Only a Failing US Empire Would Be So Blind as To Cheer Netanyahu and His Genocide
There is only one country in the world right now, in the midst of Israel’s slaughter in Gaza, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is guaranteed dozens of standing ovations from the vast majority of its elected representatives.
That country is not Israel, where he has been a hugely divisive figure for many years. It is the United States.
On Wednesday, Netanyahu was back-slapped, glad-handed, whooped and cheered as he slowly made his way – hailed at every step as a conquering hero – to the podium of the US Congress.
This was the same Netanyahu who has overseen during the past 10 months the slaughter – so far – of some 40,000 Palestinians, around half of them women and children. More than 21,000 other children are reported missing, most of them likely dead under rubble.
It was the same Netanyahu who leveled a strip of territory – originally home to 2.3 million Palestinians – that is expected to take 80 years to rebuild, at a cost of at least $50bn.
It was the same Netanyahu who has destroyed every hospital and university in Gaza, and bombed almost all of its schools that were serving as shelters for families made homeless by other Israeli bombs.
It was the same Netanyahu whose arrest is being sought by the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity, accused of using starvation as a weapon of war by imposing an aid blockade that has engineered a famine across Gaza.
It was the same Netanyahu whose government was found last week by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to have been intensifying Israel’s apartheid rule over the Palestinian people in an act of long-term aggression.
It was the same Netanyahu whose government is standing trial for committing what the ICJ, the world’s highest judicial body, has termed a “plausible genocide”.
And yet, there was just one visible protester in the congressional chamber. Rashida Tlaib, the only US legislator of Palestinian heritage, sat silently grasping a small black sign. On one side it said: “War criminal”. On the other: “Guilty of genocide”.
One person among hundreds mutely trying to point out that the emperor was naked.
Cocooned from horror
Indeed, the optics were stark.
This looked less like a visit by a foreign leader than a decorated elder general being welcomed back to the Senate in ancient Rome, or a grey-haired British viceroy from India embraced in the motherland’s parliament, after brutally subduing the “barbarians” on the fringes of empire.
This was a scene familiar from history books: of imperial brutality and colonial savagery, recast by the seat of the imperium as valor, honor, civilization. And it looked every bit as absurd, and abhorrent, as it does when we look back on what happened 200 or 2,000 years ago.
It was a reminder that, despite our self-serving claims of progress and humanitarianism, our world is not very different from the way it has been for thousands of years.
It was a reminder that power elites like to celebrate the demonstration of their power, cocooned both from the horrors faced by those crushed by their might, and from the clamor of protest of those horrified by the infliction of so much suffering.
It was a reminder that this is not a “war” between Israel and Hamas – let alone, as Netanyahu would have us believe, a battle for civilization between the Judeo-Christian world and the Islamic world.
This is a US imperial war – part of its military campaign for “global, full-spectrum dominance” – carried out by Washington’s most favored client state.
The genocide is fully a US genocide, armed by Washington, paid for by Washington, given diplomatic cover by Washington, and – as the scenes in Congress underlined – cheered on by Washington.
Or as Netanyahu stated in a moment of unintentional candor to Congress: “Our enemies are your enemy, our fight is your fight, and our victory will be your victory.”
Israel is Washington’s largest military outpost in the oil-rich Middle East. The Israeli army is the Pentagon’s main battalion in that strategically important region. And Netanyahu is the outpost’s commander in chief.
What is vital to Washington elites is that the outpost is supported at all costs; that it doesn’t fall to the “barbarians”.
Outpouring of lies
There was another small moment of inadvertent truth amid Netanyahu’s outpouring of lies. The Israeli prime minister stated that what was happening in Gaza was “a clash between barbarism and civilization”. He was not wrong.
On the one side, there is the barbarism of the current joint Israeli-US genocide against the people of Gaza, a dramatic escalation of the 17-year Israeli siege of the enclave that preceded it, and the decades of belligerent rule under an Israeli system of apartheid before that.
And on the other side, there are the embattled few desperately trying to safeguard the West’s professed values of “civilization”, of international humanitarian law, of the protection of the weak and vulnerable, of the rights of children.
