I Came Here to Humiliate America, Not to Praise It
He went to the US Congress to prolong Israel’s war on Gaza; to get the green light for a new one against Hezbollah in Lebanon. He went to ensure the flow of weapons; to show the folks back home how he “maneuvers” America; to wade into its politics yet again, rub President Biden’s nose in it along the way, and get away with it. He went there for all these reasons.
Speculation swirled around Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s record fourth speech before Congress. Understandable! The curious timing of the invitation, the sharp divides in both American and Israeli politics, the shape of the war in Israel-Palestine, the look of it in the Levant, the look of Israel in the world, could only encourage this kind of guessing game.
Except that Bibi didn’t really have to make that appearance for any of the offered reasons. His alliance with the US remains very strong; he has his genocidal war on Gaza; the weapons have been flooding in; his bond with the Republican Party is as tight as ever, many in the Democratic Party are just as close; and he has been provoking sham fights and insulting Biden every other week without consequence.
So why this speech?
Because on October 7, the fabulous world of tall tales and myths that Israel had spent decades spinning was in tatters and threads, some ripped by the Hamas attacks on that day, most by Israel’s ensuing slaughter in the Gaza Strip.
Before the October assault, it appeared all but certain that Israel would be able to slowly snuff out the life of 5.5 million Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem without any tangible costs. It would still be able to boast a vibrant economy, claim robust democratic credentials, expand its network of international friends, peddle its perceived military might, maintain its people’s sense of invulnerability, and wield regional sway in a finally welcoming Arab world.
It’s not that the forever caged Palestinians of Gaza and their perennially hounded kin of East Jerusalem and the West Bank were not seen by the world, but that they didn’t really count. Their circumstances could be explained away by Israel and then promptly discounted and contained.
In a very short but hellish period of ten months, all pretty much fell apart. Every day we are being treated to all manner of horrors being unleashed on Palestinians, young and old, babies and toddlers, men and women, journalists and humanitarian aid workers, fire fighters and ambulance drivers, nurses and doctors…
Violence so deliberately extreme and boundless in Gaza that it had the International Court of Justice declare it plausibly genocidal. An Israeli occupation in East Jerusalem and the West Bank so searing in its racism, so rapacious in its thefts, so cruel in its structural segregations that it had the ICJ recently brand it as apartheid.
All this as the International Criminal Court prepares to seek arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes.
As Netanyahu stood on that congressional podium, this was the backdrop. Against it, Netanyahu wanted to demonstrate that this post-October 7 Israel, for all its naked ugliness, had actually lost nothing to the fictitious one in the one place that matters most to him. And much like the old one, his new Israel would not only have American lawmakers’ embrace but their obeisance as well. He wanted to show that he could make a speech full of blatant lies, attack international organizations that have catalogued and verified his country’s gross violations of international law, dismiss international courts adjudicating its war crimes, lob outrageous, patently baseless accusations against its critics, including American Jews–and get 58 standing ovations for it.
By doing so, he was casting Israel and the US as one. We sink or swim together, he was saying, to the chamber’s enthusiastic applause. When he thundered, “If you remember one thing, one thing from this speech, remember this: Our enemies are your enemies, our fight is your fight, and our victory will be your victory,” he was essentially saying our genocide is yours, our sins are yours, our wars are yours, and so, therefore, is our shame and fall.
It wasn’t so much that he was presumptuously punching way above his weight, but that he could have the US so eagerly punch well below its own. The man didn’t have to grow one inch above his smallness; all he had to do is shrink a super power to his size. And, as he must be crowing to himself, he managed this feat not at a time when Israel is all “sheen and glory” but when it is all blood, rap sheets, and filth.
I am not referring here to the loss of US credibility and prestige; lazy age-old criticisms by those who are chronically yearning for this uber nation to close the gap between its high rhetoric and base actions. I am talking about the extraordinary diminishment of the US’s raw power: its rank and heft. In standing 58 times to salute the war criminal prime minister of a savage, crazed state, Congress was actually rising to bend the knee to both.
You could tell from the rhumba between Bibi’s growl and body language that he believed he was accomplishing yet another great deed: showing his camp who really is boss in this relationship, while preemptively waving the mortifying “antisemitic” label at anyone who would dare to publicly claim the same about the Jewish state. Genius, he must have thought.
Did Netanyahu actually succeed? In his make-believe world, he did. That space where time is static and predictable, and the people are all dumb and easily fooled. He clearly felt validated by the familiar adulation of that chamber. Nine years ago, Jon Stewart crudely described Congress’s crass applause as the “longest blowjob a Jewish man ever got.” Bibi can boast that this time around it was even longer.
But it’s the novel scenery that I found enjoyable: Congressman Jerry Nadler reading The Netanyahu Years, Ben Caspit’s unflattering biography of Netanyahu, minutes before its subject ascended the stage. Rashida Tlaib holding the war criminal sign was equally pleasurable, dovetailing rather nicely with the 135 Democratic lawmakers boycotting the speech. And who did not register the absence of Vice President and presidential contender Kamala Harris as an emerging moment in Israeli-American relations.
Nancy Pelosi, the former Speaker of the House of Representatives, captured rather well the sentiments of her party: “…by far the worst presentation of any foreign dignitary invited and honored with the privilege of addressing the Congress of the United States.”
In criticizing the protesters outside, Netanyahu unsurprisingly called them “Iran’s useful idiots.” It wasn’t lost on many of us that he actually had in mind the useful idiots applauding him inside.
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On Another Note
We’ve been hearing it for years now: “Blame Khamas.”
That’s long been Israel’s standard legal defense against accusations of indiscriminate targeting of civilians in Gaza. Since October 7, Israel has turned the entire strip into Hamas’s human shield. If you are in Gaza, you are fair game under the rules of international law, Israel is essentially arguing.
Nicola Perugini and Neve Gordon, in Jewish Currents, deconstruct Israel’s rationale and its dangerous legal implications. Here’s a long excerpt that offers a sum-up of their analysis:
Israel has cited Hamas’s underground tunnel system to cast every square inch of Gaza as a human shield. This apparently endless multiplication of the human shielding accusation has functioned to erase the possibility of Palestinian civilianness altogether. Indeed, Israel’s ministry of foreign affairs has argued that “the mere fact that seeming ‘civilians’ or ‘civilian objects’ have been targeted” does not mean “that an attack was unlawful,” since these seeming civilians or civilian objects may actually have been human shields. The rationale here is that Palestinian homes are not homes, hospitals are not hospitals, mosques are not mosques, schools are not schools. They might “seem” to be, but they are not what they seem. Instead, each home is a suspected hideout, every hospital a likely arms depot, each mosque a tunnel pier, every school a rocket launch platform—and all legitimate targets for the cutting-edge weaponry that Israel receives from the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France and Italy.
This deadly logic has already justified unprecedented carnage. Israel killed more civilians and destroyed more civilian infrastructure in the first three months of its campaign in Gaza than Assad’s regime did in Aleppo and Russian forces did in Ukraine over years…
Human shielding accusations have a long history. Ever since there have been rules against attacking civilians in war, there have been attempts—especially by colonial, imperial, and occupying powers—to evade these prohibitions by alleging that the enemy is using human shields…
If the international legal apparatus can be used to justify acts that can destroy a people, “in whole or in part,” then the rules-based order created in the aftermath of World War II to regulate war according to humanitarian principles becomes a tool for its own undoing.