Shortsighted and deeply flawed
The Guardian has more details:
Omar and Tlaib were planning to see the Palestinian cities of Bethlehem, Hebron and Ramallah and to spend time in the disputed city of Jerusalem. They would have had to pass through Israeli security checks to enter both the West Bank and Jerusalem.
Former Israeli diplomats also spoke out against the ban, arguing that the country should instead attempt to show Israeli perspectives during the women’s trip.
Alon Pinkas, formerly Israel’s consul in New York, said the country should “engage Omar and Tlaib, [and] show them where they are wrong or have a partial and skewed perception of reality.”
It could have been a chance to show Omar and Tlaib the point of view of Israelis up close and personal.
Trump, a close ally of Netanyahu, has sought to make political support for the Jewish state – long a consensus foreign policy for both major US parties – into a partisan issue, painting Democrats as anti-Israel. He has claimed, without evidence, that Omar and Tlaib “hate Israel, they hate our own country.”
David Brinn, the managing editor of the rightwing Jerusalem Post, wrote that a ban would be “shortsighted and deeply flawed”. He wrote: “A quashed trip is only going to further deepen the divide between Democrats and Israel – moving moderate Democrats away from a positive view of the country – and raise the spectre that Israel is behaving in something less than a democratic fashion.”
Not really a spectre now, is it.
Putting aside the morality, this just seems dumb. It’s a pretty basic principal of diplomatic relations that you try not to play favorites with political parties in other countries, at least in democracies. Sooner or later, the other party will get into power, and they will remember.
Israel has enjoyed fairly broad bipartisan support in the U.S. That’s probably still secure in the near future, because most current Democrats aren’t going to reverse themselves on a major foreign policy issue. But 20 years from now, when the Democratic politicians in office have grown up watching the government of Israel piss on their party every chance it got?
Don’t be silly, Screechy, since when have Republicans worried about their impact on the future?