Members of Congress should boycott Netanyahu’s address, and the public should join the protests being organized during his visit.
On Wednesday, July 24, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is set to deliver his record-setting fourth address to a Joint Session of Congress. Here are 10 compelling reasons why he should not have been invited and why members of Congress should boycott his visit:
Humanitarian Crisis in Gaza: Under Netanyahu’s leadership, the Israeli government has killed tens of thousands of people in Gaza, predominantly women and children; has forcibly displaced 90% of the population; and has used starvation as a weapon, plunging Gaza into a famine that will likely result in thousands more dead.
International Criminal Court (ICC) Arrest Warrant: The chief prosecutor of the ICC is seeking an arrest warrant for Netanyahu on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
International Court of Justice Ruling on Occupied Territories: The International Court of Justice has just issued an unprecedented, sweeping condemnation of Israel’s illegal occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, a ruling that Netanyahu has denounced as he continues to green light new settlement construction and empower violent settlers.
Child Rights Abuses:The United Nations secretary-general has listed Netanyahu’s government as a violator of children’s rights, citing horrific instances of abuse and mistreatment of Palestinian children. Netanyahu responded by attacking the United Nations, saying, “The U.N. put itself on the black list of history today.”
Corruption Charges: Netanyahu is currently under criminal prosecution in Israel for bribery, fraud, and conflict of interest. That’s why U.S. President Joe Biden said it was “reasonable” to conclude that Netanyahu was prolonging the war in Gaza for his political benefit.
Judicial Independence: Netanyahu has been attempting to undermine the impartiality and independence of the Israeli judiciary. Before October 7, there were massive protests against his efforts to weaken judicial oversight.
Intelligence Failure: Netanyahu is responsible for the monumental intelligence failure on October 7, 2023, which led to the devastating Hamas terrorist attack. It is considered the worst Israeli intelligence failure since the surprise attack that led to the Arab-Israeli war of 1973.
Torture and Abuse: Netanyahu’s government has been implicated in the torture and abuse of thousands of Palestinian detainees. Over 9,000 Palestinians from the West Bank have been detained since October 7, while thousands more have been “forcibly disappeared” from Gaza. Netanyahu’s far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has advocated denying prisoners sufficient food and water and called for the government to deal with overcrowding by shooting prisoners in the head.
Opposition to a Cease-Fire: While President Biden put forward a cease-fire plan that supposedly came from Israel, Netanyahu immediately dismissed the plan, saying, “We’re committed to continuing the war after the truce,” and that the idea that Israel would agree to a permanent cease-fire before Hamas was destroyed was a “non-starter.” Netanyahu’s government lacks a plan to end the conflict with Hamas other than the extermination of Palestinians.
No Interest in a Long-Term Solution: On July 17, the Israeli Knesset voted overwhelmingly by 68 to 9 to reject any creation of a Palestinian state, a policy that has been the stated goal of the U.S. government. Netanyahu’s cabinet includes officials such as Security Minister Ben-Gvir and Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi who have called for the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza.
For these reasons, members of Congress should boycott Netanyahu’s address and the public should join the protests being organized during his visit.
Demonstrators protest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The House Committee on Education and the Workplace, headed by the increasingly unhinged Rep. Virginia Palmieri Foxx (R-NC), held another Stalin-style show trial on Thursday, grilling the presidents of Northwestern University, Rutgers University, and the University of California Los Angeles about how they dealt with campus student protests against the […]
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The House Committee on Education and the Workplace, headed by the increasingly unhinged Rep. Virginia Palmieri Foxx (R-NC), held another Stalin-style show trial on Thursday, grilling the presidents of Northwestern University, Rutgers University, and the University of California Los Angeles about how they dealt with campus student protests against the Gaza atrocity. The clown car on Capitol Hill even tried to pick up yours truly. (Yes.)
Foxx and her MAGA colleagues are much more concerned about cracking the heads of principled undergraduates than about the 15,000 dead children in Gaza.
One of the presidents on the hot seat was Northwestern’s Michael Schill, who had dealt with the protests about as well as a person in his position could have, negotiating an agreement with the demonstrating students that included providing for two-year visiting fellowships for two Palestinian faculty and full scholarships for five Palestinian undergraduates. When I was an undergraduate, I had a full scholarship to Northwestern, so I don’t see what is wrong with that.
