what I say or how I say it, are going to call me a terrorist.”
Tlaib’s tactics — galvanizing grass-roots support, being a vocal critic of the president and her party — make sense to Rashid. “If the body she was working in was more functional, was a truly deliberative legislative body, you could say maybe it’s more wise to focus on educating your colleagues and working behind the scenes and not being so polarizing,” he says, “She’s doing exactly what she needs to be doing.”
Jodeh relates to the desire to bring non-Arab colleagues into the fold — in both a spirit of coalition building, but also of being effective messengers when colleagues might try to dismiss her as being too close to a subject. “It’s a tactic,” Jodeh says of relying on allies. “If there was a certain thing I needed to get across, I would be shown as the Brown emotion girl.”
Bush, who ascended to Congress after gaining prominence as a Black Lives Matter protester, knows how important allyship can be to causes of justice. “What I know from experience: if you’re the one who is most directly impacted, people oftentimes won’t hear you the same,” Bush says.
When she and Tlaib worked together on a resolution calling for a permanent cease-fire, Bush offered herself as the lead sponsor. At the very least, Bush figured it would help draw some heat away from her friend.
“It’s one thing to lead, but it’s another thing to have to be the one to carry it all,” the Missouri congresswoman says. “Why should she be the one to carry it — to try to speak up for her own humanity and the humanity of the people of Gaza?
correction A previous version of this article incorrectly said Rashida Tlaib is the first Palestinian American member of Congress. She is the first Palestinian American woman and the first Palestinian American Democrat, but not the first member. In addition, the article misattributed a statistic about the child death toll in Gaza to the Gaza Health Ministry. According to the Gaza Health Ministry, 70 percent of those killed have been women and children. The article has been corrected.
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