In Israel they say that the occupation devoured Israeli politics so that everyone is beholden to the settlers, well the same thing is happening to American politics and today it was evident. I’m not the only one to feel shattered by Netanyahu’s bravura performance in Congress today laying claim to the West Bank as the ancestral Jewish homeland– and the Congress’s prostrate acceptance of his rightwing declarations.
“In Judea and Samaria, the Jewish people are not foreign occupiers,” he said to a standing ovation– I even saw John Kerry standing. “We are not the British in India. We are not the Belgians in the Congo.”
And Netanyahu got the same standing ovation when he said, crazily: “Jerusalem must remain the united capital of Israel. I know that this is a difficult issue for Palestinians.”
No wonder David Welna of NPR has quoted John Mearsheimer as lead analyst in his piece tonight– a breakthrough by the gobsmacked media. Writes a friend: “With this speech Netanyahu becomes the right-wing politician of most serious national stature in America. He put a lot of work into the words, and the delivery. It was necessary to have some understanding of (a) history, (b) politics, and (c) character in order to see through it. The distortions were everywhere. But I doubt that 20 members of Congress were equipped to notice them. There must have been a dozen standing ovations. He has taken Hamas off the table, put the peril of Iran back on the table, and bound the U.S. to Israel under the sign of power and providence.”
ABC says there were 20 standing ovations, on MSNBC I heard there were 26. Staggering. Our president is overseas, and his spokesman Ben Rhodes was afraid to contradict Netanyahu in any way today. This is power of the lobby in our politics, and it looks as disastrous to me as the slave power’s ability to enforce unanimity in American politics in the 1850s.
