Resource Author: Y.L. Al-Sheikh

A Diminished Netanyahu Meets Growing Protest in Congress

Editor’s note: On July 24, 2024, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel spoke before a joint session of the US Congress. Concurrently CIP co-hosted a counter-programming event, featuring among others Representative Pramila Jayapal, pictured above. The IPJ is happy to publish this paired response to Netanyahu’s speech, authored by Y.L. Al-Sheikh and Hadar Susskind.
 

Protest honors the dead. Action can save the living

Y.L. Al-Sheikh is a Palestinian-American writer and organizer.

Despite being responsible for the murder of more than 40,000 Palestinians and one of the most horrific campaigns of mass starvation in modern history, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was rewarded with the opportunity to come to Washington D.C. for a victory lap.

There will rightfully be many articles written on the saber rattling against Iran, or the slanderous attacks on American college students, but the most important element of the Prime Minister’s speech was by far his unsurprising rejection of Palestinian freedom and self-determination. By proposing that Gaza remain under Israeli “security control” for an indefinite amount of time, Netanyahu made clear yet again that he is ideologically opposed to anything but apartheid and Jewish supremacism between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. While it is obvious to anyone who pays attention that this sort of regime does not guarantee Jewish safety, the facts seemed to matter little on Capitol Hill.

Netanyahu peddled lie after lie about the last ten months of warfare and destruction. When the Prime Minister claimed there were no civilian deaths in Rafah, this was of course a lie. The Prime Minister said that there has been no use of starvation as a weapon of war against Palestinians, and that is plainly untrue. The Prime Minister insisted that there are no plans to “resettle” Gaza, but his most senior coalition partners openly advocate for cleansing the land of its Palestinians and embedding Israeli settlers in their place. This is just a sampling of the falsehoods he threw at the audience.

Yet it was perhaps those who were or were not in attendance which painted the bigger picture. Roughly half of all the Democratic members of Congress opted to boycott Netanyahu’s propaganda tour, and those who didn’t were not keen to visibly approve of his rant. Palestinian-American state legislator Ruwa Romman (D-GA) was right to note that this demonstrates significant progress compared to the measly 58 Democrats who chose to boycott back in 2015. The boycott was hardly limited to socialists like Bernie Sanders and AOC, instead being embraced by the likes of Nancy Pelosi, Jim Clyburn, and Dick Durbin. This is likely because they know support for this war is unequivocally unpopular. Poll after poll shows that the demand for a ceasefire is a mainstream view, with voters more likely to cast a ballot for a Democrat who expresses clear support for a ceasefire than a Democrat who mirrors the Republican point of view. More than 45% of voters who expressed support for the Biden-Harris ticket believe that military assistance to Israel should be decreased. Some of the biggest labor unions in the country want President Biden to suspend military assistance entirely until the war is concluded. It is likely because of these facts that the Vice President herself opted not to attend Netanyahu’s remarks so soon after she became the presumptive nominee for the Democratic Party in the forthcoming presidential election.

As promising as the trend-line is for the long-term prospects of a Democratic party that values Palestinian life, slow shifts offer cold comfort while the Biden-Harris administration still supplies Netanyahu and his government with the bullets and bombs that kill Palestinians and the United States still acts as a diplomatic shield protecting the State of Israel from the consequences of its decades-long illegal occupation. Displays of discontent do not bring our dead back to life, and symbolic gestures will not secure us what we are entitled to.

Without an arms embargo, sanctions on the government of the State of Israel and its settler enterprise, and an internationally coordinated push for Palestinian self-determination, it is unlikely that any ceasefire will actually be permanent. Durable peace is not possible without Palestine, and the sooner that Democrats in the United States understand this the better. Occupation and apartheid systems are systematic obstacles to peace, not just the choices of the present Prime Minister, and as such require systematic response, and not just a change in Israel’s leadership, to remedy.

It is time for the Democratic Party to face the one-state reality in the eyes, admit that there will be no such thing as peace in the Middle East so long as Palestinians are subject to military rule and displacement, and take meaningful action. If those who boycotted the Prime Minister’s speech are truly disgusted with what this war has produced, then they should demand that not another bomb be sent to the government of Israel until a permanent ceasefire is established. If those who claim to support democracy at home want to prove their sincerity, they ought to oppose military rule and racial segregation abroad and fight for an end to the illegal occupation of Palestine. It will be up to us who care about Palestinian and Jewish life alike to ensure that these advancements finally happen. The Vice President, if she wins in November, has the chance to work with us and be bold on this front. I hope that she takes it up.
 

Netanyahu and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

Hadar Susskind is President and CEO, Americans for Peace Now, and an Israeli-American dual citizen.