The US Congress decisively showed where it stood: with barbarism.
Netanyahu has become the most feted foreign leader in US history, invited to speak to Congress four times, surpassing even Britain’s wartime leader, Winston Churchill.
He is fully Washington’s creature. His savagery, his monstrousness is entirely made in America. As he implored his US handlers: “Give us the tools faster and we’ll finish the job faster.”
Finish the job of genocide.
Performative dissent
Some Democrats preferred to stay away, including party power broker Nancy Pelosi. Instead, she met families of Israeli hostages held in Gaza – not, of course, Palestinian families whose loved ones in Gaza had been slaughtered by Israel.
Vice President Kamala Harris explained her own absence as a scheduling conflict. She met the Israeli prime minister, as did President Joe Biden, on Thursday.
Afterwards, she claimed to have pressed Netanyahu on the “dire” humanitarian situation in Gaza, but stressed too that Israel “had a right to defend itself” – a right that Israel specifically does not have, as the ICJ pointed out last week, because Israel is the one permanently violating the rights of the Palestinians through its prolonged occupation, apartheid rule and ethnic cleansing.
But the dissent of Pelosi – and of Harris, if that is what it was – was purely performative. True, they have no personal love for Netanyahu, who has so closely allied himself and his government with the US Republican right and former president Donald Trump.
But Netanyahu simply serves as an alibi. Both Pelosi and Harris are stalwart supporters of Israel – a state that, according to the ICJ’s judgment last week, decades ago instituted apartheid rule in the Palestinian territories, using an illegal occupation as cover to ethnically cleanse the population there.
Their political agenda is not about ending the annihilation of the people of Gaza. It is acting as a safety valve for popular dissatisfaction among traditional Democratic voters shocked by the scenes from Gaza.
It is to deceive them into imagining that behind closed doors, there is some sort of policy fight over Israel’s handling of the Palestinian issue. That voting Democrat will one day – one very distant day – lead to an undefined “peace”, a fabled “two-state solution” where Palestinian children won’t keep dying in the interests of preserving the security of Israel’s illegal settler-militias.
US policy towards Israel has not changed in any meaningful sense for decades, whether the president has been red or blue, whether Trump has been in the White House or Barack Obama.
And if Harris becomes president – admittedly, a big if – US arms and money will continue flowing to Israel, while Israel will get to decide if US aid to Gaza is ever allowed in.
Why? Because Israel is the lynchpin in a US imperial project for global full-spectrum dominance. Because for Washington to change course on Israel, it would also have to do other unthinkable things.
It would have to begin dismantling its 800 military bases around the planet, just as Israel was told by the ICJ last week to dismantle its many dozens of illegal settlements on Palestinian territory.
The US would need to agree a shared global security architecture with China and Russia, rather than seek to bully and batter these great powers into submission with bloody proxy wars, such as the one in Ukraine.
The coming fall
Pelosi, remember, smeared students on US campuses protesting Israel’s plausible genocide in Gaza as being linked to Russia. She urged the FBI to investigate them for pressuring the Biden administration to support a ceasefire.
Netanyahu, in his address to Congress, similarly demonized the demonstrators – in his case, by accusing them of being “useful idiots” of Israel’s main foe, Iran.
Neither can afford to recognize that millions of ordinary people across the US think it is wrong to bomb and starve children – and to use a war with an unachievable aim as the cover story.
Hamas cannot be “eliminated” through Israel’s current bout of horrifying violence for a very obvious reason: The group is a product, a symptom, of earlier bouts of horrifying Israeli violence.
As even western counter-terrorism experts have had to concede, Israel’s genocidal policies in Gaza are strengthening Hamas, not weakening it. Young men and boys who lose their family to Israeli bombs are Hamas’s most fervent new recruits.
That’s why Netanyahu insisted Israel’s military offensive – the genocide – in Gaza could not end soon. He demanded weapons and money to keep his soldiers in the enclave indefinitely, in an operation he termed as “demilitarization and deradicalization”.
