Netanyahu Commands, US Obeys
U.S. support for Israel’s genocide against Palestine is rooted not only in campaign financing but in other factors, including a rigid ideology stuck in the shadow of World War II, writes Joe Lauria.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed a joint session of Congress on Tuesday, March 3, 2015. (U.S. Congress/Wikimedia Commons)
America as ‘Savior,’ Israel as ‘Victim’
By Joe Lauria
Special to Consortium News
The world-historical crisis in Gaza might in the long-term bring about radical change in both the U.S. and Israel, but in the interim the greatest crimes the two nations have jointly taken part in has stiffened their defenses against unprecedented criticism.
The fear of blasting Israel has been breached. The taboo broken. Tel Aviv and Washington have never faced this before. As both are settler nations, having wiped out natives across the land, they are circling their wagons on a new frontier. They can only respond with the most profound denial and viciousness.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who addresses a joint-session of Congress on Wednesday the subject of a requested arrest warrant at the International Criminal Court, has demanded the United States shield Israel from criticism while continuing to arm and support its genocide — and the U.S. has answered his call.
When the Biden administration withheld a symbolic shipment of weapons to Israel, Netanyahu counted on Congress to draft a law that would withhold funding for the State Dept. and the Pentagon if Biden did not give Netanyahu the weapons he needs to “finish the job” in Gaza.
Biden’s withholding of the shipment was designed to fool U.S. voters critical of his Gaza policy. But the assault on Rafah — despite Biden’s supposed red line — continues, and so will unconditional U.S. support for Israel. The question is why.
Why will U.S. politicians risk losing elections to continue supporting the most unimaginable crimes? The answer lies beyond elections and individual politicians.
Continued support for Israel in the midst of genocide threatens the very legitimacy of U.S. post-war rule as the world turns increasingly against the U.S. and Israel.
Despite this, what makes U.S. leaders so enthralled to a foreign nation and leader who has angered several U.S. presidents?
For instance, why did U.S. leaders, essentially on the say-so of that foreign leader, turn against their own university students on U.S. soil peacefully protesting both Israel’s genocide and Washington’s complicity in it?
In a video address to America delivered April 24 in his American-accented English, Netanyahu ordered that anti-genocide protests on U.S. campuses be stopped. And they have been. It is worth quoting his entire remarks. He said:
“What’s happening on American college campuses is horrific. Anti-semitic mobs have taken over leading universities. They call for the annihilation of Israel. They attack Jewish students. They attack Jewish faculty.
This is reminiscent of what happened in German universities in the 1930s. It is unconscionable. It has to be stopped. It has to be condemned and condemned unequivocally.
But that’s not what happened. The response of several university presidents was shameful. Now fortunately, state, local, federal officials, many of them have responded differently but there has to be more. More has to be done.
It has to be done not only because they attack Israel, that’s bad enough. Not only because they want to kill Jews wherever they are. That’s bad enough. It’s also, when you listen to them, it’s also because they say, not only death to Israel, death to the Jews, but death to America.
And this tells us that there is an anti-semitic surge here that has terrible consequences. We see this exponential rise of anti-semitism throughout America and throughout Western societies as Israel tries to defend itself against genocidal terrorists who hide behind civilians.
Yet it is Israel that is falsely accused of genocide. Israel that is falsely accused of starvation and all sundry war crimes. It’s all one big libel. But that’s not new.
We have seen in history that anti-Semitic attacks were always preceded by vilification and slander. Lies that were cast against the Jewish people that are unbelievable, yet people believe them.
And what is important now, is for all of us, all of us who are interested and cherish our values and our civilization to stand up together and to say: enough is enough.
We have to stop anti-Semitism because anti-Semitism is the canary in the coal mine. It always precedes larger conflagrations that engulf the entire world.
So I ask all of you, Jews and non-Jews alike, who concerned with our common future and our common values, to do one thing: Stand up, speak up, be counted. Stop anti-Semitism now.”
