Twitter’s new fact checking system hit back at Rep. Rashida Tlaib after she falsely labeled Israel an “apartheid state.”
“Speaker McCarthy wants to rewrite history but the apartheid state of Israel was born out of violence and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians,” Tlaib tweeted on Monday. “75 years later, the Nakba continues to this day.”
Tlaib’s tweet in response to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s post noting the “special relationship” between Israel and the U.S., was the subject of an instant fact check by Twitter, with notes below the post pointing out several errors.
The fact check first points out that Israel was created by United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181, linking to the document at the U.N.’s official website. It then points out that the “ethnic cleansing” Tlaib claimed happened “affected both Jewish and Arab communities caught up in the war initiated by 5 Arab states who opposed the existence of Israel.” To bolster the second point, the Twitter fact check linked to the State Department’s official history of the Arab-Israeli War of 1948.
The last note pointed out that Israel has over 20% Arab citizens which have “full and equal rights,” linking to a Democracy Institute study that found the country’s Arab residents had declining rates of infant mortality and rising life expectancies.
“You’re a bit off on this congresswoman,” former U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman wrote in a response on Twitter. “Actually, the State of Israel was born notwithstanding the unsuccessful Palestinian attempts at ethnic cleansing to remove the Jews, through acts of terror and collaboration with Hitler (whose dear friend was Grand Mufti of Jerusalem).”