In US, Netanyahu Spoke of “Democracy” But Offers Indefinite Apartheid

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Struggle and Solidarity: Writing Toward Palestinian Liberation

Speaking before a joint session of Congress this week in an attempt to justify the mass destruction and death wrought by Israel’s war on Gaza, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu preached about his country’s “powerful and vibrant democracy” to applause from an audience dominated by Republicans as protests raged outside the Capitol.

Issa Amro, a Palestinian activist living under Israeli occupation in Hebron in the West Bank, said Americans should not be fooled. Military occupation and democracy are contradictory, Amro argued, and alleged war criminals such as Netanyahu have no right to talk about “democracy” when Palestinians living under illegal occupation face state-backed violence and displacement.

“For sure I live under Israeli apartheid and Israeli occupation and Israeli supremacy,” Amro told Truthout after the speech. “Netanyahu can’t talk about democracy when his government is occupying the West Bank and Gaza and East Jerusalem and not allowing us to practice our own freedoms.”

Netanyahu’s words likely also rang hollow for thousands of Israelis who spent months before the war filling the streets in protest of anti-democratic judicial reforms by the prime minister’s far right governing coalition. The same extremist politicians are working with violent settlers to displace Palestinians on the West Bank and pushing to illegally annex the entire territory as they leverage the war on Gaza to reinforce occupation and apartheid across Palestine.

In his speech, Netanyahu slammed the International Criminal Court prosecutor seeking to arrest both him and his defense minister for war crimes and denied the allegations, which include intentionally targeting civilians in Gaza and using starvation as a weapon of war. (Three Hamas officials, including leader Yahya Sinwar, are also charged with war crimes for their role in the October 7 attacks.)

However, Netanyahu said little about the recent landmark opinion from the International Court of Justice in a separate case that declared Israel’s 57-year occupation of Palestine to be illegal under international law.

In its historic ruling, the World Court found Israel responsible for enforcing illegal apartheid conditions in occupied Palestine that human rights groups and activists such as Amro have documented for decades. Palestinian journalist and Truthout contributor Michel Moushabeck recently summarized the situation:

Over the past 57 years, successive Israeli governments have brutally terrorized Palestinians, demolished homes, confiscated large tracts of Palestinian lands, expanded Israeli settlements in the West Bank — considered illegal under international law — and added many new ones that effectively rendered the “two-state solution” impossible. Now West Bank settlers number more than 700,000; they are heavily armed and are constantly terrorizing Palestinian residents in neighboring villages in an effort to force them to leave, as described in a report by Amnesty International.

In a statement, Israel’s foreign ministry wrote that the court was “fundamentally wrong” and that the opinion “is completely detached from the reality of the Middle East.” It also noted that the opinion was an advisory one, and thus not legally binding. Israel has long denied that its system of occupation and segregation amounts to apartheid.

But Amro said he lives under apartheid every day. As a Palestinian, Amro does not have the same rights as Israeli citizens, including those living in the Jewish-only settlements on occupied Palestinian territory that are considered illegal under international law.

To move about the West Bank, he must pass through security checkpoints and suffer invasive searches by military police while Israeli citizens drive along segregated roads on their way to gated communities. Settler violence and military raids routinely displace Palestinians from their homes and neighborhoods, which are often demolished so residents cannot return. Peace Now, a group that monitors displacement on the West Bank, reports that Israel has confiscated more Palestinian land in 2024 than any year in the past two decades.

Amro says Israel’s strategy is to make life so miserable that Palestinians leave their homeland and join the international diaspora, making way for more Jewish-only settlements.

Even as U.S. weapons sustain the occupation of Palestine, the West Bank remains a source of tensions between Israel and the Biden administration, which has placed financial sanctions on violent settler leaders and restored a policy that declares Jewish-only settlements to be “illegitimate” under international law. It’s no surprise that Netanyahu kept the focus on Gaza during his speech before Congress and meetings with President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris this week.

“Without American support, Israel would not be able to sustain the occupation and apartheid for that long,” Amro said.

For months, Netanyahu has been under fire abroad and at home for failing to outline a plan for Gaza after the war and for allegedly prolonging the conflict in order to appease the far right parties keeping him in power — and potentially out of jail.