Decoded, that means a continuing horror show for the Palestinians there, as they are forced to continue living and dying with an Israeli aid blockade, starvation, bombs and unmarked “kill zones”.
It means, too, an indefinite risk of Israel’s war on Gaza spilling over into a regional war, and potentially a global one, as tripwires towards escalation continue to grow in number.
The US Congress, however, is too blinded by championing its small fortressed state in the Middle East to think about such complexities. Its members roared “USA!” to their satrap from Israel, just as Roman senators once roared “Glory!” to generals whose victories they assumed would continue forever.
The rulers of the Roman empire no more saw the coming fall than their modern counterparts in Washington can. But every empire falls. And its collapse becomes inevitable once its rulers lose all sense of how absurd and abhorrent they have become.
Jonathan Cook is the author of three books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His website and blog can be found at www.jonathan-cook.net. This originally appeared in the Middle East Eye.
US Gives a War Criminal the Honor of Speaking to Congress
On Wednesday July 24, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke to a joint session of Congress. As he was speaking, the war in Gaza was continuing, with more than 39,145 Palestinian killed at the time of writing this piece, 89,800 injured, with 70 percent of all casualties being children, women, and old men. 129 people were killed just over the past 5 days. 1.9 million people have also become internal refugees, since 80 percent of Gaza has been destroyed by Israel.
Never mind the report by the Lancet, the prestigious medical journal, which declared that the true number of people killed directly and indirectly in Gaza is actually close to 190,000, because for every person killed directly by Israel, at least 4 other people have died due to a variety of reasons caused by the war, from hunger, to disease that are spreading, and lack of medicine.
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees has reported that between 7 October 2023 and 8 July 2024, at least 553 people have been killed, including 131 children, in Netanyahu’s second war front with the Palestinian people in the West Bank.
Meanwhile, in Netanyahu’s third war – this time in Lebanon – as of July 9 at least 98,002 people have been displaced, with the total casualties standing at 1904 in southern Lebanon. Israel’s bombings have also killed at least 800 farm animals.
The International Criminal Court has been seeking arrest warrants for Netanyahu, as well as Hamas’ leader Yahya Sinwar on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The Court’s prosecutor, Karim Khan, has stated that the Court is also seeking arrest warrants for Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.
At home, the trial of Netanyahu, charged for corruption in three separate cases, which originally began in 2020, resumed last December, after a two-month pause due to the war in Gaza. The war has provided him with a reprieve and has distracted attention from the charges that he is facing. Like everything else that he does, Netanyahu has denied any wrongdoing.
Given this background, how was Netanyahu greeted by Congress? As he walked onto the floor of the House, he was greeted with roaring applause that lasted more than 5 minutes. As he dismissed the protestors at the Capitol, which included family members of Israeli hostages who are being held in Gaza who wore shirts inside the chamber during his address that said, “Seal the Deal Now,” the majority in the audience clapped repeatedly. Overall, Netanyahu was applauded 79 times, of which 58 were standing ovations.
During his speech, Netanyahu fiercely attacked those Americans, including many Jewish Americans, who have been protesting his war in Gaza. He accused them of “standing with evil,” and declared that “they should be ashamed of themselves.” This is not surprising. After all, this is the same man who back in April, at the height of college students protests against the war, declared that the protestors are all antisemitic.
He also gave U.S. leaders their marching orders for putting down the protests when he declared, “What is important now is for all of us, all of us who… cherish our values and our civilization, to stand up together and to say, ‘enough is enough’… it is unconscionable; it has to be stopped…” Yes, if there is only one man in the entire world who is completely qualified to talk about civilization and civility, it is Netanyahu.
But Netanyahu did not even stop there. He accused anti-war protestors of being agents of a foreign government. Guess which government did he have in mind? Surprise! Iran, his punching bag for the last 25 years. Netanyahu said, “For all we know, Iran is funding the anti-Israel protests that are going on right now outside this building… well, I have a message for these protesters. When the tyrants of Tehran, who hang gays from cranes and murder women for not covering their hair, are praising, promoting, and funding you, you have officially become Iran’s useful idiots.”