Brazen
Netanyahu uttered a dozen lies in that 339-word message, which got 18.4 million views on X. There are five lies in the first five sentences alone:
1). the students are not “anti-semitic mobs” but protestors, many Jews, against genocide; 2.) they are calling for a free and independent Palestine, not the “annihilation” of Israel; 3.) they are not attacking Jewish students, but Israel’s war; 4). they are not attacking Jewish faculty, unless calling out Israel’s crimes is considered an attack on Jews; and 5). Jews were banned from German universities in the 1930s, making such a comparison to the U.S. today a ludicrous lie.
And what exactly does Netanyahu mean by the “annihilation” of Israel, a phrase he repeatedly utters?
If Israel granted full citizenship rights to Palestinians in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank, would that mean the “annihilation” of Israel, or the annihilation of apartheid in Israel? The real annihilation going on is that of Gaza by Israel.
More outrageous was Netanyahu’s lie that American student protestors “want to kill Jews wherever they are” and want “death” to Israel and America. He lies about a “surge” of anti-Semitism. In a clinical case of projection, Netanyahu said Israel is “falsely accused of genocide” of “starvation” and of “all sundry war crimes.”
In Lock-Step
Instead of outrage at this litany of obvious falsehoods, U.S. officials and media echoed Netanyahu’s words. The White House, Congress, newspapers, universities and police responded in lock-step, criminalizing students in their own their country for opposing an active genocide.
At the Capitol for Holocaust Remembrance Day on May 7, Biden framed the Oct. 7 attack as purely motivated by hatred of Jews, whitewashing the entire 80-year history of ethnic cleansing and occupation of Palestinians by Israel. He repeated Netanyahu, saying:
“This ancient hatred of Jews didn’t begin with the Holocaust; it didn’t end with the Holocaust, either, or after — or even after our victory in World War Two. This hatred continues to lie deep in the hearts of too many people in the world, and it requires our continued vigilance and outspokenness. That hatred was brought to life on October 7th in 2023.
Driven by ancient desire to wipeout the Jewish people off the face of the Earth, over 1,200 innocent people — babies, parents, grandparents — slaughtered in their kibbutz, massacred at a musical festival, brutally raped, mutilated, and sexually assaulted.
And as Jews around the world still cope with the atrocities and trauma of that day and its aftermath, we’ve seen a ferocious surge of antisemitism in America and around the world: vicious propaganda on social media, Jews forced to keep their — hide their kippahs under baseball hats, tuck their Jewish stars into their shirts.
On college campuses, Jewish students blocked, harassed, attacked while walking to class.
Antisemitism — antisemitic posters, slogans calling for the annihilation of Israel, the world’s only Jewish State.”
Biden pushed the lie that Palestinian violence against Israelis is motivated by anti-Semitism rather than against occupation. Surely there are anti-Semites among Palestinians, but we aren’t dealing with a people attacking another for no other reason than the irrational hatred of their ethnicity.
During a trip to Israel in 2011 I posed the same question to nearly every Israeli I met: “Why do they hate you?” The less educated the respondent, the more often I heard, “Because we are Jews,” and the more educated, the more I heard an admission that Israel had stolen Palestinian land.
Biden is peddling the same propaganda as Netanyahu, who has perennially provoked irrational fear among Israelis of “annihilation” — in other words a new Holocaust — and then presented himself as their savior and protector. His power seems to depend on it. But what is Biden’s and other U.S. politicians’ motivation?
Occupied Capitol Territory
March for Israel, Washington, Nov. 14, 2023. (tedeytan/Wikimedia Commons)
There are few signs of empathy for Gaza on Capitol Hill, long the most fertile ground for Israel in America.
After Netanyahu’s April 24 speech, U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said on the floor that it is “unacceptable when Jewish students are targeted for being Jewish, when protests exhibit verbal abuse, systematic intimidation or glorification of the murderous and hateful Hamas or the violence of Oct. 7.”
Extremist Sen. Tom Cotton went further, declaring on Fox News, that “Joe Biden has a duty to protect these Jewish students from what is a nascent pogrom on these campuses. These are scenes like you’ve seen out of the 1930s in Germany.”
