I wonder who wrote those for her?
It's a good chance they came from her Jewish Communications Director- Jeremy Slevin.
"A senior D.C. staffer adds: “
There’s no question that there are many Jewish staffers on the Hill that are told one version of history growing up but now have a much more evenhanded analysis of the conflict.” Many peers working in Congress have taken a similar journey.
“Hill staffers are a self-selected collection of politically engaged people,” the aide says. “They want to do good things; they could be making more money elsewhere. It’s a perfect storm of people who will be very self-reflective on this kind of stuff.”
Waxman believes members of this generation are a bit resentful about being raised on mythic images of Israel. “We’ve heard stories of college students with these evolving stances,” he says, “but they’re growing up and entering positions of influence and bringing their critical attitudes toward Israel into their work.”
Jeremy Slevin,
Rep. Ilhan Omar’s communications director, believes he would have experienced such an evolution even if he didn’t work for the Minnesota congresswoman – though her position as one of Israel’s severest critics certainly focused his mind.
Slevin describes “baked-in assumptions about Israel” while growing up in the Washington suburbs. “It’s not like I was being indoctrinated about Israel in Hebrew school, but it was threaded throughout,” he says.
The senior staffer, meanwhile, notes growing up in a liberal environment but still being taught a one-sided view of the conflict: “We would sing ‘Hatikva’ but not really interrogate how Israel came to be, and there was no real mention of Palestinian people at all. They just weren’t part of the narrative.”
There was the time a rabbi described how the Palestinians walked off their land in 1948, not deserving the right of return since they willingly left. “I was 14 at the time and didn’t have a counter-narrative, so I took it at face value,” the staffer recounts.
There really is a change taking place in Jewish diaspora communities, nowhere more advanced than in the United States. The…
www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk
Palestinians didn't "willingly" walk off their land when Israel was created. They were deported...Being anti-Zionist is Political, not racist. Zionism is a POLITICAL IDEOLOGY- it does not equate to BEING JEWISH...
"Slevin notes milestones along the way, especially concerning events such as the rapid expansion of Israel’s West Bank
settlements and
Benjamin Netanyahu’s alignment with then-President
Donald Trump and the far right, as well as the prime minister’s “affirmation of Jewish supremacy,” as Slevin puts it, with the law declaring Israel the
nation-state of the Jewish people.
The staffer adds that Netanyahu “has done tremendous damage. He has made Israel a partisan issue, he cares more about
evangelical Christians than young Jews, and people have noticed.”
Slevin admits he didn’t learn about
the Nakba – when more than 700,000 Arabs fled or were expelled from their homes during the 1947-49 war – until “relatively recently,” crediting his work in Washington and Palestinian voices on social media.
His experience on the Hill let him see how criticism of Israeli policy could be conflated into misguided allegations of
antisemitism. He first worked for Keith Ellison, the first Muslim member of the House. Referring to the liberal pro-Israel group
J Street, he describes Ellison as a “two-stater in the J Street mold.”