Schill, a descendant of Holocaust survivors, had to put up with angry Christian neo-fascists telling him how to run the university and keep Jewish students safe. Many of the university protesters have been idealistic young Jews from movements like Jewish Voice for Peace. Schill underlined that he had set up a commission on antisemitism on campus.
I can say, since the crackpot Rep. Tim Walberg spilled the beans, that the committee at Northwestern, which was concerned to include perspectives on Islamophobia and anti-Arab bigotry, asked me to give a presentation.
Walberg confronted Schill on my testimony, accusing me of being an antisemite. Since I am the director of the Arab and Muslim American Studies Program at the University of Michigan and have spent 52 years studying Arab and Islamic Culture (I started first year Arabic in 1972), I have the credentials, if I do say so myself, to speak about anti-Arab and anti-Muslim hate. Walberg does not, of course. In fact, he is a notorious racist against those very groups.
But let’s get this straight. A commission on fighting antisemitism and other forms of bigotry at Northwestern asked me to make a presentation to them, and I did. And my testimony against antisemitism and other forms of bigotry is being used by Walberg to prove that I’m an antisemite?
I actually have written about Walberg, possibly the most bigoted member of Congress, which is saying a lot. I pointed out a couple of months ago,
“US Representative Tim Walberg (R-MI), a former pastor, called this week for a genocide, the Final Solution of the Palestinian Problem . . .
At a meeting in Dundee with constituents on March 25, Walberg said that President Biden had spoken of our need to get aid into Gaza. He said, “I don’t think we should. I don’t think any of our aid that goes to Israel, to support our greatest ally, arguably maybe in the world, to the feet of Hamas, and Iran, and Russia. Probably North Korea is in there and China, too — with them, helping Hamas. We shouldn’t be spending a dime on humanitarian aid. It should be like Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Get it over quick.”
“Nuking Gaza,” by Juan Cole, Digital, Dream / Dreamland v. 3 / IbisPaint, 2024.
Unfortunately for Walberg, who likely talks like this all the time with his inner circle of fellow sociopaths, his remarks were recorded.
Walberg has also visited Uganda, which made being gay a capital crime, urging its government to continue to kill gay people. And he is part of the movement to take reproductive choice away from women so as to keep them barefoot, pregnant and firmly under the control of men like himself.
Everybody should send money to the Democratic Party challenger to Walberg in Michigan’s fifth district, former steel worker and union stalwart Libbi Urban . I know I will.
Also if you want to help out Informed Comment, which appears to have upset the MAGA snowflakes in Congress, here’s how:
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Personal checks should be made out to Juan Cole and sent to me at:
Juan Cole P. O. Box 4218, Ann Arbor, MI 48104-2548 USA (Remember, make the checks out to “Juan Cole” or they can’t be cashed)
So why did Walberg say I am an antisemite? He quoted me as “claiming that Israel quote, was founded on a formal racial supremacist principle that Jews must rule the state, and that, quote, ‘The only thing that Palestinians and their sympathizers can do to make Zionists happy is to bend over and allow themselves to be royally screwed.'”
Of course, Walberg wasn’t actually alleging that I had said anything antisemitic, only that I criticized Israel, and MAGA is trying to equate the two, as though criticizing Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador is equivalent to bigotry toward Chicanos.
In 2018 I wrote a column on the Israeli Parliament’s passage of a law that vested “sovereignty” solely in the Jewish citizens of Israel, excluding the 21% who are of Palestinian heritage. I pointed out that this would be like the US Congress passing a law that sovereignty in the United States is vested solely in white Christians. (At the time I thought it far fetched,, but maybe Elise Stefanik, Virginia Foxx and Tim Walberg have such plans).
So I wrote, “2018 was in many ways a turning point for the position of Israel in the system of Western, liberal, capitalist democracies. It had long sat uneasily among France, Britain, and the United States, inasmuch as it was founded on a formal racial supremacist principle that Jews must rule the state. Racism is important in the other democracies, as well, but it is not typically enshrined in the constitution. The French Rights of Man mentioned nothing about race.” Anyone who knows anything about the thinking of founders of Israel such as David Ben Gurion, whom I am sure that Walberg has not read, knows that he precisely held that Israel would be a state for Jews where Jews must rule.
As for the second quote, it was in a 2015 column in which I complained about CNN firing Mark Lamont Hill. I pointed to the success of letter-writing and smear campaigns by pro-Israel groups in disallowing a compassionate consideration of the plight of Palestinians. In that column, I wrote:
This success is not because “Jews” are “powerful.” First of all, only a minority of Jewish Americans sympathize with the far right politics of the Likud Party. Jon Stewart used to complain tongue in cheek that if Jews were so powerful he ought to have been able to get off basic cable and have a network show.
