I want everyone to know that we will keep fighting.
—Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN)
It was mid-April, and spring had finally arrived in Washington. A pink curtain of cherry blossoms drooped over a group of lawmakers and religious leaders who had gathered for a press conference outside the Capitol to announce a bill to undo President Trump’s ban on travelers from some Muslim-majority countries. Standing a bit to the side was Ilhan Omar, one of just three Muslims in the House. For weeks, she had been at the center of the earliest and what would become one of the most lingering conflicts among Democrats, underscoring the complexity of a truly diverse Congress.
Khizr Khan, a Pakistani immigrant whose son had been killed in the Iraq War and who had been attacked by then-candidate Trump after the Democratic National Convention, spoke first. Khan had become a fixture in the Muslim rights world, and he seemed to wear his son’s loss freshly every time I saw him, a man less animated by his fights, as some of the women in Congress clearly were, than burdened by them. Hunched over and soft of voice, he introduced Congresswoman Omar, calling her “my dear sister.”
Omar stepped to the mic, wiping a tear from her eyes as she recalled her campaign promise to fight the travel ban. “When I was twelve years old, I myself came here as a refugee,” she said, referring to the four years she spent in a refugee camp in Kenya after escaping civil war in her birthplace of Somalia. Describing the current ban, Omar choked up. “It’s meant mothers cannot be at the bedside of their dying children,” she said, alluding to a woman who had been unable to travel to see her gravely ill child in her last days.
Over the last several weeks, the freshman lawmaker from Minneapolis had had altercations with her Democratic colleagues, had been attacked by both anti-Muslim groups and Jewish organizations, and had become the topic of an official legislative rebuke on the House floor for her critiques of Israel and its supporters in the United States. Slight as a doe, with big dark eyes and a lilting voice that somehow evokes melting ice cream, Omar did not fit the image of villain that her detractors made her out to be, and she had done a good job of keeping a poker face in public. Now, among her allies, she allowed a few cracks to show in her usual steely composure.
“I want everyone to know that we will keep fighting,” she said before turning from the mic and hugging Rashida Tlaib, the only other Muslim congresswoman.
Minutes later, a group of Republican members of Congress gathered on the steps of the Capitol to denounce the “socialist” Democrats now in charge of the House.
One Capitol, two very different realities: Omar’s foreign policy views, shaped by her experiences both as a refugee and a Muslim, had been an object of fascination and controversy before she even got to Congress, particularly her views on Israel. Over the last decade of the strongly conservative Likud Party government’s control of Israel, a chasm has opened up among American Jews over continued US support for its historically unassailable ally. Many more liberal Jews, especially college students, have been feeling increasingly squeamish about the Jewish state after decades of that government’s harsh treatment of Palestinians, the growing influence of powerful if very small ultrareligious groups on Israeli society, and the seeming futility of generations of peace processes in the region.
It did not help matters that Donald Trump had formed such a public, unctuous bond with Israel’s right-wing prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who had been doing his level best for years to link the Likud with the Republican Party of the United States, even as American Jews remain by and large doggedly Democratic. The bond would culminate in the prime minister’s barring of both Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib from a visit to Israel in August, a move so ostentatiously political that even a number of Republicans denounced it.
Omar came to Congress determined to bring a Shirley Chisholm–style folding chair to the table on this topic. During her House campaign, a Twitter post of hers from November 2012, when she was still a nutrition outreach coordinator with the Minnesota Department of Education resurfaced: “Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel. #Gaza #Palestine #Israel.” That angered Jews in her home state and beyond, who saw in that tweet coded anti-Semitic language dating back to the death of Jesus. Omar alternated between defensive and apologetic, the beginning of her struggle to convincingly explain the difference between her foreign policy criticisms and standard anti-Semitic tropes, of which she often claimed to be ignorant.
“I don’t know how my comments would be offensive to Jewish Americans,” she told CNN. “My comments precisely are addressing what was happening during the Gaza War, and I’m clearly speaking about the way the Israeli regime was conducting itself in that war.”
Later, in a tweet, she sought to clarify her remarks: “It’s now apparent to me that I spent lots of energy putting my 2012 tweet in context and little energy in disavowing the anti-semitic trope I unknowingly used, which is unfortunate and offensive,” she wrote. “With that said, it is important to distinguish between criticizing a military action by a government and attacking a particular people of faith. I will not shy away from criticism of any government when I see injustice—whether it be Saudi Arabia, Somalia, even our own government!” She added, “What is important to me is that people recognize that there’s a difference between criticizing a military action by a government that has exercised really oppressive policies and being offensive or attacky to particular people of faith.”
