Yesterday I featured the response of Caitlin Johnstone to the rapturous welcome given the day before – Wednesday, July 24 – by both Houses of Congress to Israel’s criminal prime minister, Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu.
Criminal? What else should we call a man with an arrest warrant issued on him by the highest court on the planet? A man who, in part to dodge serious jail time for the more mundane crimes of malfeasance in high office, bears a unique and egregious responsibility for the deaths, says that most prestigious of medical journals, The Lancet, of up to 186,000 Palestinians; almost all of them non-combatants, including tens of thousands of children?
Not, I hasten to add, that the genocide of the apartheid terrorist state he fronts can be reduced to any one man. (Much as the hand-wringing wing of Zionist apologetics would love to do just that.) Not even when that man is as odious as Benjamin Netanyahu.
All the same …
Inside the Capitol Building he makes – see the two minutes commencing 1:09:45 in this video – a hero’s entrance. Lovestruck and lionising, senators and congressmen fall over themselves to shake the hand of the mass murderer; his air of modest self-effacement belied by the cat-with-the-cream smirk he can’t quite conceal. See him on his way down the aisles, pressing the flesh with smilingly magisterial ease, in those final seconds before taking to the microphone for an address so packed with lies as to make a Boris Johnson blush, yet interrupted by no fewer than fifty-three standing ovations.
Roughly one a minute.
As I was saying … yesterday we had Caitlin. Today it’s the turn of Naomi Klein’s old colleague at The Intercept, Mehdi Hasan. Over to you Mehdi, also writing yesterday, on your Zeteo site:
What Netanyahu Didn’t Tell Congress
I debunk five of the Israeli prime minister’s biggest lies in Washington D.C.
Benjamin Netanyahu was met with sustained applause and dozens of standing ovations from members of the United States Congress on Wednesday afternoon.
Those in the chamber – a majority of them Republicans – didn’t seem at all bothered by his non-stop gaslighting – and not just the number of brazen lies that he told, but also his many blatant omissions and evasions.
I was bothered. I was furious, in fact.
So I put together this fact-check of his hour-long address to his Republican and Democratic pals on Capitol Hill; a receipt-filled debunking of his five biggest lies; a rejoinder to his five slipperiest statements.
1) NETANYAHU ON AID
What he said:
“The prosecutor of the International Criminal Court has shamefully accused Israel of deliberately starving the people of Gaza. This is utter, complete nonsense. It’s a complete fabrication. Israel has enabled more than 40,000 aid trucks to enter Gaza. That’s half a million tons of food, and that’s more than 3,000 calories for every man, woman, and child in Gaza.”
What he didn’t say:
Netanyahu didn’t mention how the world’s leading aid agencies – Oxfam, Doctors Without Borders, Save the Children, UNICEF – all reject his rosy image of the aid situation in Gaza and all accuse Israel of blocking aid into Gaza. He didn’t mention that, in April, Oxfam reported that “people in northern Gaza have been forced to survive on an average of 245 calories a day – less than a can of fava beans – since January,” or that the organization also found that “the total food deliveries allowed into Gaza for the entire 2.2 million population – since last October – amounted to an average of just 41 per cent of the daily calories needed per person.”
He didn’t mention how some aid trucks that were destined for Gaza have been blocked by right-wing Israeli protesters; those protesters are on tape “throwing food packages onto the road and ripping bags of grain open.” He didn’t mention how many aid trucks do pass into Gaza, yes, but then get fired upon by Israeli forces. He didn’t mention the Israeli air strikes on a convoy of World Central Kitchen (WCK) trucks, in which seven food aid workers were targeted “systematically, car by car,” according to celebrity chef and WCK founder José Andrés. He didn’t mention the “Flour Massacre,” in which more than 100 Palestinians were killed after “shots were fired within close range of crowds that had gathered for food,” according to a CNN investigation.
2. NETANYAHU ON CIVILIAN CASUALTIES
What he said:
“John Spencer is head of urban warfare studies at West Point. He studied every major urban conflict… Israel, he said, has implemented more precautions to prevent civilian harm than any military in history – and beyond what international law requires. That’s why, despite all the lies you’ve heard, the war in Gaza has one of the lowest ratios of combatants-to-noncombatants casualties in the history of urban warfare.”
What he didn’t say:
What Netanyahu didn’t mention is that the Israeli military conveniently defines almost every adult male it kills in Gaza as a combatant – as one soldier told the Israeli publication +972:
Every man [in Gaza] between the ages of 16 and 50 is suspected of being a terrorist… it’s permissible to shoot everyone, a young girl, an old woman.
What Netanyahu didn’t mention is what Israeli newspaper Haaretz has extensively reported on: that there are “kill zones” inside of Gaza where any Palestinian “who crosses into them is shot.” Says Haaretz:
The Israeli army says 9,000 terrorists have been killed since the Gaza war began. Defense officials and soldiers, however, tell Haaretz that these are often civilians whose only crime was to cross an invisible line drawn by the IDF.
