Attacks on Israel that distort the reality of the Jewish state’s past and present in the service of undermining its well-being and its very survival have become ever more widely disseminated in bastions of the Left in America. This is occurring most strikingly in academia, among both students and faculty, but also in prominent mainstream media and even within the Democrat party. At the same time, those Jews who align themselves with the Left often resort to the most contrived of contortions to mitigate the message of such attacks.

A representative example of this phenomenon was recently provided by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA)’s editor-in-chief, Andrew Silow-Carroll. The context was his contribution to the storm of comment in response to Rashida Tlaib’s remarks in a May interview on the podcast Skullduggery. Silow-Carroll’s article was entitled, “What did Rashida Tlaib say about the Holocaust? It’s probably not what you think.” What makes the piece particularly noteworthy is that the JTA is a news service whose stories are picked up by Jewish papers around the world and the rhetoric of its articles, not least that of pieces by its editor-in-chief, is shaped to have a desired impact on the service’s Jewish readership. In Silow-Carroll’s gloss on the Tlaib interview – as in many other articles put out by the JTA having to do with Israel and its critics on the Left – the rhetoric is clearly intended to reassure readers that attacks on Israel from the Left, in this case the Democrat Congresswoman’s statements, were not so problematic and that reactions to the contrary are overwrought.

Tlaib had been asked in the Skullduggery interview about her support for a one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and how she envisioned a single state that would meet both Palestinian and Israeli-Jewish national aspirations. She never answered the question. Instead, she remarked, as transcribed by Silow-Carroll in his piece, “…two weeks ago we celebrated, or took a moment I think in our country to remember, the Holocaust. And there’s a kind of a calming feeling, I always tell folks, when I think of the Holocaust and the tragedy of the Holocaust in the fact that it was my ancestors – Palestinians – who lost their land and some lost their lives, their livelihood, their human dignity, their existence in many ways had been wiped out, and some people’s passports – I mean, just all of it was in the name of trying to create a safe haven for Jews, post-the Holocaust, post-the tragedy and the horrific persecution of Jews across the world at that time. And I love the fact that it was my ancestors that provided that, right? In many ways. But they did it in a way that took their human dignity away, right, and it was forced on them.”

In his column, Silow-Carroll first goes after Republicans who attacked Tlaib for saying she gets a “calming feeling” when she thinks about the genocide. Well, she did say that. But Silow-Carroll insists all she meant was, as she states, “…it was my ancestors… in the name of trying to create a safe haven for Jews… I love the fact that it was my ancestors that provided that…”  Silow-Carroll next goes after those who pointed out that, far from welcoming Jewish refugees during the Nazi era, Palestinian leaders worked against their immigration to British Mandate Palestine and collaborated with the Nazis during the war. (He does note Palestinian collaboration in the war against the Allies; he could also have noted collaboration in the murder of the Jews.) Silow-Carroll particularly cites Benny Morris as erroneously accusing Tlaib of crediting Palestinians with welcoming Jewish refugees. She did say they “provided” the haven but acknowledged “it was forced on them.”