Blood Libel: Anti-Israel Mouthpiece Repeats ‘Ethnic Cleansing’ Lie

Rashida Tlaib has promoted antisemitic blood libels on multiple occasions, recently repeating a lie about “ethnic cleansing” in August.

By United with Israel Staff

Persistent accusations of Jew-hatred have dogged the political career of Michigan congresswoman, Rashida Tlaib, not least of all due to her insistence on spreading lies about the Jewish state.

Tlaib’s falsehoods include promoting antisemitic blood libels, including parroting the false claim that Israel commits “ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians.

Most recently, she repeated the “ethnic cleansing” lie on on August 22 when she lambasted U.S. President Joe Biden for not condemning Israel’s crackdown on Palestinian organizations that serve as fronts for terror groups.

This is a popular theme among Israel-haters, who ignore actual population statistics and claim that Israel is committing “genocide” against Palestinians. In reality, the Palestine Central Bureau of Statistics itself reported that in 2020 it counted 5.1 million Arabs living in Judea, Samaria and Gaza. This figure is almost double what the Palestinians reported in 1997.

Which shows a significant increase in the Palestinian population, the opposite phenomenon of the “ethnic cleansing” libel Tlaib promotes.

After the 1967 Six Day War, there were roughly 600,000 Arabs in Judea and Samaria and 300,000 in the Gaza Strip. That means since 1967 and under so-called Israeli “occupation,” the Palestinian population is indeed almost six times what it was in 1967.

According to Stephen D. Smith, the Finci-Viterbi Executive Director of the USC Shoah Foundation, “The term ‘ethnic cleansing’ is not codified in international law” and has been defined by the United Nations as “a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas.”

“By those definitions,” explained Smith in 2021, “ethnic cleansing is simply not happening in Israel and the West Bank and Gaza. The Israelis are not trying to change the make-up of the population by forcing Palestinians to move. Rather, what is happening between Israel and the Palestinians is a territorial war between elected governing bodies.”

This is hardly the first time Tlaib has pushed blood libels about Israel.

In February 2020, Tlaib falsely accused Israeli Jews of murdering a seven-year-old Arab boy who tragically drowned due to out of control flooding the previous month.

Tlaib spread the lie on Twitter to her close to 900,000 followers, eventually deleting it without ever issuing an apology. In reality, there was not one iota of truth to the tale she disseminated, which bore all the hallmarks of a classic anti-Semitic blood libel.

Blood libels such as the one Tlaib promoted in 2020 remain standard fare among Jew-haters in modern times.