Four days later, U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson said on Capitol Hill:
“Antisemitism is a virus and because the administration and woke university presidents aren’t stepping in, we’re seeing it spread…. Nearly every committee here has a role to play in these efforts to stop the madness that has ensued.”
What resulted was the U.S. House passing a bill on May 1, a week after Netanyahu spoke, that would radically redefine anti-Semitism to essentially outlaw speech that criticizes the Israeli government or Zionism. Universities could potentially lose federal funding if it does not shut down such speech.
Check out the 11 instances of anti-Semitism proposed by the bill, including criticizing Israel, which has gone to the Senate. Congress is also ready to come to the rescue of Israeli leaders if the International Criminal Court actually indicted them for war crimes.
Obedient Media
The U.S. media has long told the story almost exclusively from Israel’s point of view. That has conditioned the U.S. public, and its political leaders, to give unconditional support for Israel and expect ostracization for criticizing it.
CNN’s chief political correspondent, Dana Bash, for instance, editorialized on a news show a week after Netanyahu spoke about U.S. campus protests that the students had “lost the plot.” …
“You don’t hear the pro-Palestinian protestors talking about” Oct. 7., she said angrily. “What you’ve seen is 2024 in Los Angeles, harkens back to the 1930s in Europe. And I do not say that lightly. The fear among Jews in this country is palpable.” Almost word-for-word Netanyahu.
And his words, filtered through U.S. politicians and media had consequences. Hours after Netanyahu spoke on April 24, police at Columbia University aggressively moved in to arrest students.
“There should be no place on any campus, no place in America, for antisemitism or threats of violence against Jewish students,” Biden had said. “None of this is a peaceful protest.”
But as Chicago University professor John Mearsheimer asks, was there an anti-Semitism problem on American campuses before Israel’s attack on Gaza?
Could Have Stopped It
Biden could have stopped the genocide immediately by withholding all weapons, military aid and diplomatic cover — which any decent man with such power would have done. Instead Biden engaged in public relations while the Gazan public was decimated, pretending to oppose Netanyahu and caring for Palestinian civilians.
Likewise Biden’s State Department tried to play it both ways: feinting to the American public that it was ready to criticize Israel for its mistreatment of civilians, while taking no action. The State Department even said it had evidence Israel may have broken international humanitarian law, but not enough to cut off arms shipments.
As The New York Times reported it:
“The Biden administration believes that Israel has most likely violated international standards in failing to protect civilians in Gaza but has not found specific instances that would justify the withholding of military aid, the State Department told Congress … the report — which seemed at odds with itself in places — said the U.S. had no hard proof of Israeli violations.”
For Netanyahu’s and members of his cabinet who have expressed genocidal intent, this is the chance they have been waiting for, to fulfill Israeli Founding Father David Ben Gurion’s promise of a Greater Israel. The war to wipe out Hamas is a cover for wiping out the Palestinians from Gaza.
Whatever Biden or the State Department says, Israel will continue with its genocidal urban renewal plan in Gaza by bombing buildings with people still living in them with a view to replacing them with Israeli and Western-owned beachfront property (with an Israeli gas pipeline through it). It is evidently a plan Biden and Blinken, and presumably Kamala Harris, agree with.
According to the Jewish News Syndicate:
“Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir declared at the event [on May 14] that the government should encourage voluntary emigration of Palestinians from the Strip.
‘Two things must be done: One, return to Gaza now, return home, return to our holy land. And two: encouraging emigration. To encourage the voluntary departure of the residents of Gaza. It’s moral, it’s rational, it’s right, it’s the truth. This is the Torah and this is the only way—yes, it is also humanitarian,’ the minister told attendees.”
In response to Biden’s “pause” in shipments, Netanyahu said Israel would fight with its “fingernails” if it needed to in Rafah.
Angered US Presidents
Sept. 1, 2010: From left: Palestine Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu before working dinner with U.S. President Barack Obama, on right. (White House/ Pete Souza)
Several American presidents have in rare instances stood up to Israel. President Dwight D. Eisenhower threatened sanctions against Israel over the 1956 Suez Crisis to get Tel Aviv, Paris and London to end its military operation against Egypt and for Israel to withdraw from the Sinai Peninsula.