The success is because right wing white people are so powerful, and many of them still have a latent belief in the goodness of colonialism and in the White Man’s Burden. Melanie McAlister argued brilliantly that for right wing Christian whites in the United States, the Israeli domination of the Palestinians is a symbolic reenactment of the Vietnam War, in which this time the “white people” (as they characterize themselves) win instead of losing. I.e., Israel functions as did those old Rambo movies.
One of the standard Israeli propaganda techniques is to equate any resistance to their frankly fascist techniques of social control imposed on the colonized Palestinians with “terrorism.” There is nothing new or strange about this. The British in India considered Gandhi a terrorist. Of course the colonial state views opposition as terrorism.
That same dishonest columnist at The Forward managed to reconfigure Hill’s activism as violence. The fact is that international law recognizes the right of occupied peoples to mount even violent resistance to occupation militaries. But that isn’t what Hill was calling for. And then, any violence is then twisted around as violence toward civilians. And there you have it. Terrorism.
The golden magic circle of Hasbara (Zionist propaganda) gives us: resistance= violence= terrorism.
The only thing the Palestinians and their sympathizers can do to make Zionists happy is to bend over and allow themselves to be royally screwed– or better yet, allow themselves to be deported from their homeland of millennia at the hands of the Russian and Polish immigrants.
As we speak, the Polish prime minister of Israel is trying to deport 2.2 million indigenous Palestinians from Gaza by making the Strip uninhabitable.
I think if you read the whole column it is pretty obvious it isn’t about Jews at all. It is about virulent right wing Zionism, which now rules Israel in an increasingly fascist manner.
The American right wing is now trying to equate criticism of the Israeli government with antisemitism, and if you let them do that, you may as well kiss the First Amendment goodbye.
Newark, Delaware (Special to Informed Comment) – In the words of the great poet Hafez, “Be happy that the tyrant did not make his way home” While all eyes were on Gaza and the genocide taking place, an event in the mountains of Iranian Azerbaijan changed the news. The death of President Ebrahim Raisi and […]
( Tomdispatch.com ) – There are constants in this world — occurrences you can count on. Sunrises and sunsets. The tides. That, day by day, people will be born and others will die. Some of them will die in peace, but others, of course, in violence and agony. For hundreds of years, the U.S. military […]
Some of them will die in peace, but others, of course, in violence and agony.
For hundreds of years, the U.S. military has been killing people. It’s been a constant of our history. Another constant has been American military personnel killing civilians, whether Native Americans, Filipinos, Nicaraguans, Haitians, Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians, Afghans, Iraqis, Syrians, Yemenis, and on and on. And there’s something else that’s gone along with those killings: a lack of accountability for them.
Late last month, the Department of Defense (DoD) released its congressionally mandated annual accounting of civilian casualties caused by U.S. military operations globally. The report is due every May 1st and, in the latest case, the Pentagon even beat that deadline by a week. There was only one small problem: it was the 2022 report. You know, the one that was supposed to be made public on May 1, 2023. And not only was that report a year late, but the 2023 edition, due May 1, 2024, has yet to be seen.
Whether that 2023 report, when it finally arrives, will say much of substance is also doubtful. In the 2022 edition, the Pentagon exonerated itself of harming noncombatants. “DoD has assessed that U.S. military operations in 2022 resulted in no civilian casualties,” reads the 12-page document. It follows hundreds of years of silence about, denials of, and willful disregard toward civilians slain purposely or accidentally by the U.S. military and a long history of failures to make amends in the rare cases where the Pentagon has admitted to killing innocents.
Moral Imperatives
“The Department recognizes that our efforts to mitigate and respond to civilian harm respond to both strategic and moral imperatives,” reads the Pentagon’s new 2022 civilian casualty report.
And its latest response to those “moral imperatives” was typical. The Defense Department reported that it had made no ex gratia payments — amends offered to civilians harmed in its operations — during 2022. That follows exactly one payment made in 2021 and zero in 2020.
Whether any payments were made in 2023 is still, of course, a mystery. I asked Lisa Lawrence, the Pentagon spokesperson who handles civilian harm issues, why the 2023 report was late and when to expect it. A return receipt shows that she read my email, but she failed to offer an answer.
Her reaction is typical of the Pentagon on the subject.
