The U.S. House of Representatives said Tuesday it believes Israel is neither a racist nor an apartheid state and that the United States will always be a staunch partner of the country, and it went so far as to reject antisemitism and xenophobia.
A resolution stating those precepts was unsurprisingly and overwhelmingly adopted on a bipartisan basis on a 412 to 9 vote that had more to do with the partisan jockeying for position than any actual concern over Israel.
On the House floor, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), who was one of the nine votes, all from Democrats, against the resolution and the only Palestinian American in Congress, called it an effort at “policing the words of women of color.”
Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, is set to speak Wednesday before a joint session of Congress, and his invitation to speak set off a chain of events that led both parties to accuse the other of being soft on antisemitism ahead of the speech.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and a prominent Israel critic, kicked things off Saturday when, as part of remarks at the progressive Netroots Nation conference decrying the deterioration in Israeli-Palestinian relations recently, she said that Israel was “a racist state.”
That drew condemnation from both fellow Democrats as well as Republicans. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) told reporters Monday Jayapal’s comments were only the latest in a series of anti-Semitic remarks by members of the party.
“There are a number of them over there,” he said. “I think this is a role for [House Democratic Leader] Hakeem [Jeffries], the leader, to prove that, no, they’re not antisemitic and they cannot allow their members to continue to say what they have said in the past.”
Jayapal recanted her statement Sunday, but Democratic leaders put out their own statement in support of Israel, and 43 of Jayapal’s Democratic colleagues issued their own separate statement distancing themselves from Jayapal’s original remark.
And in an irony that could only happen in Washington, House Republicans left themselves open to charges of antisemitism with the disclosure that a high-profile witness for a hearing Thursday, presidential candidate and noted anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., had made antisemitic remarks at a New York City dinner recently.
Kennedy told other dinner guests in a video posted by the New York Post that he believed COVID-19 had been “ethnically targeted” to affect some populations, such as white people and African Americans, but not others, such as Ashkenazi Jews and people of Chinese descent.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee said Kennedy’s remarks “perpetuated harmful and debunked stereotypes.”
McCarthy said again Monday that he disagreed with “everything he says” but also said Kennedy’s remarks should not affect whether he testifies at the Thursday hearing.
“The hearing that we have this week is about censorship. I don’t think [censoring] somebody is actually the answer here,” he said.
“I think if you’re going to look at censorship in America, your first action to [censor] him probably plays into some of the problems that we have.”
And though the resolution may have passed overwhelmingly, as expected, the fight over the optics isn’t done yet.
Asked Friday about a group of Democrats who planned to skip Herzog’s speech and whether he believed merely not attending was antisemitic, McCarthy answered simply, “Yes.”