Netanyahu’s Speech to Congress Is a Desperate Ploy to Rally Support for Genocide

By Souzan Naser, first published at Truthout

Congressional leadership’s invitation for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address a joint session of the U.S. Congress on July 24 was an act of political violence.

Since October of last year, the war criminal Netanyahu has ordered the mass murder of at least 39,000 Palestinian people in Gaza, including more than 15,000 children, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health. In addition, over 21,000 children are thought to be missing.

Rather than holding Netanyahu accountable, top U.S. lawmakers like House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana), House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York), Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) have given him carte blanche to justify the genocide. It comes as no surprise that their invitation has ushered in a wave of condemnation.

Millions across the world have been out in the streets for months protesting the genocide, the largest mobilization for Palestinian rights in history. Karim Khan, prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, is pursuing a warrant to arrest Netanyahu for war crimes. Criticism over the visit is bipartisan, with 230 anonymous congressional House and Senate staffers signing on to a letter speaking out against it. And a small but growing number of lawmakers, including Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-South Carolina), Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington), Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts), plan to skip the speech. While well-meaning, these politicians have a responsibility to do more than just boycott. They should push harder by demanding an end to the genocide and organizing some kind of protest from the floor, even in the face of Speaker Johnson’s threat to arrest anyone who disrupts Netanyahu.

Beyond boycotting or protesting Netanyahu’s speech, if members of Congress want to truly get serious about stopping the genocide and ending the racist Israeli state’s illegal occupation and colonization of Palestinian land, they must withdraw their votes of financial, military and diplomatic support, and urge their colleagues to do the same. Anything less will be disastrously ineffective.

Meanwhile, a boycott of Netanyahu’s speech by Rep. Jim Clyburn, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-Massachusetts) and Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Illinois) seems rather performative considering they voted in favor of sending aid to Israel.

But the liberation of Palestine won’t come from the halls of the U.S. Congress, or the growing Israeli protests in Tel Aviv. Instead, Palestinian liberation will be won by Palestinians themselves, who are resisting illegal military occupation, defending their people and land, and fighting for self-determination.

The other piece that will lead to victory is the power of the people: the collective voices of organizers, activists, trade unionists, students, artists, workers and scholars in the U.S. and around the world, who are fervently rejecting not only Netanyahu’s visit, but also Israel’s bombing, murdering, stealing, jailing, unhousing and demolishing — over 75 years of war crimes all intended to rob Palestinians of freedom, justice and a life of dignity.

In Gaza specifically, the 17-year-old air, sea and land blockade imposed by the apartheid state has impacted the health and longevity of the people. With severe restrictions on freedom of movement, Palestinians in Gaza are cut off from visiting family living in the West Bank, Jerusalem and historic Palestine, and are routinely denied permits to receive life-saving medical treatment. On October 10, 2023, as a form of collective punishment, Israel canceled the limited number of work permits it issued to Palestinians in Gaza. The emotional and physical health of Palestinians in Gaza is further deteriorating because of restrictions of goods entering the Strip. Already frail from the siege, the past nine and a half months of horror have been devastating to those who are surviving the genocide.

It is clear that Israel is intent on depopulating Gaza. And despite international outrage, the U.S. remains devoted to supporting the assault, which, of course, is very much in line with its own bloody history — one built on the mass genocide of Black and Indigenous people. This history is reflected in U.S. laws and ingrained in its culture, and is at the root of the country’s social, economic, racial and gender inequities. These inequities show themselves in the ongoing daily violence of the US: as police officers murder Black and Brown people and use excessive force against communities of color; the separation, caging and dehumanization of immigrants; the attacks on access to sexual and reproductive health care; and the unprecedented spike in anti-LGBTQ legislation.

