In a Newsweek op-ed this week, Israeli Knesset Member Haneen Zoabi published a series of misleading statements and outright lies about Israel.
From incorrect assertions that Israeli soldiers had murdered a 15 year old girl while she was lying helpless on the ground, to entirely false accusations of “executions,” to a surreal denial that Jews have any history in the Land of Israel: Zoabi’s essay was closer to a fantasy novel than an opinion piece. But for Zoabi, this is just business as usual.
People who don’t know Israel are often surprised to discover that Israel’s population includes 1.7 Million Arabs who are full citizens with full equal rights, and that Arab Israelis make up several political parties and hold 17 seats in the Israeli Knesset: including the seat held by Zoabi herself.
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Yet Haneen Zoabi’s tenure as a member of Knesset has not amounted to much: among her dubious accomplishments, Zoabi sailed on the 2010 “flotilla” attempting to break the Israeli naval blockade of Gaza, which interdicts maritime weapons smuggling to the Strip. Zoabi’s attempt to break such a blockade could be viewed as technical act of war against her own country, also known as treason. At the very least, she directly attempted to place her own fellow citizens in danger.
Zoabi has worked to persuade the international public that Israel is an “apartheid state” despite the irony that she herself is a full citizen and member of Knesset. On the last anniversary of the Holocaust event of Kristallnacht, Zoabi visited Amsterdam where she gave a speech accusing Israel of “ethnic cleansing modeled on Nazism.”
She has also justified the idea of Israeli Arabs joining Islamic State even while she called the IDF “worse than ISIS,” and provocatively met with the families of terrorists who killed Israelis.
Zoabi has supported the Israel-hating author Ben White, defended the inciting Sheikh Raed Salah, and even allied herself with the terror group Hamas. In 2014, Zoabi even wrote an op-ed in a Hamas publication justifying rocket attacks.
The misfortune of Haneen Zoabi is not that she seeks to damage her own country or even that she must lie in to do so. The greater tragedy is that Zoabi squandered her uniquely influential position in the Israeli government to pursue a campaign of defamatory propaganda, instead of working for positive change benefiting the people who elected her.
In short, Zoabi abandoned her Arab Israeli constituents for provocative grandstanding and, this week, for the fleeting spotlight of a Newsweek op-ed.
Featured image CC BY Circuito Fora do Eixo; Zoabi via SocialTV;
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