Ronald Reagan in 1983 withheld F16s to Israel until it withdrew from Lebanon. “While these forces are in the position of occupying another country that now has asked them to leave, we are forbidden by law to release those planes,’ he said.
And in 1992, George H.W. Bush threatened to withhold a $10 billion loan guarantee if Israel continued building settlements in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, according to The Washington Post. And yet Israel always seems to get its way.
In his review of Netanyahu’s memoir Bibi: My Story, As’ad AbuKhalil wrote last year in Consortium News:
“Netanyahu’s analysis of U.S.-Israeli relations is simple: no matter what Israel does, and no matter how many wars and invasions it launches, the ‘alliance with the U.S. will take care of itself.’ He correctly believes that U.S. presidents will stand by Israel no matter what … ” (p. 84).
Despite this, we learn from the book that a succession of U.S. presidents disliked Netanyahu but would not stand up to him as previous presidents had to earlier prime ministers. AbuKhalil writes:
“Netanyahu does not mind that his rude behavior and political chutzpah irked U.S. presidents.
He cites former U.S. President Bill Clinton demanding of him: ‘Who’s the f-ing leader of the free world?’ (p. 227). But Netanyahu is assured that no American president would ever allow their annoyance with him to change U.S. policy because Congress would never end U.S. unconditional support for Israeli occupation and aggression.”
About Barack Obama and Biden, he quotes Netanyahu as writing:
“Netanyahu claims that Obama tried to intimidate him by reminding him that he came from Chicago (p. 371). Netanyahu says: ‘The prime minister of Israel was being treated as a minor thug in the neighborhood.’ But then Vice-President Joe Biden assured Netanyahu that he could always count on him saying: ‘I’m the one friend you do have. So, call me when you need to.’
But later, even Biden protested at Netanyahu’s rudeness toward Obama, when he lectured him in the Oval Office before the press. Biden told him: ‘We’re a proud country. And no one, but no one, has the right to humiliate the president of the United States.’”
AbuKhalil writes:
“Netanyahu admits that in 2011 Obama decided to ‘ease the pressure on’ him in order to secure reelection. Obama gave an address at the United Nations that Netanyahu describes as ‘the most pro-Israel speech he would give’ (p. 419). Obama in that speech spoke about how Arabs want to ‘wipe [Israel] off the map.’ Who is calling for wiping Israel off the map when there is not a single Middle East country with the power to wipe off any nation?
Of course, Israel with its nuclear weapons, is the only country with the capability to wipe out other countries. Furthermore, in talking about ‘threats’ to wipe out Israel, no American leader has ever considered that the Palestinian nation was actually wiped out by Zionist forces in 1948. History of the holy land begins in 1948, as far as U.S. leaders are concerned.”
Four years later, the Republicans in Congress humiliated Obama by inviting Netanyahu to address a joint session of Congress without even informing the president.
‘America Can Be Easily Moved’
Ultimate obedience to Netanyahu in the U.S. brings to mind a video of him speaking to an Israeli settler family in Hebrew in 2001 about how easy it is to manipulate the Americans.
He says, “With the U.S., I know how they are. America is a thing you can easily maneuver and move in the right direction. Even if they say something, so what? Eighty percent of Americans support us.”
About the Palestinians, Netanyahu says: “The main thing is, first of all, to strike them, not once but several times, so painfully, that the price they pay will be unbearable. So far the price-tag is not unbearable.”
One of the family says, “But then the world will say we are the aggressors.”
“They can say whatever they want,” Netanyahu responds.
His opportunity to make the pain “unbearable” appears now, 23 years later, as he has already officially killed more than 39,000 Palestinians [nearly 200,000 according to The Lancet,] provoking the righteous anger of American students whom he dared compare to Nazis.
Why?