Yesterday, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu stood before a joint session of Congress and spoke eloquently about Israel, about the October 7th attacks by Hamas, about the conflict with Hezbollah, about the looming threat of Iran, and about the US-Israel relationship. It was heartfelt, it was well delivered, and it was mostly not true.

He spoke about how Israel has allowed so much food into Gaza that any accusations of hunger as collective punishment are absurd. Sadly, it is his statement that strains credibility. The accounts of hunger are widespread and well documented.

He spoke about how he will do anything and everything to bring home the hostages still being held in Gaza. And yet, at this very speech, seven Israeli family members of those hostages were arrested for the “crime” of wearing t-shirts reading “Seal the Deal Now”. Those grieving family members showed up in those shirts knowing that they could be arrested, but did so despite that risk because they cannot otherwise get their Prime Minister’s attention, unless it’s for a photo-op.

He also spoke about how Iran is funding the “anti-Israel” protest in the United States, including those that took place right outside of the Capitol Building yesterday. As someone who helped lead, and spoke at, one of those protests, I can assure you, that wasn’t true either. The protest I spoke at, organized by UnXeptable, a group of Israeli ex-pats living here in the United States and cosponsored by many American Jewish organizations, featured rabbis, IDF veterans, and hostage families. Each demanded that Netanyahu end the war, bring home the hostages, and stop prioritizing his own political survival over the good of the nation he is supposed to be leading.

One remarkable facet of Netanyahu’s speech was how few people were there to hear it. Approximately half of the Democratic caucus (and one Republican) declared that they were unwilling to be used as props for Netanyahu’s speech, and they didn’t go. And many of those who were there, including the senior Jewish member of Congress Jerry Nadler, made their disdain for Netanyahu very clear. Even Senator Chuck Schumer, a longtime friend of the Prime Minister, gave him barely a nod as he entered, and received even less in return. This of course stems from Senator Schumer’s remarks in May in which he said he believes “Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has lost his way and is an obstacle to peace in the region”.

Netanyahu spoke in English, but his real audience was back in Israel. He has, for his whole career, told Israelis that he and he alone knows how to “manage America”. That he can captivate Congress and build bipartisan support. Like most of his speech, it was never very true. But yesterday it was made absolutely clear that through his words, his actions, and his failed government, Netanyahu has alienated not only Democrats in Congress, but the many millions of Americans who they represent. If anything, Congress lags behind the opinions of those Americans, many of whom were surprised and disappointed to see that any Democrats showed up for the speech.

Between the protests outside, the members of Congress who skipped the speech, the hostage families who showed up only to get arrested, and the disdain that the speech was met with in Israel, it is clear that Netanyahu had a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.

 

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Durable Peace Isn’t Possible Without Palestine

Y.L. Al-Sheikh is a Palestinian-American writer and organizer active in the Democratic Socialists of America and in international solidarity work between Israel/Palestine and the United States. 

The prospective invasion of Rafah by Israel threatens to blow up not just the nation’s recent attempts at regional normalization, but to also provoke the ire of Egypt and Jordan, countries that walked long, hard diplomatic roads to reach peace with their neighbor. Rafah, the southernmost city in the Gaza strip, had a prewar population of 275,000, which has now swollen to over 1,300,000 people. It is currently the last place for most of the Palestinians of Gaza to find refuge, given the scale of destruction throughout the north forcing them south toward the Egyptian border.

It is in this context that we are witnessing some of the harshest exchanges between Israel and its Arab neighbors, including the Jordanians and Egyptians, since the 1973 war fifty years ago. This regional deterioration comes at a time that the Biden Administration is rebooting its multi-year effort to broker a security and normalization deal between Saudi Arabia and Israel, despite fierce skepticism both at home from Senate Democrats and abroad from Israel’s ultra-right governing coalition.

With a resurgent intensity in rage among the Egyptian and Jordanian peoples in response to Israel’s military campaigns in occupied Palestine, the governments of these two states are feeling the pressure to respond. In Egypt’s case, with echoes of the Nakba on the mind and fears of hundreds of thousands refugees being exiled into the Sinai, they have publicly raised the prospect of terminating the 1979 treaty of peace based on the Camp David accords. On the other side of Israel’s frontier, the government of the Kingdom of Jordan, which has a majority Palestinian population, was recently instructed by its parliament to review all existing agreements with Israel, including the 1994 treaty of peace which was signed in part with the expectation that a Palestinian state would soon come to fruition via Oslo. These actions, though perhaps largely symbolic at the moment, underscore a more serious lesson that has been forced upon the West since the beginning of the war: the prospects for durable peace and prosperity in the region are slim to none without a meaningful path to Palestinian liberation.