A 2020 study of post-9/11 civilian casualty incidents by the Center for Civilians in Conflict and Columbia Law School’s Human Rights Institute found that most went uninvestigated. When they did come under official scrutiny, American military witnesses were interviewed while civilians — victims, survivors, family members — were almost totally ignored, “severely compromising the effectiveness of investigations,” according to that report.
In the wake of such persistent failings, investigative reporters and human rights groups have increasingly documented America’s killing of civilians, its underreporting of noncombatant casualties, and its failures of accountability in Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere.
During the first 20 years of the war on terror, the U.S. conducted more than 91,000 airstrikes across seven major conflict zones and killed up to 48,308 civilians, according to a 2021 analysis by Airwars, a U.K.-based air-strike monitoring group.
Between 2013 and 2020, for example, the U.S. carried out seven separate attacks in Yemen — six drone strikes and one raid — that killed 36 members of the intermarried Al Ameri and Al Taisy families. A quarter of them were children between the ages of three months and 14 years old. The survivors have been waiting for years for an explanation as to why they were repeatedly targeted.
In 2018, Adel Al Manthari, a civil servant in the Yemeni government, and four of his cousins — all civilians — were traveling by truck when an American missile slammed into their vehicle. Three of the men were killed instantly. Another died days later in a local hospital. Al Manthari was critically injured. Complications resulting from his injuries nearly killed him in 2022. He beseeched the U.S. government to dip into the millions of dollars appropriated by Congress to compensate victims of American attacks, but they ignored his pleas. His limbs and life were eventually saved by the kindness of strangers via a crowdsourced GoFundMe campaign.
The same year that Al Manthari was maimed in Yemen, a U.S. drone strike in Somalia killed at least three, and possibly five, civilians, including 22-year-old Luul Dahir Mohamed and her 4-year-old daughter Mariam Shilow Muse. The next year, a U.S. military investigation acknowledged that a woman and child were killed in that attack but concluded that their identities might never be known. Last year, I traveled to Somalia and spoke with their relatives. For six years, the family has tried to contact the American government, including through U.S. Africa Command’s online civilian casualty reporting portal without ever receiving a reply.
In December 2023, following an investigation by The Intercept, two dozen human rights organizations — 14 Somali and 10 international groups — called on Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to compensate Luul and Mariam’s family for their deaths. This year, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Representatives Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), and Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) have also called on the Defense Department to make amends.
A 2021 investigation by New York Times reporter Azmat Khan revealed that the American air war in Iraq and Syria was marked by flawed intelligence and inaccurate targeting, resulting in the deaths of many innocents. Out of 1,311 military reports analyzed by Khan, only one cited a “possible violation” of the rules of engagement. None included a finding of wrongdoing or suggested a need for disciplinary action, while fewer than a dozen condolence payments were made. The U.S.-led coalition eventually admitted to killing 1,410 civilians during the war in Iraq and Syria. Airwars, however, puts the number at 2,024.
Several of the attacks detailed by Khan were brought to the Defense Department’s attention in 2022 but, according to their new report, the Pentagon failed to take action. Joanna Naples-Mitchell, director of the nonprofit Zomia Center’s Redress Program, which helps survivors of American air strikes submit requests for compensation, and Annie Shiel, U.S. advocacy director with the Center for Civilians in Conflict, highlighted several of these cases in a recent Just Security article.
In June 2022, for instance, the Redress Program submitted requests for amends from the Pentagon on behalf of two families in Mosul, Iraq, harmed in an April 29, 2016, air strike reportedly targeting an Islamic State militant who was unharmed in the attack. Khan reported that, instead, Ziad Kallaf Awad, a college professor, was killed and Hassan Aleiwi Muhammad Sultan, then 10 years old, was left wheelchair-bound. The Pentagon had indeed admitted that civilian casualties resulted from the strike in a 2016 press release.
In September 2022, the Redress Program also submitted ex gratia requests on behalf of six families in Mosul, all of them harmed by a June 15, 2016, air strike also investigated by Khan. Naples-Mitchel and Shiel note that Iliyas Ali Abd Ali, then running a fruit stand near the site of the attack, lost his right leg and hearing in one ear. Two brothers working in an ice cream shop were also injured, while a man standing near that shop was killed. That same year, the Pentagon did confirm that the strike had resulted in civilian casualties.
However, almost eight years after acknowledging civilian harm in those Mosul cases and almost two years after the Redress Program submitted the claims to the Defense Department, the Pentagon has yet to offer amends.