Why then do American politicians, universities and media slavishly follow whatever Israel demands? There is more than one answer:
1. AIPAC’s campaign financing;
2. Lingering guilt over the holocaust and fear of being labeled an anti-semite;
3. A natural, historical connection between settler, colonial nations founded on ethnic cleansing and genocide;
4. Power-sharing in the Middle East with overlapping regional and international empires;
5. Israeli intelligence possessing kompromat on U.S. politicians.
6. Keeping a World War II ideology alive to justify global and local supremacy.
Money
The answer most often given to the question is campaign contributions for politicians, who want to avoid being “primaried” by Israel Lobby money. The American–Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) raises more than $100 million a year, which it spends on lobbying and campaign contributions to U.S. political candidates.
Universities are also dependent on wealthy donors, many who demand total loyalty to Israel, which goes a long way to explaining why U.S. universities asked police to break up peaceful, anti-genocide protests on their campus.
But it isn’t only about money.
Holocaust
Western governments retain inherited guilt for their deplorable behavior during the Second World War regarding the Holocaust. Germany, naturally, is at the top of the list of the still guilty parties, and is the second largest arms supplier to Israel after the United States.
This residual guilt has created a condition in which the descendants of the victims are still immune to criticism 80 years later in an almost inexhaustible supply of sympathy that Israeli leaders clearly exploit.
Former Israeli government minister Shulamit Aloni was asked by Amy Goodman in a 2002 interview: “Often when there is dissent expressed in the United States against policies of the Israeli government, people here are called antisemitic. What is your response to that as an Israeli Jew?”
She replied “Well, it’s a trick, we always use it. When from Europe somebody is criticizing Israel, then we bring up the Holocaust. When in this country [the U.S.] people are criticizing Israel, then they are anti-semitic.”
There is an “Israel, my country right or wrong” attitude and “they’re not ready to hear criticism,” she said. Anti-semitism, the Holocaust and “the suffering of the Jewish people” are exploited to “justify everything we do to the Palestinians,” Aloni said.
‘Cowboys and Indians’
In 2011 I interviewed Georges Corm, a former Lebanese finance minister, in his Beirut office. To help an American audience understand the Israeli occupation of all of historic Palestine, he likened what Israel did to the story of “cowboys and Indians, and the Palestinians are the Indians.”
In this way he said, the shared settler, colonial experience of cleansing their conquered lands of the existing population created a strong bond between Israel and America. The mythological role of the Old Testament search for a “promised land” also still joins the nations together, he said.
There is deep ignorance in America about the foundation of Israel, exploded by some Israeli historians, especially by Ilan Pappé, whose book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, documented the intent of Israel’s founders to drive more than 700,000 of the indigenous population off their land into neighboring countries, and killing hundreds of thousands more in an unbroken process now playing out in Gaza.
Overlapping Empires
(Amoruso/Wikipedia/Wikimedia Commons)
According to Electronic Intifada:
“As early as 1937, Ben-Gurion wrote that the ‘boundaries of the Zionist aspirations are the concern of the Jewish people and no external factor will be able to limit them.’
Ben-Gurion also hoped for the expansion of ‘Zionist aspirations’ to Israel’s ‘biblical borders’ (which stretch all the way to Iraq). There is no mention of or reference to the Indigenous population in this vision.”
An explanation of the geography of the Biblical Land of Israel is found in Genesis 15:18–21, which defines the land promised to the children of Abraham:
“On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram and said, ‘To your descendants I give this land, from the Wadi of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates— 19 the land of the Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites, 20 Hittites, Perizzites, Rephaites, 21 Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites and Jebusites.’”
From Egypt to the Euphrates.
In this interview clip, Ben-Gurion says Israel did not “compel” Arab Palestinians to leave their land.
But other early Israeli leaders were quite open about their project. This is what Moshe Dayan, then chief of the Israeli general staff, said in 1956 about Gaza:
“What cause have we to complain about their fierce hatred to us? For eight years now, they sit in their refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we turn into our homestead the land and villages in which they and their forefathers have lived. … We are a generation of settlers, and without the steel helmet and gun barrel, we shall not be able to plant a tree or build a house. . . . Let us not be afraid to see the hatred that accompanies and consumes the lives of hundreds of thousands of Arabs who sit all around us and wait for the moment when their hands will be able to reach our blood.”