Cracks in this orientalist belief that the Palestinians could be sidelined permanently and without consequence were already showing long before October 7th, with the Biden administration facing rising domestic pressure over the three and a half years of his first term. Prominent Democrats across the political spectrum of the party, from internationalist progressives like Bernie Sanders and Rashida Tlaib to national security centrists like Chris Van Hollen and Tim Kaine, have vented frustration with the lack of pushback against Israel’s most extreme government in history.

Before the war, President Biden’s record on Israel-Palestine looked eerily similar to his predecessor’s, with the president nominally maintaining key elements of Pompeo doctrine on settlement policy, upholding Trump’s recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan heights and implicit recognition of Israel’s control over a supposedly “united” Jerusalem, and a failure to follow through on the campaign promise to reopen the consulate for Palestinians in East Jerusalem. It took until February 23, 2024, over three years into this administration’s term, for the first of a series of possible reversals by the Biden administration of any part of the Pompeo doctrine. It remains unclear at this time if this policy change will include a reversal in how products made in the settlements must be labeled, as the administration currently mandates that Israeli products made in the occupied West Bank be marked as “made in Israel”. To the administration’s credit, an executive order was issued which allows for sanctions to be imposed on violent settlers and those who do business with them, and there is speculation that the mechanism will be used more often in the near future.

Polling data indicated that younger voters disapproved of Biden’s handling of the May-June War of 2021, just as they are disapproving today of his handling of the current war, and in early 2023 a Gallup poll had shown that for the first time ever Democratic voters had more sympathy for Palestinians than they did for Israelis. In this context, it is not surprising that Senate Democrats are demanding real concessions for Palestinians in exchange for approving any tentative treaty between Saudi Arabia and the United States. The “price” for such a treaty since the brutal Israeli campaign that has killed over 12,000 Palestinian children has gone up significantly, both from the perspective of Democrats and of Saudi Crown Prince MBS, with the latter now demanding that Israel take “irreversible steps” towards the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Yet there have also been rumblings against the suddenly revived two-state paradigm itself. We are now more than twenty five years removed from the signing of the first Oslo agreement, which neither explicitly promised a Palestinian state nor set a defined time table for the establishment of such a state, and the failures of the much talked-about peace process are leading some to embrace alternative frameworks for peace. Rashida Tlaib is  currently the only member of Congress to formally endorse a secular, binational state for all of its citizens, but her skepticism of two states for two peoples is being echoed in the international arena.

In a bombshell interview last year, former Jordanian DPM and FM Marwan Muasher stated that it was his view that Jordan should sever all relations with Israel and begin to push the international community towards a single state or confederal model that respects Palestinian and Jewish Israeli rights alike. Muasher was the architect of the 1994 treaty of peace between Jordan and Israel, and his view is indicative of how some in Jordan are beginning to feel about the post-Oslo political landscape. Likewise, the “one-state reality” as a framework for understanding the conflict has gained salience on the heels of reports issued by B’Tselem, Amnesty, and Human Rights Watch calling Israel’s multifaceted regime over all Palestinians between the Mediterranean and River a system of apartheid. In May of 2021, Congresswomen Bush, Ocasio-Cortez, and Tlaib all asserted that “apartheid states are not democracies”. Despite these shifts, the Biden administration seems intent on trying to revive partition as the United States’ official framework for peace, and a detailed plan could be unveiled within the next month.

However, the current philosophy of unequivocal support to Israel makes the United States one of the biggest obstacles to a negotiated peace, rather than a facilitator of it. So long as this administration and any successive one is intent on being Israel’s lawyer above all else, intervening on Israel’s behalf in every diplomatic forum and providing it with unconditional military support, there will be no reason for Israel to compromise and certainly no reason for Palestinians to trust the Americans to be a fair mediator. For peace to be given a chance of seriously succeeding, regardless of the minute details of the final political framework, Biden will not just have to finally reverse the damage that his predecessor created, but go beyond all of his predecessors and make clear that a just settlement will be based on international law and the dignity of not just Israelis, but the Palestinians as well. As Rashid Khalidi says towards the end of his book A Hundred Years’ War On Palestine, negotiations “should stress complete equality of treatment of both peoples, and be based on the Hague and Fourth Geneva conventions, the United Nations Charter with its stress on national self determination, and all relevant UN Security Council and General Assembly resolutions, not just those cherry-picked by the United States to favor Israel.”

Anything less will doom this president to the same fate as Clinton, Bush, and Obama, failed authors of ephemeral treaties, of which nothing besides missed opportunity remains.