Early in the hour-long harangue that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu imposed to the U.S. Congress yesterday, the tone was set. Netanyahu rehashed unproven and/or completely discredited tropes: “And these monsters, they raped women, they beheaded men, they burnt babies alive,” etc. Then he explained: “For centuries, the massacre of Jews was always preceded by wild accusations.” What irony—as the slaughter of tens of thousands of women and children in Gaza has been preceded by Netanyahu’s own wild accusations.
He continued: “We were accused of everything from poisoning wells to spreading plagues to using the blood of slaughtered children to bake Passover matzos. These preposterous anti-Semitic lies led to persecution, mass murder and ultimately to history’s worst genocide, the Holocaust.” His point is correct about the manipulation of mobs in stirring up mass violence. But his lesson is that any criticism of racist and genocidal actions of his government is due only to anti-Semitism: “Now, just as malicious lies were levelled for centuries at the Jewish people, malicious lies are now being levelled at the Jewish state…. The outrageous slanders that paint Israel as racist and genocidal are meant to delegitimize Israel, to demonize the Jewish state and to demonize Jews everywhere….
“Here’s a case in point: 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. If there are Palestinians in Gaza who aren’t getting enough food, it’s not because Israel is blocking it, it’s because Hamas is stealing it.”
Netanyahu’s reckless disregard for the slaughter of tens of thousands of women and children also extends to his reckless disregard of other facts. Media fact-checkers want to chastise Netanyahu for his attempt to smooth over the first several weeks of complete deprivation of food, water, and medicine; but they miss the elephant in the room. Netanyahu’s numbers translate to a full day of caloric intake for each Palestinian in Gaza about once in every seven weeks. That means that in 284 of the last 290 days, zero calories. One can play with calculation but—taking Netanyahu’s numbers at face value, counting 2.3 million Gazans, and estimating about 3,500 calories for each pound of food—that’s 35 billion calories delivered over 290 days, which for 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza amounts to about 52 calories/person/day. For comparison, Nazi concentration camp inmates were rationed 15-25 times that amount. Just to get to that concentration camp level, Netanyahu would have to be figuring on somewhere between 50,000-90,000 calories per pound of food. Yet many in the Congress stood for more than 50 times in separate ovations.
