Netanyahu told Congress he's protecting 'every American city.' He's only protecting himself.

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A brief note on the biggest political story of the week:" It was good — and relieving — news that Biden dropped out. I was, as you know, ambivalent about what decision would be best for the future. I’m glad to say that, for the moment at least, it appears the negative outcomes I was most concerned about didn’t happen: no fractious power struggle ensued; Democratic voters seem happy — thrilled, in fact — to coalesce around a new candidate, etc. Kamala Harris is proving to be an adrenaline shot in what had otherwise been a moribund race. I will have more to say about it, and her candidacy, soon.

More pressing business in Washington today. Last week, I sat through Donald Trump’s interminable speech at the Republican convention so you wouldn’t have to. Today I listened to another lie-filled rant, this time by Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister and génocidaire en chef. The honor comes as the official Palestinian death toll in Gaza nears 40,000 (researchers recently argued in the Lancet that the true toll could be more than four times higher), and hunger and destitution spread throughout the strip—just as Israeli officials promised they would.

Netanyahu arrived in D.C. under threat of a pending arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court. The separate International Court of Justice just ruled that his government is illegally occupying, discriminating against the local population of, and in the process of annexing the remaining Palestinian territory; a ruling that that a day after the Israeli Knesset voted overwhelmingly against not only the “two-state solution” but the creation of a Palestinian state “on any piece of land west of the Jordan River.”

But such niceties don’t trouble U.S. leaders; not when an ally is involved. Netanyahu’s joint address — his fourth in three decades — was given at the invitation of House Speaker Mike Johnson. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer — who had only recently called Netanyahu one of the “obstacles to peace” in “Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank” — co-signed the invitation, perhaps reluctantly. Netanyahu didn’t greet Schumer at all as he made his way to the dais, where took the position usually reserved for presidents — backed by Johnson and the seniormost Democrat willing to be in frame with him, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair Ben Cardin.

Kamala Harris, who’d normally take the high seat in her capacity as Senate president, was hundreds of miles away giving remarks at the Zeta Phi Beta sorority’s biennial convention in Indianapolis. (She is scheduled to meet Netanyahu tomorrow, as is President Biden.) Harris joined 136 Democratic senators and members of Congress in declining to attend, along with at least one Republican. The lone Palestinian-American member of Congress, Rashida Tlaib, showed up, decked out in a keffiyeh and holding a black-and-white flip sign that read “war criminal” on one side and “guilty of genocide” on the other.

That left a partially filled house — most of which, especially on the Republican side, tried to make up for their absent colleagues by standing and clapping rapturously, as many times as they could. (That’s the price of boycotting a speech — you aren’t there to be seen not clapping.)

Netanyahu’s speech was an amalgam of post-9/11, Samuel Huntington-style “clash of civilizations” nonsense meant to provoke his long hoped-for war between the U.S. and Iran, pro-Israel memes lifted from (or perhaps also deployed on) social media, and U.S.-style culture wars agitprop meant to appeal above all to Donald Trump and the Republican Party. A line he included about last week’s attempted shooting in Butler County, Pa. — “there is no room for political violence in democracies” — was just funny coming from a man whose government is a world leader in targeted assassinations, and who himself was blamed by the widow of his one-time political rival, Yitzhak Rabin, for fomenting his 1995 murder at the hands of an extremist settler.

His main message: “We’re not only protecting ourselves. We’re protecting you.” More on that below.

In State of the Union style, Netanyahu brought “special guests.” (“Lenny Skutniks,” as such human props are known.) These included Noa Argamani, one of four Israeli hostages freed in a June 8 attack on the Nuseirat refugee camp that killed over 274 Palestinians and injured 700 more; and the family members of other hostages still in Gaza. He said, cryptically: “As we speak, we’re actively engaged in intensive efforts to secure their release, and I’m confident that these efforts can succeed. Some of them are taking place right now.”

He made no mention of the fact that almost all the hostages who have been released so far were released through negotiations. Or that he is currently blocking a deal to release the remaining 120 hostages, over a third of whom are believed to be dead. Nor did Netanyahu not acknowledge the many hostage family members who showed up the audience to protest his failure to negotiate their relatives’ release — six of whom were arrested by Capitol police for wearing yellow shirts that read “Seal the Deal.”

Netanyahu also found time to denounce student protesters who stood against Israel’s genocide — over 3,500 of whom were arrested this spring at almost uniformly peaceful protests, as friend-of-The Racket Spencer Ackerman has found — also to thunderous applause from many of the legislators who claim to represent them. Bibi called the protesters “Iran’s useful idiots” and accused them of “standing with rapists and murderers.”

In doing so, he a story that neither I nor anyone I’ve asked has heard before:

Again setting aside the repulsiveness of claiming that anyone who opposes the mass murder of Palestinian children is ipso facto cheering for the deaths of Israeli ones, I can find no references to a story like this — in which militants stormed into a house on a kibbutz, found a latch to a secret attic, opened it, and then killed the babies hidden inside.

If you have any idea what he’s talking about, feel free to message me. But I suspect that Netanyahu made this one up. First of all, according to a December 4 article in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, which in turn cited “sources including Israel's National Insurance Institute, kibbutz leaders and the police,” only one baby under the age of 1 was killed on Oct. 7 — a 10-month-old killed along with her father Kibbutz Be’eri. In other words, there were no “two babies” killed, attic or otherwise.

It is possible that Netanyahu was riffing on the story of the Siman Tov family—Israeli-Americans, including a two-year-old son and six-year-old twin sisters, who died in their house in Kibbutz Nir Oz, a few miles from the Gaza fence line. But the Siman Tovs died, apparently all together, of smoke inhalation and shots from outside the house, according to a relative. And while British media described them as having taken refuge in a safe room, the relative told CNN they were next to a window.

If that’s the story he altered, he likely knew that adding the detail of a “secret attic” in which these “babies” were allegedly hidden, only to be killed, would carry strong resonances of the Holocaust, specifically the story of Anne Frank. (I’ve written the Israeli embassy in Washington asking for comment. I will update if they respond.)

If Netanyahu had a bottom-line message for Congress — and he didn’t get to it until close to the end of his speech — it was give us more bombs, faster. Or, as Netanyahu put it: "Fast-tracking U.S. military aid can dramatically expedite an end to the war in Gaza, and help prevent a broader war in the Middle East.”

He made his case in the way he has always made it since 9/11: that Israel is the front line between the United States and what he believes is our true enemy — the Muslim world in general, and Iran in particular. “For Iran, he said, Israel is first, America is next.” As he put it — and, again, got a huge swell of applause from the legislators in attendence — “we also keep American boots off the ground while protecting our shared interests in the Middle East.”

If this was ever true, Israel’s actions in the aftermath of Oct. 7, 2023, have broken that arrangement. Netanyahu’s belligerence and obstinance, and his refusal to stop the killing in Gaza, have forced the U.S. to engage in its largest ongoing naval battle since World War II, committing 7,000 sailors to fight the Houthis in the Red Sea. It cost the lives of three U.S. soldiers in Jordan, and drove the U.S. closer than it has ever been to a direct confrontation with the Islamic Republic of Iran. This is deeply ironic, as the continuance of the war — a war that can only continue with U.S. support — may be the only thing keeping Netanyahu out of prison in Israel, if not the Hague.

“My friends,” Netanyahu told the chamber, “if you remember … one thing from this speech, remember this: Our enemies are your enemies, our fight is your fight, and our victory will be your victory.” But as the rows of empty brown seats staring back at him may have suggested, that message is not as compelling in Washington — or in the voting booths that send candidates there — as it was ten months ago.

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