The launch of Israel and the Greater Israel project coincided with the beginning of the post-war U.S. global empire, which overlapped in the Middle East with Israel’s burgeoning regional empire. Israel and its regional ambitions became a natural footprint for U.S. dominance in the region: namely the subjugation of Arab peoples and rulers.
Thus for the continuance of U.S. empire and all the benefits it accrues to U.S. rulers in the face of growing worldwide opposition, it is natural for Washington to continue supporting Israeli expansionism — no matter the horrendous human cost.
Blackmail
One cannot easily dismiss talk of Israeli intelligence gathering blackmail dirt on American politicians to keep them in line beyond campaign bribes. According to Ari Ben-Menashe, a former Israeli military intelligence official, such blackmail is a part of Israeli tactics. For instance, he told Consortium News‘ CN Live! in 2020 that the child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein was collecting such kompromat on powerful Americans.
Mired in WWII
Part of the ideology driving the America-Israel dominance regionally and globally is mired in the shadow of the Second World War: the delusion that the U.S. is still the world’s savior and that Jews are still active victims of history. It’s as if 80 years have not passed.
Jews were certainly among the war’s greatest victims, but America was not the sole or even the chief savior, given the outsized role of the Soviet Union in destroying the Nazis.
After the war, the United States was left with troops around the globe, in areas of great natural resources in a devastated world, whose devastation didn’t touch the American mainland.
A worldwide empire was the result. U.S. leaders have been dedicated to expanding and maintaining it ever since by installing and propping up governments that serve U.S. economic and strategic interests and removing those that don’t. This is done through electoral interference, coups and invasions that have killed millions of innocent lives in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Latin America and elsewhere.
To maintain a kind of moral veneer to justify America’s global marauding as “spreading democracy” a connection to the moral war against fascism needs to be maintained. So World War II is invoked constantly by American leaders when embarking on new overseas adventures.
A telltale sign that Washington is planning to overthrow a foreign government for not obeying America is when U.S. officials hearken back to World War II to call that leader “Hitler.”
Saddam Hussein was Hitler. Slobodan Milosevic was Hitler. Manuel Noriega was Hitler. Moamar Gadaffi was Hitler. And Vladimir Putin is Hitler.
To convince themselves they are a force for good, rather than bloodthirsty adventurists feasting on other peoples’ resources, American leaders wrap themselves in the banner of the Second World War.
How cynical is it for descendants of survivors of the Second World War genocide to invoke the Holocaust to perpetrate a genocide of their own?
This confusion still clearly pervades Germany today. In their guilt over their genocide of the Jews and their determination never to let it happen again they are stuck in the World War II past and cannot accept that Israel can possibly be the perpetrators of genocide 80 years later.
So protests against Israeli actions in Germany are seen as protests against Jews and have to be stopped, as the police did in May at Humboldt University in Berlin in the very plaza where Josef Goebbels led the Nazi burning of books.
German police shut down an academic conference about Gaza that month in Berlin. In their misguided fervor to stop another genocide the Germans are supporting one, sending more arms to perpetrate the massacres in Gaza than any nation but the United States.
The last scene in the 2009 film Defamation by Israeli filmmaker Yoav Shamir shows an Israeli teenager who was on a school trip to Auschwitz. She went as a typical teenager excited about taking her first airplane. By the end of the trip she says says she’d like to kill all the Nazis who did that to her people. Told that they are now dead, she chillingly says, “They have heirs.”
The 15-year old film shows how an irrational exaggeration of anti-Semitism and fear of a new genocide against Jews is deliberately fostered by Israel and the film makes a plea for Israelis to stop fixating on the past and look to the future.
But it seems way too late for that.
Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette, the London Daily Mail and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He is the author of two books, A Political Odyssey, with Sen. Mike Gravel, foreword by Daniel Ellsberg; and How I Lost By Hillary Clinton, foreword by Julian Assange.
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