The following article has been published in The Herald Sun by Alex Ryvchin. 

It is difficult not to savour the irony of two United States con­gress­wo­men who advocate boycotts of Israel crying foul at being denied entry into the very country they seek to erase.

Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, two members of the Demo­crat­ic Party’s “Squad” of neophyte con­gress­wo­men from the Party’s radical left faction, have made their names by seeking to collapse decades of bipar­tis­an support for Israel in US politics and using America’s demo­crat­ic ally in the Middle-East as a wedge issue to divide their Party.

Omar, who courted Jewish support during her election campaign by declaring her oppos­i­tion to organised boycotts of Israel, before promptly embracing them upon her election, has bran­dished virtually every antisemitic slur ima­gin­able in her brief political career. She accused Israel of “hyp­not­iz­ing the world” and called on “Allah to awaken the people” to Israel’s evil. She accused American Jews who support the Israel alliance of dual loyalties. She accused American Jews of buying political influence. And she has declared her support for boycotts, divest­ment and sanctions of Israel artists, academics, and busi­nesses, a campaign which in the words of its framers seeks the “complete and total isolation of Israel”, and the end of a Jewish state within any borders what­so­ever.

Her con­gres­sion­al colleague Rashida Tlaib, openly supports a “one-state solution” to the conflict by which the solitary Jewish state is replaced by what would be the 22^nd majority Arab state, and has recently taken to falsi­fy­ing history, claiming that good-hearted, kindly Arab Palestini­ans opened their homes to Jewish inter­lopers fleeing the Holocaust. In fact, the majority of Israelis are from the Middle-East and have no his­tor­ic­al con­nec­tion to Europe. More so, the Palestini­an lead­er­ship sought at every turn, through violence and political man­oeuv­ring, to block entry into the land by fleeing European Jews. Their leader, Haj Amin-Al Husseini was a key Nazi col­lab­or­at­or and recruited Muslims to the Nazi killing squads, and called on them to “kill Jews wherever you find them, this pleases God, history and religion.”

To be sure, the decision to bar entry into Israel to Con­gress­wo­men Omar and Tlaib is a fraught one which will have immense political implic­a­tions for Israel. For decades, the imper­at­ive of American Jewish leaders has been to ensure that support for Israel tran­scends party politics. While some US Pres­id­ents and Con­gresses have been more sym­path­et­ic to Israel than others, baseline support for the peace and security of Israel has been remark­ably resilient, even as politics has generally become more bitter and divided. But the decision of the Israeli Gov­ern­ment, which (although now said to be uncon­nec­ted) followed a Twitter statement from Donald Trump that “it would show great weakness if Israel allowed” the con­gress­wo­men entry, will only serve to rally the Demo­crat­ic Party around the anti-Israel con­gress­wo­men and position them as the popular symbols of oppos­i­tion to Donald Trump. 

Just last month, despite intense lobbying by Omar and Tlaib, the US Congress adopted a res­ol­u­tion by a whopping 398 – 17 that rejected the anti-Israel boycott campaign, affirmed the two-state solution and calling for increased military aid to Israel.

But seeking to travel to Israel was a clever gambit by the con­gress­wo­men, who have carved out a unique ability to at once advance their agenda by using their power as influ­en­tial public figures, while decrying the “privilege” of opposing political forces that sup­posedly keeps them in sub­ser­vi­ence.

A leaked itinerary for the con­gress­wo­men confirmed that they weren’t scheduled to meet with any main­stream Jewish groups or political figures and were being chap­eroned by the NGO Miftah, which has accused Jews of using the blood of Christian children for Passover rituals and regularly praises Palestini­ans who kill Israeli civilians as “martyrs”.

If Israel allowed them entry, the con­gress­wo­men would have without question used the oppor­tun­ity to advance their aim of turning public and political opinion against Israel by embarking on a carefully cho­reo­graphed and live tweeted escapade show­cas­ing the noble Palestini­an struggle against the insa­ti­able blood-lust of Jewish Israelis.

But by refusing entry, Israel inev­it­ably opens itself up to criticism of being, at best, glass-jawed, and at worst, non-demo­crat­ic. The former is a judgement call, but the latter is a spurious claim, given that countries routinely bar entry on character grounds, even to elected politi­cians of friendly countries (Dutch MP Geert Wilders was initially denied entry to Britain in 2009). Only in the case of Israel does this lead to the country’s demo­crat­ic character being called into question. 

The claim appears more dubious still when it is advanced by those who support the Palestini­an national movement, the lead­er­ship of which is split between the wholly corrupt Fatah, whose President Mahmoud Abbas is currently lux­uri­at­ing in the four­teenth year of a four-year term, and the Islamist Hamas, which regularly takes to tethering political opponents, suspected homo­sexu­als and trade unionists to the backs of motor­cycles and dragging them through the streets of Gaza.

The long-term implic­a­tions of the Israeli Government’s decision on public opinion in the United States and Demo­crat­ic Party support remains to be seen, though the alliance has spanned seven decades and has withstood far greater chal­lenges than this. But with both a pro-Israel US President and the anti-Israel con­gress­wo­men cynically using the Jewish State in their campaigns to divide and conquer, it is difficult to envisage a scenario in which this latest skirmish ends well for Israel and those who support it.

Alex Ryvchin is the co-Chief Executive of the Executive Council of Aus­trali­an Jewry. His new book is “Zionism – The Concise History”.