Netanyahu quoted John Spencer, a pro-Israeli U.S. academic, but he didn’t quote U.S. military historian Robert Pape, who has called Gaza “one of the most intense civilian punishment campaigns in history.” He didn’t quote former UN Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights Andrew Gilmour, who has said we are witnessing “probably the highest kill rate of any military killing anybody since the Rwandan genocide of 1994.” He didn’t quote U.S. Marine Corps veteran Phil Klay, who has argued that “even if we accept the IDF’s claim that 12,000 of the roughly 29,000 Gazans reported dead by February 20 were enemy fighters, that would still mean that for every 100 Israeli air strikes, the IDF killed an average of 54 civilians. In the U.S. campaign in Raqqa, the American military caused an estimated 1.7 civilian deaths per 100 strikes.”
3. NETANYAHU ON RAFAH
What he said:
Remember what so many people said? If Israel goes into Rafah, there’ll be thousands, maybe even tens of thousands, of civilians killed. Well, last week, I went into Rafah. I visited our troops as they finished fighting Hamas’ remaining terrorist battalions. I asked the commander there, ‘How many terrorists did you take out in Rafah?’ He gave me an exact number: ‘1,203.’ I asked him how many civilians were killed. He said, ‘Prime Minister, practically, none – with the exception of a single incident, where shrapnel from a bomb hit a Hamas weapons depot, and unintentionally killed two dozen people, the answer is: practically none.’
What he didn’t say:
“Practically none”? Netanyahu didn’t mention the Israeli bomb that, per Amnesty International, “struck the four-storey home of the Abu Radwan family in the Tal al-Sultan neighbourhood in West Rafah, killing nine members of the family – six children, two women and one man” on April 19. He didn’t mention the Israeli strike that “destroyed the Abdelal family home in the al-Jneinah neighbourhood in eastern Rafah, killing 20 family members”. He didn’t mention the “at least 29 Palestinians… killed in two separate Israeli attacks on displacement camps in Rafah” in late May, as CNN reported at the time.
Then there is his suggestion that the dozens and dozens of Palestinian civilians, including women and children, who were killed in a horrific fire in the Tel al-Sultan refugee camp in Rafah on May 26, were killed not by the pair of 250-pound bombs dropped on them by the Israel air force but by “shrapnel from a bomb” that ignited a nearby “Hamas weapons depot.” The New York Times carried out an extensive investigation of this Israeli claim, saying it had “reviewed dozens of videos and has been unable to find any that suggest a significant secondary explosion.”
4. NETANYAHU ON THE HOSTAGES
What he said:
Israel has already brought home 135 of these hostages, including seven who were freed in daring rescue operations… Many hostages’ families are also here with us today.
What he didn’t say:
Netanyahu didn’t mention how more than 100 hostages were released not “in daring rescue operations” but via a ceasefire deal with Hamas – which he is refusing to do again. He didn’t mention that his “daring rescue” mission killed almost 300 Palestinians, and injured hundreds more, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. He didn’t mention that Israel itself has, unwittingly, killed multiple hostages in Gaza. He didn’t mention that the former spokesperson for the hostages’ families has said there was a deal on the table in October to release all the hostages, but Netanyahu rejected it. He didn’t mention how many of the families of the hostages have been furious with him for several months now and have been protesting against him in the streets of Israel. He didn’t mention how, outside of where he was delivering his speech in the Capitol, at least six family members of Israeli hostages were arrested while demonstrating against him, including the “brother of a current hostage and daughter of a murdered one.” 1
5. NETANYAHU ON THE PROTESTERS
What he said:
For all we know, Iran is funding the anti-Israel protests that are going on right now, outside this building. Not that many, but they’re there. And throughout this city. Well, I have a message for these protesters. When the tyrants of Tehran, who hang gays from cranes and murder women for not covering their hair, are praising, promoting, and funding you, you have officially become Iran’s useful idiots.
What he didn’t say:
There is zero evidence, none, nada, for this nonsensical and offensive claim. Were the hundreds of Jewish antiwar protesters arrested at the Capitol the day before Netanyahu’s speech all paid by the Iranian government to be there? Are you kidding? Are the majority of ordinary Americans who tell pollster after pollster that they favor a ceasefire in Gaza, and an end to the fighting, also “Iran’s useful idiots”?
This was the dumbest, most dishonest, most desperate claim of Netanyahu’s entire speech to Congress.
* * *
- Since Mehdi is responding to a very specific claim on the hostages, his response here is narrow. (Though he surely should have noted that, besides “unwittingly” killing their own, IDF applied – we have this from Haaretz no less – the Hannibal Directive on October 7.) If we widen the focus we can take in the fact of Israeli jails crammed with thousands of Palestinian hostages, including children, held without trial or charge.