To disrupt the status quo and expose the injustices both in the U.S. and apartheid Israel, people are organizing en masse. In my hometown of Chicago, the U.S. Palestinian Community Network (USPCN), of which I am a member, has been out in the streets with the Chicago Coalition for Justice in Palestine every weekend since the genocide began. We demand that the U.S. force Israel to stop the genocide by ending weapons transfers and all aid to the Zionist state. Israel cannot continue its crimes, occupation and colonization without U.S. funds and weapons, and we will continue to demand an end to our country’s role in supporting this genocide that Netanyahu and his far right government is perpetrating.

It is no exaggeration to say at this point that the U.S. has blood on its hands. An Amnesty International report verifies multiple incidents of U.S.-supplied weapons being used in Gaza in violation of humanitarian law. The report mentions deadly strikes conducted in December 2023 and January 2024, which killed at least 95 civilians, including 42 children, in Rafah, which at the time was a designated “safe zone.”

On July 24, USPCN will be joining the Palestinian Youth Movement, U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, and a dozen other convening organizations, along with thousands of protesters to gather in front of the U.S. Capitol and demand a “citizen’s arrest” of Netanyahu for committing crimes against humanity. The prime minister’s visit to Washington comes as his government is in disarray. War cabinet member Benny Gantz, who has since resigned from his position, has publicly accused Netanyahu of “prioritizing his own political survival over the fate of the hostages in captivity.” Members of Netanyahu’s own political party are speaking out much more forcefully about Israel’s military facing defeat in Gaza.

Netanyahu knows that the game is over for him, and we can predict that his remarks will be filled with political grandstanding and deceptive and dangerous lies intended to justify the horror of the past nine and a half months. How can our congresspeople be convinced that the murder of Hind Rajab, the six-year-old Palestinian child who was trapped in a car alongside the bodies of six dead family members, is justified? Surrounded by Israeli military vehicles, Hind pleaded on the phone with an emergency medical worker to rescue her. Twelve days later, she was found dead, as were the paramedics sent to rescue her.

There is also no justification for the murder of 3-year-old Reem and her 5-year-old brother Tariq, who were killed while sleeping. Their lifeless bodies were pulled from under the rubble after an Israeli airstrike brought their home down. These tragedies are unfortunately far from unique. Indeed, no human being can erase the disturbing images of Palestinian corpses in the streets, shattered infrastructure, buildings toppled with entire families inside, and evident signs of starvation.

Netanyahu last spoke in front of Congress in 2015. Since then, there has been a significant shift in the way people globally talk and think about the occupation of Palestine. Israel and its U.S. patron have been exposed internationally like never before, and much of the world now openly describes Israel as an apartheid, racist state.

Further prioritizing Israel’s control and complete domination and colonization over Palestinian lands, Israeli lawmakers voted against a two-state solution on July 18, proving yet again Israel’s apartheid status and its ultimate goal of politically erasing Palestinians from the map.

When talking about the future of Palestine, it is now more commonplace to hear people advocating for a one-state solution and the end of settler colonialism.

Clearly, support for Israel has waned and the apartheid state is increasingly aware of its own fragility. And while Israel and its allies in the U.S. government don’t want our grievances to be heard, we will turn the temperature up at the Democratic National Convention (DNC), which is scheduled to take place on the week of August 19 in Chicago. The genocide in Gaza will be a focal point for the Coalition to March on the DNC, of which USPCN is a leading member, and for tens of thousands of people that we expect to be there to protest Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Antony Blinken, and the rest of the Democrats who are complicit in the genocide.

Although Palestine and Gaza will be the main issues at the DNC protests, like they were at the RNC protests last week in Milwaukee, we will also defend and demand the expansion of immigrant, women’s, reproductive, LGBTQ and workers’ rights, as well as call for Black liberation, police accountability, and the end of police crimes against communities of color.

The scale of the protests against Netanyahu being planned for July 24 and for the DNC in August are proof that ours is a strong and energized movement. Regardless of who is on the Democratic ticket come August, we will be out in the streets with our unchanged demands, because we know that the U.S. will continue to pour money into the apartheid state until we make it impossible for them to do so.