This is yet another lie about Iran by Netanyahu. There is no evidence that Iran, besieged by all sorts of economic and political problems, has provided funds to anyone in the United States to protest Israel. To the contrary, as Politico reported in May, “Two of the organizers supporting the protests at Columbia University and on other campuses are Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow. Both are supported by the Tides Foundation, which is seeded by Democratic megadonor George Soros and was previously supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.”
At the same time, for at least 15 years, ever since the Green Movement in Iran in 2009, Iran’s hardliners have accused Soros of trying to ignite a “velvet revolution” to overthrow the Islamic Republic.
As Politico reported, in addition, “Another notable Democratic donor whose philanthropy has helped fund the protest movement is David Rockefeller Jr., who sits on the board of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. It has given nearly $500,000 directly to Jewish Voice for Peace.”
Netanyahu shed crocodile tears for Iranian women and for its LBGTQ community. How many Palestinian women, with or without Islamic Hijab, have been murdered by his American-made bombs? Thousands. How many gay men in Gaza have been killed by the same bombs? Probably a large number.
Only the United States overthrows democratically elected governments around the world, from Iran to Chile, but preaches democracy.
Only the United States supports fascists, such as Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt whose regime has 65,000 political prisoners, and the religious dictatorship in Saudi Arabia that beheads 81 people in a single day, but preaches human rights around the world.
And, only the United States gives the honor of speaking to a joint session of Congress to a war criminal who is also on trial at home for corruption.
Muhammad Sahimi, a Professor at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, analyzes Iran’s political developments, its nuclear program, and its policy in the Middle East.
A Standing Ovation for Genocide
There’s no mention of their duty to the people in the oath of office that members of Congress take. It says they will support and defend the Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic. Maybe, in some regard defending the Constitution would mean doing their job: representing the people that elected them. But today, the architect of the genocide against the Palestinian people walked in and out of the “people’s house” to a standing ovation. He was given more time with our lawmakers than any of us will ever get in our lifetime and he used it to insist he was a good man that was commanding a moral army – insisting they have not killed anyone who did not deserve to have their life ended in the blink of an eye.
There are one thousand indications that our government has no obligation to us. This moment was just one – but it was one I will never let slip my mind. These people are no different than the settlers that gather in lawn chairs, eat popcorn, and cheer when the Israeli military drops bombs on apartment complexes in Gaza. For as long as they’ve been in office, they’ve had a front row seat to the carnage and all they do is gawk and cheer from the sidelines. Every once in a while, someone they are supposed to work for pesters them about their complacency and we are swatted away like flies.
The majority opinion in the United States is against continued support for Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza. Stories come out every week that push the needle further. Last week, the story of Muhammad Bhar surfaced and was circulated around the world. Muhammad was my age, 24, and had Down Syndrome. The Israeli military raided his home and let their dog attack him, tearing his arm to shreds. They separated him from his family, and left him in a room all by himself. They ordered his family to leave the house and left Muhammad to die – alone, bleeding, and scared. His family found Muhammad starting to decompose in the room the soldiers left him in. He still had a tourniquet on his arm from when they tried to stop the bleeding. And they just left him there, like he was nothing.
The Israeli military confirmed this story days later and Netanyahu gets a round of applause for his courage and leadership. They don’t even feel the need to lie to the world about their atrocities anymore – letting babies suffocate to death in incubators months ago was the litmus test for what the United States would let slide. Ordering an attack dog on a man with Down Syndrome and locking him in a room to die without his loved ones there to console him wasn’t the red line – because there will never be one.
They gave a standing ovation.
If a man like Benjamin Netanyahu had walked through their home and mangled their children’s bodies so much that they could never forget the way they looked afterward – I wonder if they would applaud still. I wonder if the screams of their family members burning alive in tents would potentially interrupt the thought that told them to clap, the thought that told them to give the man a standing ovation for his perfectly executed slaughter of thousands of human beings.