Omar’s stated position on the conflict is in many ways in line with the mainstream—she supports a two-state solution, two sovereign nations, one Jewish, one Palestinian, side by side, which happens to be the official position of the US government. But she had also been open about her support for the BDS movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel to pressure it to improve treatment of Palestinians. This movement, for the most part, had been confined to college campuses, but Democratic leaders feared it would wash up on the shores of a political party increasingly reliant on minority and immigrant votes. The Democratic Party may have been trying to up diversity in its ranks, but was it actually ready for a new dynamic around policies so long rooted in assumptions and traditions on the Hill? Omar’s views on Israel would be an early test.
Ilhan Omar’s journey to Congress was as unlikely as it was remarkable. Born in 1982 to a well-off family in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, the youngest of seven siblings, her mother would die when she was two years old, and she and her siblings would be raised by her father and grandfather. Like many families, hers was caught in the cross fire of the Somali civil war, and when she was eight years old, they were forced to flee. The family spent four years in the Utanga refugee camp in Kenya, an isolated outpost where she and her siblings had no access to education.
In a 2017 speech at the United Way of Central Iowa’s Refugee Summit, Omar described the refugee camp as “very segregated from other people.” She said, “There were no schools, sanitation systems, or running water. To fetch water, we had to go to the next city over, carrying our buckets, every day. Because I was the youngest in the family, fetching water became my job. I would walk through the woods, carrying the buckets, and walk back with them full. On the way, I would often see the children from the city. I would watch them play and go to school, wearing their cute little school uniforms, and I would wonder why I could no longer do that. When I asked my father, he said that one day, one day, we would move to America and that everything would change. We would have access to everything that was available to Americans: free education, economic security—a normal life. America was a land of abundance, where everyone had these things, and my father dreamed that one day we would be in America.”
Omar now often speaks of her high expectations for life in the United States, and of her gratitude that the country took in her family. “No one loves this country more than I do,” I have often heard her say. She believes in the principle of free speech, and this is why, she says, she feels an obligation to criticize.
In 1995, the family was indeed granted refugee status in the United States, and two years later settled in Minneapolis, in a neighborhood full of other Somali refugees. After learning English, Omar came to feel like both a permanent outsider at school—she says she was often picked on by her American classmates—and an assimilator. While in high school, she worked as an interpreter at the local Democratic caucuses. She then attended North Dakota State University in Fargo, where she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in political science and international studies, and where her interests in community organizing and politics grew.
Her first job, starting in 2006, was as a community nutrition educator with the University of Minnesota. In mid-2012, before she started working for the Minnesota Department of Education, she served as campaign manager for Kari Dziedzic, who was running for state senate. Eventually, Omar decided to give politics a try herself and ran for a spot in the Minnesota legislature in 2016, becoming the first Somali American Muslim legislator in the United States. She was so politically inexperienced that she did not return the congratulatory calls from some members of the state’s congressional delegation; it was because, another House member told me, she had no idea who they were.
Green or not, in 2018 Omar quickly saw an opening to move up when Rep. Keith Ellison decided to leave his US House seat to run for Minnesota attorney general. His announcement came as the state filing deadline approached, and Omar had just three hours to decide whether to declare.
She entered a six-way primary, which included prominent Minnesota politicians. Her campaign mirrored those of many other young Democratic women who won that year, focusing on Medicare for All, increasing the federal minimum wage, and championing a standard progressive agenda. What endeared her to voters, it seems, was her backstory of perseverance against great odds.
Her campaign also had a massive organizing strategy: from the time she announced her candidacy that June until Election Day, her team reached out to more than 330,000 constituents via door knocking, texting, and calling, a textbook contemporary digitally driven campaign. She won the primary handily, and that November, she defeated the sacrificial Republican with 78 percent of the vote, more total votes than any other member in her class.
Omar, in many ways, is the contemporary face of modern female Muslims in the United States. She dresses modestly in stylish suits with large, often candy-colored necklaces, and the aforementioned colorful headscarf for every one of her outfits, including a fetching checkered scarf that she wore for a cameo, along with entertainers Mary J. Blige, Jennifer Lopez, and Ellen DeGeneres, in Maroon 5’s video for its song “Girls Like You.” She began wearing the hijab after the 9/11 attacks, she told me, less for religious reasons and more as a way of declaring her identity in the face of incipient prejudice against Muslims.
