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.