Some part of me still wanted to believe that these people may still be completely misled – that perhaps they don’t know about the 15,000 children that have been killed. Maybe they haven’t seen what I’ve seen – the little girl with her face falling off, the boy with a missing head, the child with no legs, the mother unwilling to wash her children’s blood off her hands because it is all that is left of them. Maybe they haven’t seen it at all. As thunderous applause rang out for the murderer, there were thousands of people outside trying to signal to the millions of people in Palestine that their turmoil isn’t being ignored. They were pepper sprayed, beaten, and arrested by cops that were trained in Israel.
When I saw the video of the standing ovation, something sunk in me – this is where I was born. This is where both of my parents were born. I have no nation to be loyal to but a nation tripping over themselves to kill my friends’ families. There is bloodlust in the US Congress – and bloodlust seems like the only thing they are loyal to. If there are “enemies” foreign and domestic, I fear they view us as the latter.
I clap for my friends at their comedy shows. I clap for people after they finish a speech at a community event. I sometimes clap when the plane lands, if someone else does it first. To clap for an executioner of children, mothers, fathers and friends – how much did they sell their souls for?
Danaka Katovich is one of CODEPINK’S National Co-Directors, based in Chicago, Illinois.
Netanyahu in Congress: the Crime Boss
Fulminates, While His Accomplices Cheer
Photograph Source: U.S. Embassy Jerusalem – CC BY 2.0
I returned home from Wednesday’s anti-Netanyahu demonstration on Capitol Hill in time to watch the Israeli prime minister address a joint session of the U.S. Congress. The vilest thing about the event was not the speech itself, which was predictably bloodthirsty and mendacious, but the reactions of the assembled Congresspeople. Almost all of them stood and cheered lengthily while their invited guest smeared those protesting his appearance in the streets outside the Capitol as pro-Hamas “idiots” who “stand with rapists and murderers,” and whose protests are “paid for by Iran.”
Understand that almost all those protesting, including me, were Americans — a group that the members of Congress claim to represent. But never mind that. Benjamin Netanyahu is an experienced con artist who knows very well when he has an audience of suckers who will buy any Brooklyn Bridge that he feels like selling. I arrived home in time to watch him bedazzle the Congressional rubes by introducing wounded Israeli war veterans — who just happened to be people of color – in the visitors’ gallery. No one laughed or objected when he defamed the protestors, when he called the Israel Defense Forces the most scrupulously pro-civilian army in world history, or when he accused the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court of disseminating an antisemitic “blood libel.” But his best trick of all was using the Book of Genesis to justify Israeli claims to all of 21st century Palestine.
“They call Israel a colonialist state,” he ranted, pounding the lectern. “Don’t they know that the Land of Israel is where Abraham, Isaac and Jacob prayed, where Isaiah and Jeremiah preached and where David and Solomon ruled?”
That grotesque non-sequitur evoked the loudest cheers of all! Netanyahu understands perfectly well that what sustains the remaining American support for Israel is a combination of Zionist political and financial pressure, evangelical Christian hopes for a Middle East Armageddon, and U.S. imperialism. He baldly presented Israel as a U.S. agent in the region obviating the need for American “boots on the ground.” His peroration, cheered on passionately by the yokels, called for an Abrahamic Alliance to make war on Iran and Hezbollah.
About half of the Democrats in Congress had the decency to absent themselves from this bellicose farce. Kamela Harris refused to attend and preside; Rashida Tlaib attended but held up a small sign that read “War Criminal.” Other Democrats like Jerry Nadler of New York and Jamie Raskin of Maryland were in the hall but behaving weirdly – sitting on their hands for some of Bibi’s more obnoxious pronouncements but rising to cheer at other moments of jingoistic bombast. No point in offending AIPAC and its supporters in an election year!
Most Republicans, of course, were in ecstasy throughout, especially when Netanyahu praised their Dear Leader. As I write this, he is on the way to Mar-a-Lago to pay him homage. So much for Donald Trump the “peace candidate.” The one useful result of this globally embarrassing event was the revelation – if one were needed – that the MAGA Republicans are united in support of a U.S.-financed “forever war” in the Middle East.
Meanwhile, the world watches in disbelief as the clueless American Empire further isolates itself morally and politically from virtually all the world’s peoples. With friends like Netanyahu, as the old Jewish joke goes, who needs enemies?
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