When she arrived in Congress, she feared a House ban on hats would prevent her from being able to wear the hijab on the floor, but she said Nancy Pelosi told her this would be “the one thing you will never have to worry about,” and indeed the freshmen soon instituted a change to the rule, to expressly permit head coverings for religious reasons on the House floor for the first time in 181 years.
At the same time, Omar is a fierce advocate for gay rights and other liberal social positions not always associated with Muslims. Likewise, Rashida Tlaib moves comfortably between traditionally religious expressions in Arabic and the salty language of a marine. Most of the country was first introduced to her cursing the day she was sworn in, and the more animated she becomes in conversations, the more cursing she does.
Omar and Tlaib represent the attitudes of many American Muslims, particularly, the younger generation, according to Farhana Khera, the executive director of Muslim Advocates, a legal advocacy group and an ally of the new Muslim women in Congress. “Maybe the word I’m looking for, it’s like ‘rock stars,’ ” Khera told me, “a proxy for the community.” Omar and Tlaib were not the first Muslims to join Congress, but as the first Muslim women, they carry extra burdens: they embody the hopes of other Muslim women seeking to run for office, while engendering suspicion in the broader diaspora, where some male Muslim officials from other countries have raced to criticize them—not to mention bearing all the cultural biases that continue to dominate US politics, in which outspoken women are overwhelmingly scrutinized, especially when they are not white.
Omar’s predecessor in Minnesota’s Fifth District, Keith Ellison, the first Muslim in Congress, had his fair share of controversies; some accused him of a coziness with the leader of the Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan, who is widely viewed by Jews as anti-Semitic, a relationship Ellison always denied.
Rep. André Carson (D-IN), the only male Muslim currently in Congress, hails from a Midwest district not quite as electorally safe as his female colleagues’ districts. Like all other Muslims in Congress, he has faced criticisms, but he told me, “Ilhan and Rashida help provide a voice for the many Muslim Americans who feel underrepresented. I said a decade ago that one day we will see Muslim women in Congress, and they have come as powerful, outspoken women who are criticized for speaking their minds.”
Khera sees it more starkly. “You’ve got a Muslim black refugee, and they’re women, as well,” she said. And so it’s because of that confluence of factors that they’re seen as a threat.”
When Omar arrived in Congress, Pelosi assigned her to the Foreign Affairs Committee, which unnerved some Jewish Democrats who knew of her support for the boycott movement against Israel. The committee’s chair, Rep. Eliot Engel of New York, was about as staunch an ally of Israel as there was in the House, and he made it clear early on he was watching—a member of the old guard representing traditional unconditional support for Israel sending a message to a new member with a different view.
“My colleague from Minnesota recognizes that her 2012 tweet was ‘unfortunate and offensive,’ which I appreciate,” Engel told a Jewish news service shortly after Omar joined his committee. “In the days ahead, I hope to work with her and all members of the Committee to share my views about the importance of the U.S.-Israel relationship and the dangers of anti-Semitism.”
Despite these pressures, Omar’s early days in the House seemed joy-infused in large part thanks to her female colleagues. As a mother of three children ranging in age from seven to sixteen, she asked her fellow representatives for advice on how to be a good congresswoman mom. Rep. Grace Meng (D-NY), from Queens, said she would have her own children answer Omar; Meng’s kids told her to make ample use of FaceTime to ask her kids lots of questions about what was going on back home. Omar was thrilled with all her new colleagues and their shared commitment to supporting one another rather than engaging in the rivalries that have often befallen women in politics. “Having more women in Congress matters,” she said, “because we are more skilled at building relationships and nurturing them.”
Those first weeks, her office buzzed with merriment. Omar smiled and laughed at every reception and press conference I saw her at, clearly enjoying the spotlight. She seemed to take in stride the more ominous attention she and other freshman women were receiving from Republican men, who went out of their way to find fault with them. When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez cast her vote for Nancy Pelosi on the day the new House voted for Speaker, loud boos had risen from the Republican side of the aisle. “They are jealous,” Omar told me, which may be the case, since many of those members had never before tasted the bitter brine of being in the House minority. “They wish they could be us.”
Early on, House leaders warned members not to write their own tweets, which seemed quaint at best and anathema to some of the younger members who had spent their entire campaigns reaching out to voters on social media. AOC even gave some of her befuddled colleagues an official Twitter tutorial. That platform would soon set Omar greatly off course on the one issue for which she was already under the microscope: the United States’ relationship to Israel.
