Netanyahu’s hour
Congress cheered him to the echo, but that's not enough to save Israel, America and the West.
By Melanie Phillips
JNS
Jul 25, 2024
For the better part of an hour on Wednesday, it was possible to believe that the Western world had not lost its mind.
For some 54 minutes, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the U.S. Congress truth after truth about the war against Israel and demolished the malicious and grotesque accusations against it of war crimes and genocide.
In a magnificent, impassioned and pitch-perfect address, he roused Congress to its feet with at least 54 standing ovations.
They cheered and applauded when he declared that Israel’s battle against Iran was America’s battle.
They cheered and applauded when referring to U.S. intelligence that Iran was behind the pro-Hamas protests, he said those demonstrators “stand with evil” and are “Iran’s useful idiots.”
They cheered and applauded when, in a veiled reference to the Biden administration’s decision to slow down the supply of arms to Israel that Congress had mandated, Netanyahu said: “Give us the tools faster and we’ll finish the job faster.”
For the duration of that hour, it was possible for Jews reeling from the murderous antisemitism that has erupted around the world since the Oct. 7 pogrom, the refusal of Western governments to tackle it and the near-universal adoption of Hamas propaganda by liberal elites, to believe that the Jews are not standing alone after all.
But this ecstatic audience was composed of Republicans who get it and Democrats who were prepared at least to give Netanyahu the courtesy of a hearing. The same could not be said of the 70 Democrats who boycotted Netanyahu’s address, including the new Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris.
This was the most ominous signal possible that, if she becomes president, Harris will be a danger to both Israel and the West. Her absence wasn’t just a deliberate insult to Netanyahu. It showed contempt for America’s principal Middle East ally as it fights for its life against forces that menace America and the free world.
Far from marking her out as a statesman, Harris’s boycott was the act of a petulant partisan. And the claim made by such Democrats that they only loathe Netanyahu, not Israel, doesn’t hold water for a moment.
While dutifully intoning concern about the hostages and maintaining hand-on-heart their iron-clad commitment to the Jewish state, Harris and like-minded Democrats demand an immediate ceasefire by Israel, which would be tantamount to handing victory to Hamas.
They recycle Hamas blood libels about the IDF wantonly killing Gaza civilians and deliberately withholding aid. They support the appeasement of Iran—the Biden administration policy that laid the fuse for the Oct. 7 pogrom and has systematically undermined Israel’s self-defense ever since.
And with a few weaselly caveats, Harris has expressed her sympathy and understanding for the mobs who have turned college campuses into no-go areas for Jews—though she was careful to condemn the “despicable hate-fueled’’ rampage in Washington while Netanyahu was speaking, when mobs screaming “Allahu Akbar” burnt the Stars and Stripes and hoisted the Palestinian flag outside Union Station.
The Democrats, many of whom have acted as Hamas shills, can’t shrug off this sickening, anti-American behavior. They own it.
Harris’s attitude towards Israel is of a piece with her left-wing positions on other issues that place her to the left of President Joe Biden. She also has a track record of utter incompetence and asininity.
Yet since the convulsive developments that propelled her to the Democratic nomination, Harris has had the wind in her sails. Her first, carefully controlled speech was widely praised. On TikTok, she’s become a viral pin-up. Liberal websites are attempting to conceal her central role in the catastrophic collapse of U.S. border controls. The media will fall into line in sanitizing her and demonizing her opponent, former President Donald Trump, still further.
Will American voters fall for this? There are signs that the Trump campaign has been knocked off balance. Its strategy of focusing on its core vote, which was predicated on the enfeebled Biden fighting the election, is no longer appropriate.
According to some polling, the vice-presidential nominee J.D. Vance—who was selected in order to further fire up the base—is not going down well. And his own strange absence from Netanyahu’s address was an inexplicable error.
In these most febrile times, anything could happen. But Jews must face the fact that come November, America might have elected a president viscerally hostile to Israel backed by similarly hostile administrations in Britain, Canada, Australia and elsewhere. As the free world staggers over the edge of its own civilizational abyss, Israel and Diaspora Jews could find themselves shockingly isolated.
Oct. 7 and its aftermath should provide a wake-up call for the Jewish people. This is not just about the massive security failure of Israel’s political, military and intelligence elites and their inability to understand what Hamas was planning. Nor is it just about the omnipresence of vicious antisemitism throughout the West, of which the Jewish people should have needed no reminder.
The more urgent realization now must be the danger posed by the liberal mindset that characterizes the Democratic Party in America and the cultural elites that rule the West.
The failure to recognize this danger has done Israel immeasurable damage over the years. Israel’s elites allowed themselves to be seduced by the liberal article of faith that war must be replaced by law, all global actors are susceptible to reason and all conflict must be resolved by negotiation and compromise.
Israel accordingly went along with the “peace process” orthodoxy that required it to negotiate with genocidists in the belief that they don’t speak for the majority of the Arab and Muslim world, who only want jobs and security. This fantasy was institutionalized through the 1993 Oslo Accords, which created structures designed to lead to a Palestine state and a “two-state solution.”
Israel has paid for this terrible error in blood. From 1994 until today, more than three times as many Israelis have been murdered by Palestinian Arabs than between the formation of the State of Israel in 1948 and the signing of the Oslo Accords.
The lesson taught so agonizingly since Oct. 7 is that Israel can never achieve security through diplomatic means. It can never expect acceptance from the world, nor rely on America or anyone else. It can only make itself safe and secure through military means, an unequivocal defeat of its enemies and a clear-eyed acknowledgment of what it is up against.
Since Oct. 7, a number of Israelis have woken up to this. The young generation performing so heroically on the front line certainly gets it. So do Mizrachi or Eastern-origin Israelis who understand the Arab and Muslim world all too well.
So too do many former leftist dreamers in Israel and the West, who have found to their profound shock that people they thought were on their side suddenly turned out tragically to be their mortal enemies or have been cheering on those who want the Jews gone from their world altogether.
In his address to Congress, Netanyahu spoke repeatedly of achieving victory over the enemies of Israel and America. To Western leftists—including many Jews and too many elite Israelis—such talk is anathema because it involves the exercise of military force rather than diplomatic compromise.
They assume that Jews who talk about achieving security through Jewish power are fascists because leftists associate all free-world power with fascists. They believe instead that the powerlessness displayed by compromise with genocidists is the way to achieve the brotherhood of man.
This default position of Western liberalism has resulted in the murder of thousands of Israelis and is exposing the West to existential danger.
And that’s something those who care about Israel, America and civilization should keep in mind when they cast their ballots.
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