In his speech before Congress, Netanyahu laid out a vision for “total victory” over Hamas, one in which Israel effectively maintains a military occupation with no end in sight, a goal that critics say is both impossible and antithetical to the “two-state solution” favored by the Biden administration.

Netanyahu has said that Israel would not attempt to “settle” Gaza after the war. In other words, his plan would not see Jewish settlers attempting to colonize Gaza as they have in the past. But members of the settler movement supported by Netanyahu’s extremist allies have declared their intention to do just that. Netanyahu said the Israeli military must maintain “overriding security control” of Gaza until the remaining population “deradicalized” and “demilitarized,” an extremely vague goal that he suggested could take generations to achieve.

“Those twin words, demilitarization and deradicalization, those two concepts were applied to Germany and Japan after World War II, and that led to decades of peace, prosperity and security,” Netanyahu said.

It’s not the first time Netanyahu has compared Israel’s destruction of Gaza to World War II, even though it was Israel that originally forced Palestinians from their ancestral lands and into the Gaza refugee camps where resistance has brewed for decades. Experts say the comparison is simply an ahistorical excuse for brutality and genocide. Even Germany, a stalwart ally of Israel, has criticized Netanyahu’s postwar plans for Gaza as incompatible with international agreements and a path toward peace.

Netanyahu suggested Palestinians who agree not to attack Israel could set up a civilian administration to govern the Gaza after the war. However, much of infrastructure for life — homes, hospitals, schools, mosques and hospitals — has been destroyed by bombs made in the U.S., and the prime minister has refused to give the job to the Palestinian Authority, which partners with Israeli security forces to govern parts of the occupied West Bank. The Palestinian Authority is controlled by Fatah, which is the main Palestinian political party along with Hamas.

Fatah recently put aside its bitter rivalry with Hamas and agreed to form a governing coalition for Palestine. The two parties have a fraught history but share the same goal of ending the Israeli occupation and establishing an independent Palestinian state.

A senior Hamas official told Reuters Netanyahu’s speech makes clear that he is not interested in reaching a ceasefire deal in Gaza, despite his repeated assurances to the Biden administration that Israel is negotiating in good faith. Nabil Abu Rudeineh, a spokesman for Palestinian Authority leader President Mahmoud Abbas, said the “Palestinian people … are the only ones who decide who rule them.”

“Our permanent stance is that the only solution to achieve security and stability is the establishment of an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital,” Rudeineh said.

Netanyahu’s coalition is broadly opposed to a Palestinian state and is instead using the war on Gaza to put as much territory under control of the Israeli military and outposts run by violent settlers as possible. For this reason and many others, some liberal Israelis urged congressional Democrats to boycott Netanyahu’s speech. About half of all Democrats skipped the speech, and progressives condemned Netanyahu’s leadership outright.

“In my view, his right-wing, extremist government should not receive another nickel of U.S. taxpayer support to continue the inhumane destruction of Gaza,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) in a statement ahead of Netanyahu’s speech.

Last week, Israeli lawmakers overwhelmingly voted against Palestinian statehood, further frustrating Democrats who support Israel but also back a “two-state solution.” Yet the Democrats in the Biden administration have not threatened to withhold weapons and aid to Israel in order to pressure Netanyahu toward a ceasefire, at least publicly. In early July, White House officials told reporters that a ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas was within reach. But three weeks later, on July 25, White House spokesman Admiral John Kirby said ceasefire negotiations were ongoing as Netanyahu met with Biden and Harris at the White House.

“There’s still more work to be done, we believe that we are closer now than we have been before, and we think it’s absolutely achievable for getting things over the finish line,” Kirby told skeptical reporters.

Biden and Harris want a ceasefire and hostage swap long before U.S. voters head to the polls in November, when Harris hopes to be the Democratic presidential nominee now that Biden has stepped aside. Despite months of frenzied negotiations and multiple overseas tours by U.S. diplomats, Kirby said both Israel and Hamas still need to soften their positions and compromise.

“It’s time to end the war,” Kirby said.

This came just a day after Netanyahu stood in front of the U.S. Congress and repeated his maximalist demands for “total victory” and an indefinite military occupation of Gaza, terms which Hamas has said for months it cannot accept. Whether a ceasefire can be achieved under Netanyahu’s leadership remains to be seen, but history shows that his coalition has only pushed Israel further to the right.