The hypocrisy of attacking Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib for their remarks about Israel was not lost on many in the House, especially members of the Congressional Black Caucus who had watched for years as some Republicans had made offensive statements. Rep. Steve King, a Republican from Iowa, made repeated racist and anti-Semitic remarks with little to no censure from his colleagues. In October 2018, then–house majority leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) accused Jewish billionaires George Soros, Tom Steyer, and Michael Bloomberg of trying to buy the election, a freighted charge in an era of rising anti-Semitism. Another Republican, Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona, falsely suggested that the August 2017 white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, had been secretly funded by Soros. In January 2018, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) invited the notorious far-right internet troll and accused Holocaust denier Chuck Johnson to be his guest at Trump’s first State of the Union. Not a word of admonishment came from the Republican leaders. Only in January 2019, after Steve King gave an interview to the New York Times in which he asked when the term “white supremacist” had become negative, did Republicans finally move to strip him of his committee assignments.
That action, belated as it was, paved the way for them to create a wedge issue out of the Israel question for Democrats. One weekend in February, the journalist Glenn Greenwald made the point on Twitter, arguing that there was nothing wrong with criticizing a foreign government. Omar replied in full public view, “It’s all about the Benjamins baby,” adding a music emoji to show she was referring to a popular rap song. In context, she seemed to be alluding to the influence of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a nonprofit organization whose members donate heavily to pro-Israel lawmakers.
The backlash was almost instant. Centrist Democratic congressman Max Rose quickly rebuked her, pointing out that her language played off the long-standing trope that Jews seduce and control politicians with money. “Congresswoman Omar’s statements are deeply hurtful to Jews, including myself,” he tweeted. Criticism from other Jewish Democrats, and Republicans, was unrelenting.
Although she and her staff would often point out that she grew up among refugees and lacks awareness of anti-Semitic buzzwords, Omar quickly understood that she had made a grievous error. That evening, Josh Gottheimer, a moderate, called Pelosi to complain. He and other Jewish Democrats felt Omar had crossed a bright line. What were the House leaders going to do?
Seeking to avoid the horde of reporters who had gathered outside her office, Omar and her staff had retreated to her apartment near the Hill. The freshman congresswoman still seemed baffled. Her communications director, Jeremy Slevin, a young progressive who had grown up in a large Jewish family, quietly detailed to his boss his own father’s upbringing in New York City, where non-Jewish classmates often hurled pennies at him, and the anti-Semitic bullying around money and its symbols that had followed him into college. Slevin suggested she apologize.
While this conversation was occurring, Pelosi had conferred with the rest of the leadership slate. She called Omar to tell her that she had been hearing from unhappy colleagues and that Omar was going to be the subject of a joint statement from leaders condemning her words.
Omar said she understood, but she was blindsided by the language of the statement, she later told aides, which was more pointed than she had expected: “Congresswoman Omar’s use of anti-Semitic tropes and prejudicial accusations about Israel’s supporters is deeply offensive.”
She responded with a tweet: “Anti-Semitism is real and I am grateful for Jewish allies and colleagues who are educating me on the painful history of anti-Semitic tropes. My intention is never to offend my constituents or Jewish Americans as a whole. . . . I unequivocally apologize.”
But, she added, she still believed the American Israel Public Affairs Committee had too much influence in Washington. “At the same time, I reaffirm the problematic role of lobbyists in our politics, whether it be AIPAC, the NRA or the fossil fuel industry,” the tweet said.
As the reporters continued their vigil outside Omar’s office, Max Rose stomped over to find her himself. She wasn’t there, so he spoke to them instead. The fireplug congressman, a military veteran who often speaks with the edge of a New Yorker who has just been cut in line at Starbucks, admonished the reporters for failing to take on what he viewed as anti-Semitic remarks previously made by the former majority leader. “Their caucus stayed united and had his back, and none of you called him out on that,” he growled. “That caucus can’t be chickenshit in face of anti-Semitism either.”
While some Democratic members also put out their own statements critical of Omar, others held their fire. “The smart operatives see that is where the energy is,” one aide to a prominent member of Congress told me, referring to the base that is quick to defend Omar, Ocasio-Cortez, and others from attacks. “The new identity stuff is really important. I worry less these days about people thinking my boss is too nice to pharma than that he is a white dude tsk-tsking a young woman of color from Minnesota with an incredible story.”
Republicans had the precise opposite view. Any chance to seize on anti-Semitism, both to distract from the alt-right followers of Trump who continued to help fuel his base and to force Democrats to have to answer to critics on the issue was a boon. So Republican leaders once again turned to a “motion to recommit,” and moved to attach an amendment condemning anti-Semitism to the bill to end military assistance for the war in Yemen, a bill that Omar had been championing since she got to Congress.