Getting to “Yes”
While the U.S. military has long been killing civilians — in massacres by ground troops, air strikes and even, in August 1945, nuclear attacks — compensating those harmed has never been a serious priority.
General John “Black Jack” Pershing did push to adopt a system to pay claims by French civilians during World War I and the military in World War II found that paying compensation for harm to civilians “had a pronounced stabilizing effect.” The modern military reparations system, however, dates only to the 1960s.
During the Vietnam War, providing “solatia” was a way for the military to offer reparations for civilian injuries or deaths caused by U.S. operations without having to admit any guilt. In 1968, the going rate for an adult life was $33. Children merited just half that.
In 1973, a B-52 Stratofortress dropped 30 tons of bombs on the Cambodian town of Neak Luong, killing hundreds of civilians and wounding hundreds more. The next of kin of those killed, according to press reports, were promised about $400 each. Considering that, in many cases, a family’s primary breadwinner had been lost, the sum was low. It was only the equivalent of about four years of earnings for a rural Cambodian. By comparison, a one-plane sortie, like the one that devastated Neak Luong, cost about $48,000. And that B-52 bomber itself then cost about $8 million. Worse yet, a recent investigation found that the survivors did not actually receive the promised $400. In the end, the value American forces placed on the dead of Neak Luong came to just $218 each.
Back then, the United States kept its low-ball payouts in Cambodia a secret. Decades later, the U.S. continues to thwart transparency and accountability when it comes to civilian lives.
In June 2023, I asked Africa Command to answer detailed questions about its law-of-war and civilian-casualty policies and requested interviews with officials versed in such matters. Despite multiple follow-ups, Courtney Dock, the command’s deputy director of public affairs, has yet to respond. This year-long silence stands in stark contrast to the Defense Department’s trumpeting of new policies and initiatives for responding to civilian harm and making amends.
In 2022, the Pentagon issued a 36-page Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan, written at the direction of Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. The plan provides a blueprint for improving how the Pentagon addresses the subject. The plan requires military personnel to consider potential harm to civilians in any air strike, ground raid, or other type of combat.
Late last year, the Defense Department also issued its long-awaited “Instruction on Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response,” which established the Pentagon’s “policies, responsibilities, and procedures for mitigating and responding to civilian harm.” The document, mandated under the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act, and approved by Austin, directs the military to “acknowledge civilian harm resulting from U.S. military operations and respond to individuals and communities affected by U.S. military operations,” including “expressing condolences” and providing ex gratia payments to next of kin.
But despite $15 million allocated by Congress since 2020 to provide just such payments and despite members of Congress repeatedlycalling on the Pentagon to make amends for civilian harm, it has announced just one such payment in the years since.
Naples-Mitchel and Shiel point out that the Defense Department has a projected budget of $849.8 billion for fiscal year 2025 and the $3 million set aside annually to pay for civilian casualty claims is just 0.00035% of that sum. “Yet for the civilians who have waited years for acknowledgment of the most painful day of their lives, it’s anything but small,” they write. “The military has what it needs to begin making payments and reckoning with past harms, from the policy commitment, to the funding, to the painstaking requests and documentation from civilian victims. All they have to do now is say yes.”
On May 10th, I asked Lisa Lawrence, the Pentagon spokesperson, if the U.S. would say “yes” and if not, why not.
“Thank you for reaching out,” she replied. “You can expect to hear from me as soon as I have more to offer.”
And there's the danger: when you dilate the definition of antisemitism to encompass all censures of Israel, you dilute the power of the antisemitism charge to mobilize people against real manifestations of anti-Jewish hatred.
We have to start claiming collective responsibility for the wrongs of our governments, which means confronting the dehumanization they use to justify atrocities.
Peace cannot be found in the endless military packages but in the corridors of diplomacy and peace talks, where dialogue and negotiation pave the way for lasting solutions.
Congressional Democrats are digging into the maneuvers corporations like Diversified rely on to make millions while unplugged wells poison communities with dangerous levels of methane gas.
I have gravitated toward projects for social justice and ecological sustainability because they have provided some meaning in my life, not because I imagined success.
The Palestinians, facing down the most powerful countries in the world, left virtually alone even by their allies, have suffered immeasurably. But they have won this war.
Planetary Cease-Fire Now! Isn’t it strange that, after all these millennia, we humans can’t seem to truly face, no less truly deal with, who and what we are and what we repeatedly do to ourselves, not to speak of the rest of this planet?
