Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu addressed a joint session of the U.S. Congress yesterday in a speech focused on defending Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. Netanyahu framed the war with Hamas as a proxy fight with Iran, arguing it was necessary to protect both Israel and the United States, while making almost no mention of the toll the conflict has taken on Palestinian civilians in Gaza, tens of thousands of whom have been killed in the nearly 10-month-long war. (New York Times)
Our Take
Netanyahu’s address yesterday is the starkest illustration yet of a trend that has been growing for more than a decade under three successive presidents: support for Israel as a partisan issue in the United States. That was demonstrated by the fact that only around half of the Democratic members of Congress attended his address yesterday, with some openly boycotting.
Polls also show a growing partisan divide among voters, with the Democratic Party’s progressive left wing particularly exercised about the humanitarian impact of the war in Gaza—and U.S. complicity in it as an active supplier of the weaponry Israel is using there—but also the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Netanyahu’s intransigence with regard to pursuing the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.