Tlaib, Pressley, and Ocasio-Cortez looked stricken as the text of this amendment was read and fellow Democrat Eliot Engel announced that he supported it; once again, a debate over an issue close to their hearts had been enveloped in controversy. The measure was insidious in its blandness, because it made it hard to vote against; everyone in the House voted yes, including Omar. Then, Republicans voted against the underlying Yemen withdrawal bill anyway. Another day in Congress.
Later that week, on Valentine’s Day, I stopped by Omar’s office. The phones were ringing incessantly, while a Minnesota water group and civil servant advocates clustered in separate meetings in corners of the tiny office. It felt chaotic and cramped.
The young aide answering the phone was trying to nibble at her chocolate-covered doughnut, but the calls would not stop. “Okay, I will pass on the message,” she said repeatedly.
“She never used the word ‘Jewish,’ ” she told another caller, looking forlornly at her doughnut.
In the meantime, Omar and Tlaib faced continual threats to their safety. In Minnesota that March, a gas station restroom was festooned with graffiti: Assassinate Ilhan Omar. Later that month, at a celebration for the West Virginia Republican Party, someone hung a poster linking Omar to the 9/11 terror attacks, depicting her under a photo of the burning Twin Towers and the words “never forget” - you said... ‘i am the proof - you have forgotten.
That same racial and religious animus continued to marinate, and play out publicly, in the minds of the president and his on-air Fox News supporters. At one point, talk show host Tucker Carlson sniffed, “Our country rescued Ilhan Omar from the single worst place on earth. We didn’t do it to get rich; in fact, it cost us money. We did it because we are kind people. How did Omar respond to the remarkable gift we gave her? She scolded us and called us names; she showered us with contempt.”
The Muslim Advocates group had been monitoring far-right buzzwords and codes for years. “It’s the exact same messaging we’ve seen for well over a decade,” Farhana Khera told me. “It’s always about American Muslim values being inconsistent with American values, that we’re going to bring Sharia law, that we’re a threat. And then there’s sometimes other submessages about we don’t treat our women well, which they don’t use as much with Rashida and Ilhan because they are actually exactly counter to the stereotype.”
Khera explained that this messaging is now “currency,” used by local communities to reject refugees and to inflame racism on a national level, as the president has been doing. “I would say it’s probably more clear today than ever before,” she said. “I think it’s not just anti-Muslim, but people who are deeply threatened by nonwhites slowly gaining traction and power.” But, she added, whether this was evidence of an ugly last gasp en route to a more just, diverse, liberal order remained unclear.
After the outreach Omar made to Jewish colleagues and the blows she had absorbed, she seemed to have gotten through the anti-Semitism crisis. But then in March, she delivered a message that tried the patience of even some of her most loyal advocates. Speaking at a progressive town hall meeting at Busboys and Poets, a famous Washington hangout, Omar spoke extensively about her life in Congress as a religious minority and her desire to advocate for the Palestinian people. “What people are afraid of is not that there are two Muslims in Congress,” she said. “What people are afraid of is that there are two Muslims in Congress that have their eyes wide open, that have their feet to the ground, that know what they’re talking about, that are fearless, and that understand that they have the same election certificate that everyone in Congress does.”
But the one sentence that caught fire was this one: “I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is okay for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country. And I want to ask, why is it okay for me to talk about the influence of the NRA, of fossil fuel industries, or Big Pharma, and not talk about a powerful lobby that is influencing policy?”
It was the single word allegiance that once again strayed into dangerous historical language against Jews, who had long been accused of being more faithful to their own people and to Israel than to the United States, a dual-loyalty trope that goes back centuries.
Again, Omar claimed ignorance, but her claims began to strain credulity with some of her colleagues. “I am getting really frustrated with Ilhan,” one House member with a background in national security, where the remark hit especially hard, told me. Jewish members of the Department of Defense, the CIA, and other agencies were always careful, for instance, to meet with Israeli officials with a translator in the room, lest the dual loyalty accusation ever surface.
Rashida Tlaib had also come under fire for previous remarks about Israel, and she took heat for association with some activists who were linked to anti-Semitic groups. But by and large, Tlaib’s peers tend to view her differently. The daughter of Palestinian immigrants from the Detroit area, she is first and foremost an advocate for Palestinians. Her district is home to one of the largest Arab American communities in the country. When she arrived at her new office on Capitol Hill with her parents, they peered at the map of the world hanging in the outer room and put a Post-it note on Israel. “We should change that to Palestine,” her father said.
