If you expected a conciliatory Netanyahu, you don’t know your man.
His bellowed address to the U.S. Congress this afternoon was a stemwinder with no stem except the protestations of an inveterate scapegoater and dissembler.
He devoted part of his tirade to lionizing IDF heroes who had rallied to Israel’s defense on October 7 and helped save lives that were at risk partly because of Bibi’s own incompetence, his failure to heed early warnings of the Hamas attack and to prepare for it.
Not surprisingly, he offered no apologies in his speech.
Instead, he deflected as hard and as often as he could, describing Hamas at one point as pure “evil.”
Again, as might be expected, he exhibited not an ounce of shame for his well-documented efforts prior to the war to pamper Hamas and keep it covertly funded so as to prevent it from making common cause with the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.
With a narcissist’s bombast, he recommitted himself to “total victory” despite recent warnings from his generals that Hamas cannot be destroyed.
And he attempted to delegitimize the numberless critics of his Gaza policies, including protestors on U.S. campuses, by slandering them as antisemitic, abettors of “rapists and murderers,” Iran-funded and “Teheran’s useful idiots.”
“They should be ashamed of themselves,” he added, in case any of these dummies might presume to disagree.
In the same hyperbolic vein, he claimed the IDF in Gaza is doing more to protect civilian lives than any other army in the history of modern urban warfare – despite Israel’s long commitment to the Dahiya Doctrine, which calls for flattening the enemy and everything and everybody around him to make an example.
Playing defense again, he credited his government with valiantly relocating civilians out of harm’s way during the Rafah campaign – while predictably leaving unmentioned that it was the Biden administration that had cajoled and extorted him into doing it.
He did thank Biden profusely for embracing Israel’s grief as his own right after October 7.
But he also shivved him ever so slyly by pleading for “faster” delivery of arms, as if the President’s decision to withhold bunker busters, which he feared would be misused in refugee-clogged Rafah, was part of some on-going stinginess, which it most certainly wasn’t.
Waxing more ecumenical, Bibi cast Israel and the U.S. as inseparable partners in combatting jihadist Iran. He praised Trump for advancing regional cooperation through the Abraham Accords and credited Biden with organizing the multinational interdiction effort that blunted the massive Iranian rocket attack against Israel on April 14.
But never once did he let on that he has resisted an equally essential Biden scheme, one that would normalize relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, turn their bonding into a turbocharged regional security alliance, and thus dramatically alter the strategic balance in the middle east to Iran’s profound detriment.
Having skirted this topic, he also spared himself the embarrassment of having to explain why he opposes it.
It is because of a Saudi demand that Israel agree in advance to promote Palestinian statehood or at least endorse some pathway to it.
This prerequisite, if satisfied, could blow Bibi’s own right-wing coalition apart, drive him from power and thus expose him to prosecution for corruption and to a terrible public reckoning for the intelligence failures that led to October 7.
Thus, it is Bibi’s own self-interest that stands in the way of a truly effective defense against Iranian adventurism.
Time and again during his address, he attempted to conflate U.S. interests with his own country’s.
“Our enemies are your enemies. Our fight is your fight. And our victory will be your victory,” he shouted at one point.
The edge, however, had already been taken off by an earlier flourish in his speech where he sought to wrap the Jewish claim to Israel/Palestine in Old Testament trappings.
Mocking those who imagine modern Israel to be a colonialist state, he asked rhetorically, “Don’t they know this “is where Abraham, Isaac and Jacob prayed, where Isaiah and Jeremiah preached, and David and Solomon ruled?
“For more than a thousand years the land of Israel has been the homeland of the Jewish people,” he added. “It’s always been our home; it will always be our home.”
Anyone who holds to that perspective is entitled to it, and has earned the right through incalculable suffering, as far as I am concerned, and may each and every one prosper and be bountiful.
But I humbly submit that the modern history of the middle east has a bit more edges than ancient writ allowed for. So do U.S. interests.
There are extremely good reasons for the US to remain Israel’s most steadfast ally without bathing them in the aura of absolute indisputable truth since not everyone reads from the same scripture.
Forgetting that fact can complicate truce deals, hostage/prisoner swaps — and partnerships.