Nan Hayworth is my congressperson. She’s a Republican but it’s a swing district, she took it from a Democrat a year ago. Where is she? Israel. I’m betting this email went out to Jewish constituents. [Update below] It’s not on her website, or online. And it’s relentless. She lays it on so thick.
Notice that she visits the “City of David” in occupied East Jerusalem and approves the Jewish claims to the place. Notice that there is not a word about Palestinian human rights or the right not to live under occupation. Notice the complete conflation of Judaism and Israel: Jewish faith built Israel. Notice her reverence for Netanyahu, and her undergraduate-like fear of misquoting him. Notice the conflation of Hezbollah and Hamas and the Nazis. Notice the visit to Yad Vashem.
And notice her defensive line about American spending for Israel when things are so tight back home. Hayworth:
Friday, August 19, 2011
As I write from Tiberias on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, I am on the sixth day of an intense and profoundly moving tour of Israel sponsored by the American Israel Education Foundation [an arm of AIPAC]. I have stood mere yards from the security fence that separates the families of Kibbutz Misgav Am from the terrorists of Hizballah and I have walked on 2000-year-old pavingstones next to the ancient Temple in Jerusalem.
The compression of space and time here between the inland mountains and the Mediterranean shore is palpable. It is completely different from the existential frame to which I as an American am accustomed, and it is essential to understanding the importance of Israel to us and to the world.
The modern State of Israel is the result of love, faith, and determination. American patriotism reflects the boundless possibility and opportunity of a young, expansive, and resource-rich nation; Israelis’ love of their country reflects an ancestral bond to this small and specific place that spans millennia.
The Jewish faith is the reason Israel exists, and Jewish laws and principles and tradition have guided this state’s development as a thriving democracy that welcomes citizens of all faiths. It is cruelly ironic that these same tenets also increase the danger that these citizens face as a condition of their daily lives. That is one of the truths that one learns vividly by coming to Israel. If you stand at the border of Israel in Kibbutz Misgav Am and look to the north, you will see Lebanese towns arrayed on the adjacent mountainside. They are not bristling visibly with armaments, but they have been the origination point of deadly fire within the past year and a half, including earlier this month. It turns out that–as has been the case in countless other communities that are near neighbors to the Jewish State to which they are taught to be hostile–the weapons have been deposited in quantity next to the most innocent of places: a school, a hospital, a mosque. Why? Because Hizbollah knows that the Israeli armed forces will not rain fire upon innocent people, even though Hizbollah and Hamas have no such compunctions.
Talk, as I did this past Tuesday morning, with Chen Abrahams of Kibbutz Kfar Aza, in the south of Israel, and you will hear that this warm and soft-spoken young woman and her family live every day–no, every minute of every day, and night too–poised to run for shelter when the alarms sound in response to incoming fire from Gaza. When that sound pierces the air they have 15 seconds. 15 seconds, that’s all, to find protection….
The United Nations houses security forces in the towns at the border between Lebanon and Kibbutz Misgav Am. These forces that were told exactly where to find Hizbollah’s guns and remove them without incurring unnecessary casualties. The weapons have not been removed. It is painfully obvious to say it: this is not security. This is not enough. Daily life in Israel proceeds regardless, because there is no alternative, and because the people of Israel rejoice in–and complain about, including the high price of life and taxes for the middle class–the same spectrum of things that we do as Americans, perhaps not surprisingly.
There is a deep affinity, a connection, between them and us, that transcends time and distance. It is eminently worth protecting. It is essential that we protect it, because to fail to do so would be a capitulation to evil, a negation of what we cherish most deeply as Americans: the freedom to live as men and women of conscience, respecting the right of others to do the same. …
Prime Minister Netanyahu, commenting on the existential threats that face Israel, emphasized that when we consider our contemporary adversaries, we must, in essence–and this is my own paraphrasing here–suspend our disbelief that men responsible for the lives of millions of their own fellow citizens will act out of madness and not out of rationality. This may be the hardest thing for Americans to accept, that we are fighting madness, because it makes the course forward harder–more painful, possibly–to envision. But we have done it before. After our visit with Chen Abrahams on Tuesday morning, we went to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. Yad Vashem bears excruciating witness to what Iran’s leaders deny; it names the victims one by one. Their lives have meaning because we remember them. And we remember them because, in World War II, Americans joined with other people of conscience to fight and win a titanic battle against madness. We won because we were willing to use overwhelming force, and because we put our nation’s best minds and bravest hearts to work to serve the good of all people.
…Yesterday we learned about a new defensive weapons system developed jointly by the United States and Israel: Iron Dome. It detects incoming rockets and detonates them in the air, which sounds much simpler than the actual technological and logistical challenge—imagine hitting a bullet with another bullet in midair. Iron Dome is high-tech and, by the standards of most weapons systems, low-cost. It can certainly be said that the cost of deployment of an Iron Dome unit is far lower in dollars than the cost of the damage from a terrorist rocket. The savings in lives is, of course, incalculable. Iron Dome is an example of how smart technology can help us to defeat evil without bloodshed. We need to do a lot more of this in a lot of places in the world, and we can, but if we’re going to afford it we need to manage our American resources better.
That’s what I’m working on every day in this Congress. Israel lives because its people are determined to remember and to honor and to carry on. Israel is important to us as Americans because the Israeli people are our true brothers and sisters in profound and countless ways. Israel’s security is crucial to American security, and America’s continued support is critical to Israel’s protection. As an American and as a Member of the United States Congress, I will do all I can to ensure that Israel remains a free and sovereign Jewish state, bound together with us by history and philosophy and faith. Sincerely, Nan Hayworth
Update: I think my assertion that Jewish constituents got this email is wrong. Writes my correspondent who got the email from Hayworth:
I received it because I had put my name on her district email list. Her postings have typically consisted of announcements about her various media appearances, a bit about her efforts to “protect” healthcare (against “Obamacare”), and now this Israel visit piece. I found it provocative in the worst sense of the term– identifying her religious motivations, her characterization of Palestinians as “madmen”, her ignorance of any sophisticated or nuanced sense of the history of this conflict, and on and on.