In meetings with her colleagues, Tlaib spoke movingly of her grandmother, who was still in the West Bank, and of the harassment of Arab Americans, including her parents in Detroit by the FBI and protesters after 9/11.
During a short speech on the floor against a bipartisan measure to condemn boycotts of Israel, she said: “I stand before you as the daughter of Palestinian immigrants, parents who experienced being stripped of their human rights, the right to freedom of travel, equal treatment. So I can’t stand by and watch this attack on our freedom of speech and the right to boycott the racist policies of the government and the state of Israel.” The speech got far less criticism or attention than Omar’s previous remarks, perhaps because members were focused on Israel’s current government.
Several Jewish members in the freshman class told me they found Tlaib’s narrative compelling and educational, and had the sense that she was learning from them as well, while they found Omar at best indifferent.
In addition, Tlaib’s activism around Palestine was often subordinate to many other areas of public policy that had dominated her years as a street fighter, from civil rights to environmental justice to corporate malfeasance to the high rates of auto insurance in Michigan, one of her pet issues in Congress. From day one, she was one of the loudest voices in favor of the president’s impeachment: at orientation, she gave each of her fellow freshman a copy of The Constitution Demands It: The Case for the Impeachment of Donald Trump, by Ron Fein, John Bonifaz, and Ben Clements, as a welcome gift.
“Rashida has always been Rashida,” Debbie Dingell, who has known Tlaib since she was a young activist lawyer, told me. “I’m not going to speak for her. But I’m not sure this experience is what she thought it would be. I mean, people come here to make a difference. We each come here and we have issues that we care about, that we’re passionate about, that we want to fix, we want to change. We have visions, and then suddenly you’re in this pack of people.” But at least with her old friend, Dingell noted, what you see is what you get. “Rashida will say to me, ‘What did I do now?’ She and I talk honestly if I think, you know, if she’s done something or something bothers me. But we also support each other. I would rather have a Rashida, who will never lie to me. A lot of these people will lie to your face.”
While Omar moves through the public sphere seemingly indifferent to the strife, Tlaib radiates more self-doubt. And Dingell was right that Tlaib was experiencing some disillusionment. “It’s love-hate, I guess,” Tlaib said when I asked for her feelings about her new job. “One of my more senior colleagues sat next to me the other day, and he said, ‘How do you like it, kid?’ And I said, ‘Do you ever feel there is a lack of urgency here?’ and he said, ‘That’s how I felt my first term.’ Then he stared out and said, ‘I wonder if this place just beats it out of you.’ Well, I hope it doesn’t.”
These differences—in personality, in framing—help to explain why Omar, more than Tlaib, found herself at the center of the Israel debate. If she had focused her criticism specifically on Benjamin Netanyahu, or on the hard-right drift of AIPAC in recent years, or that group’s fealty to Trump despite his failure to criticize his anti-Semitic followers, Omar might have pushed the policy conversation in a direction already taken by a growing group of liberal American Jews and found her natural allies in the Jewish community. But her language continued to create the impression that her beef was not with Israel, but with Jews, and so she would continue to be a complicated figure.
Members of Congress and the Washington Jewish establishment with whom I spoke wanted to take her at her word about her ignorance of the tropes. At the same time, anti-Semitic sentiments are prevalent in her birth country of Somalia, a deeply conservative Muslim nation, and those sentiments ferment in refugee camps. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a human rights activist and a research fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution, recalled her childhood in Somalia as steeped in disdain for Jews. “I never heard the term ‘anti-Semitism’ until I moved to the Netherlands in my 20s,” she wrote in the Wall Street Journal. “But I had firsthand familiarity with its Muslim variety. As a child in Somalia, I was a passive consumer of anti-Semitism. Things would break, conflicts would arise, shortages would occur—and adults would blame it all on the Jews.” She added, “We were taught to pray: ‘Dear God, please destroy the Jews, the Zionists, the state of Israel.’ ”
Omar bristles at the notion that people from Muslim countries would have any particular biases against Jews, but the issue is likely steeped in the language norms of a culture, just as many Americans grew up hearing expressions like “Indian giver” but failed to consider its true impact until adulthood. She knew few Jews growing up in the land of the “frozen chosen,” a term used locally to describe Jewish Minnesotans, who played a large role in welcoming Somali refugees, in much the way the Scandinavians welcomed the Jews a generation ago. But her views on Israeli and US foreign policy, she said, were clearly informed by her background as a refugee: “Clearly I am bringing a different perspective that not many of our colleagues share. There is an opportunity to understand these issues from a personal perspective at the most intense time of our nation’s history. We’re having an intensive conversation about who should be at the table. I’m quite okay with it. At the moment, what is important is being focused on shifting the narrative.”
Indeed, given that she came from one of the world’s most insular and conservative places to emerge as a symbol of American progressivism, her transition was fated to have its bumps. At the end of the day, to admire Omar is to live in conflict with her casual dismissal of Jewish concerns.
With Omar’s “allegiance” remarks, Pelosi was once again under pressure, and she decided that the House would need an official resolution condemning anti-Semitism. That decision, which on the surface seemed targeted at a single member over a narrow if explosive issue, untapped a simmering anger of another sort among the sizable group of black Democrats. They had been listening to offensive racist language from Trump and his allies for the better part of two years, and had watched as a series of black youths were shot by the police, as white Americans targeted black neighbors with nuisance calls to the police, and worse. Where was the resolution for them?
The majority of House members did not even know the motion was coming until they showed up for a weekly meeting, which instantly turned tense. Rep. Cedric Richmond (D-LA), a former chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, angrily asked why no resolutions had been offered by Democrats in previous years to condemn instances of racism. Richmond, a former Morehouse College baseball player, cuts an impressive figure, charming and assertive. Since joining the House, he has singlehandedly ensured the rout of Republicans by Democrats at the annual congressional baseball game. One of his best friends is the far-right congressman from his home state of Louisiana, Rep. Steve Scalise. Richmond’s authority matters, and so he spoke for many of his colleagues when he demanded, “I want to know what the bar is.”
The House floor on swearing-in day had been a visual tale of two parties, and one that Democrats had enjoyed highlighting. White men in navy suits had populated the Republican side of the room, while the Democrats’ side was resplendent with women and people of color in a fashion rainbow, joyous in the growth in diversity that had been the cornerstone goal of the party’s base. But months later, the Democratic leaders still didn’t seem to grasp that many of their members had not come to Washington to convene under the old rules; they had come to adjust them. Jahana Hayes said the tensions surrounding the anti-Semitism resolution “brought to the surface uncomfortable conversations that people were not prepared to have.”
There was more. Hayes told Pelosi she had not liked learning about the resolution via cable news. “It was the same thing when the Mueller report came out. I had people calling my office, and I had heard nothing,” she said. “The question was, How are we communicating in an inclusive way?”
Other freshmen shared this view: they wanted to know what the Democratic leadership was up to, and they wanted it communicated in a more professional and regular manner. Pelosi expressed annoyance with Hayes’s bluntness, but the freshman congresswoman was undaunted. “When Cedric said, ‘Is there a hierarchy of hate?’ the room went silent,” Hayes told me. “I’ve heard questions like that in my community over and over. And nobody really answered that. The room went silent.”
America’s affluent Jews may be mostly Democratic and liberal, but they are a tiny voting bloc. Left unsaid was the obvious fact: Democratic leaders did not want to offend Jewish donors, or, worse yet, see them drift to the Republicans. Privately, black members complained that the largely white leaders came to them when they needed votes but had failed to be fierce advocates for the issues that people of color cared about most deeply.
In June, Lauren Underwood would be greeted at a parade near her hometown with a Nazi salute from a local Republican volunteer. The incident was met with silence once again, I noted, from both sides.
“What was a surprise to me is how consumed Congress had become about a colleague,” Rashida Tlaib told me, referring to Ilhan Omar. “Newer members of all different backgrounds were all taken aback by [her] approach, even if they disagreed or were even pained by her statements. But, I have to tell you, I was in the Michigan statehouse for six years. One of my colleagues asked for my birth certificate in committee, and no one called him out. In another incident, he vilified Latino immigrants. Still, they never went that far,” she said. “The policing of words from women of color seems to be stronger here. We do feel we are silenced and hushed sometimes, in the terminology we use, and the fact that we are much more direct. Our lens is different. If we are going to be diverse, we need to say we are diverse in opinions, too.”
Just as women remain a minority on the Hill, so do black Americans and other people of color. While 2018 greatly broadened their ranks, the disparity remains striking; the majority of black people you will see on any given day are serving food in the many dining halls around the Capitol, and much of the place is filled with affluent white people who are dislocated from much of black America.
“As a black person in this business, you live this weird existence of being in this supposedly prestigious circle, and then going home and opening up the paper and reading a story about a fifteen-year-old who has been killed in Southeast who looks just like you,” Michael Hardaway, a chief aide to Rep. Hakeem Jeffries and one of the Capitol’s few black senior staff members, told me. “Black staffers here try to build a bridge through mentorship programs and other things, but it too often feels like there’s a moat between that existence and ours. But it’s on us to close that gap. We have to do better. And we will.”
After extensive back-and-forth, the resolution, once clearly directed at Omar, was enhanced to condemn virtually every form of prejudice, making it both more palatable and yet more meaningless with regard to its original intent. Rather than unifying the body, it only exposed new rifts. Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) outfoxed the now–minority leader Kevin McCarthy, who saw the resolution as a political victory, when she voted against it, saying it should have been focused on Jews alone. Most everyone else simply voted for it with the wish to move on to actual bills. This was one of the myriad pointless exercises of Congress, designed as a balm to hurt feelings that only resulted in creating more of them.
Back in Minneapolis, where Omar is a bit of a folk hero among her supporters, she moves about cheerfully, seemingly unbowed by the controversies. At one point during that first year, I trailed her as she visited health-care clinics and employment centers and met with a group of local Muslim women from around the state, many of whom fretted about her life back in the Capitol. Omar assured them that she was just fine. “My message to you is, I’ve got this,” she said.
While the issue quieted in Congress for the rest of 2019, it was notable that three Democrats—Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Pete Buttigieg—all said during their presidential primary runs that they were open to curbing US security assistance to Israel if it does not stop building settlements in the West Bank. Omar may have not moved her colleagues on the Hill much, but she was on the vanguard of a broader, significant trend.
That May, the Muslim Advocates group hosted an unusual event at the Capitol: an iftar, a sunset dinner celebration to break the daily fast during the Muslim holiday of Ramadan. The event was cohosted by André Carson, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib. The guests came from a broad cross-section of Washington’s progressive community: Khizr Khan, once again; leaders from Bend the Arc, a progressive Jewish advocacy group; a few women wearing T-shirts for Code Pink, a far-left activist group; Muslim professionals, in everything from fully covered hair to short skirts to business suits.
A set of prayer rugs had been laid out, and each table was covered with medjool dates, with which to break the fast. Tlaib and Omar were clearly the stars of the show, but other freshman congresswomen were there, too. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spoke, with Ayanna Pressley and Jahana Hayes sitting near the front of the room as well.
Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD), among the Democratic House leadership there, gave a somewhat cringe-inducing speech about how people should not be prejudiced, which, given that it was an event held by Muslims, the audience already knew. Then Omar spoke, calling herself and Tlaib “the two loudest Muslim women in the country” and gave an impassioned defense of her own patriotism, formed, she said, through her journey as a refugee. “I love this country more than anyone could ever love this country.”
Hayes sat along the side of the room, nodding along with some of the remarks. “I’ve never been to an iftar,” she told me on the way out. “In the short time I’ve been here, I have made it a priority to learn about Muslim and Jewish traditions.”
It had taken the addition of two Muslim women to Congress to make an iftar celebration on Capitol Hill actually happen, and not just happen: it had become the cool kids’ table.
Two months later, in mid-July, President Trump, increasingly agitated by the criticism of his administration’s detention centers at the border, began the day by pounding out a series of incendiary tweets against the Squad, culminating in his now-infamous words: “Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how it is done. These places need your help badly, you can’t leave fast enough. I’m sure that Nancy Pelosi would be very happy to quickly work out free travel arrangements!”
The tweets were as inaccurate as they were demagogic. Three of the four Squad members were born in the United States, and one represented a section of Trump’s home borough of Queens. Even some Republican lawmakers, usually loath to challenge Trump, denounced his comments as racist claptrap. “There is no excuse for the president’s spiteful comments—they were absolutely unacceptable and this needs to stop,” tweeted Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK). “We have enough challenges addressing the humanitarian crises both at our borders and around the world. Instead of digging deeper into the mud with personal, vindictive insults—we must demand a higher standard of decorum and decency.”
The day after Trump’s tweetstorm, the freshman congresswomen piled onto a dais in a freezing studio in the Capitol where Pelosi usually holds her weekly press conference to face a room packed with reporters eager to hear their response. As usual, Ayanna Pressley stole the show, suggesting that members of the Squad were not interlopers or even a squad, but rather the voice of all Americans who were fed up with Trump’s policies, rhetoric, and tweets, and any other drops of misery he seemed intent on raining down on the discourse of American life. “Despite the occupant of the White House’s attempts to marginalize us and to silence us, please know that we are more than four people,” Pressley said. “We ran on a mandate to advocate for and to represent those ignored left out and left behind. Our squad includes any person committed to building a more equitable and just world. And that is the work that we want to get back to. And given the size of this squad, and this great nation, we cannot, we will not be silenced.”