Khury Petersen-Smith
Foreign Policy in Focus / July 23, 2024
Black members of Congress boycotted Netanyahu’s speech to Congress in 2015. They should do it again to protest his genocide.
When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke to a joint session of Congress in 2015, the Congressional Black Caucus skipped the speech. Netanyahu had arrived — with the Republicans’ blessing — to rebuke then President Barack Obama for pursuing an agreement with Iran over the country’s nuclear program. In defense of Obama, the CBC refused to attend the speech.
But will Black members of Congress do the same in defense of Palestinians?
Israel is in its ninth month of a scorched earth assault on Palestinians in Gaza. Israeli forces have killed nearly 40,000 Palestinians and wounded hundreds of thousands — many of whom are permanently maimed. They are systematically targeting medical facilities for destruction, along with mosques, churches, and schools, and they have destroyed every single university campus in Gaza.
Palestinians rightly call this genocide. Scholars of the subject and the International Court of Justice agree, and are calling on Israel to stop. The U.S. government, on the other hand, has been encouraging Israel’s destruction — supplying the weapons to do it, and vetoing resolution after resolution in the UN Security Council calling for a ceasefire.
It is in this isolation on the world stage that Congress has invited Netanyahu to address a joint session — a rare privilege that Congress has extended to Netanyahu more than any other head of state in history.
Make no mistake: This invitation affirms Israel’s genocide. And with the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court calling for Netanyahu’s arrest for crimes against humanity, Congress’ invitation is an affront to international law.
But Black members of Congress can dissent. Not only has the CBC boycotted Netanyahu before, but earlier in its history, it stood on the right side of history by standing against South Africa’s racist apartheid regime. The CBC led the passage of sanctions against apartheid South Africa in 1986.
Israel had a history of deep collaboration with South Africa’s apartheid regime — and Palestinians charge Israel with being an apartheid state today. Palestinian human rights groups like Al Haq, international organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, and Israeli groups like B’Tselem have all carried out their own investigations and concluded that Israel is committing the international crime of apartheid.
Black folks in the United States have our own history of appealing to the international community in the face of suffering. In 1951, Black activists presented a case to the UN titled “We Charge Genocide,” which called attention to genocidal practices carried out and enabled by the U.S. government against the Black population.
If apartheid is wrong in South Africa, and genocide is wrong when it’s carried out against Black people, then those forms of violence are also wrong when directed at Palestinians.
The history of solidarity between the Black and Palestinian freedom struggles is long and deep. Palestinians spoke up in support of Black Lives Matter activists in Ferguson when that city rose up after the police murder of Mike Brown. The Black Panthers and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) called attention to Israeli violence in the 1960s, and Rev. Jesse Jackson included support for Palestinian rights in his presidential run in 1988.
Given the enormous complicity of Congress in Israel’s genocide — most recently voting to send Israel $26 billion in emergency aid when it’s abundantly clear that Israel is using that support to kill Gaza’s children and destroy its cities — boycotting Netanyahu’s speech is the absolute minimum that Black members should be doing.
They should also be working to stop the genocide. It is important that several CBC members were among the progressives who voted against sending more funding to Israel. But there’s much more to be done.
The next step though is clear and easy. Netanyahu — presiding over the destruction of Gaza, notoriously racist against both Palestinians and Africans, and a figure so polarizing that even prominent Israelis are calling for Congress to disinvite him — should not be welcome in the Capitol.
The Congressional Black Caucus was once called “the conscience of the Congress.” The most minimal — but no less important — way to honor that legacy, and more importantly to affirm the humanity of our Palestinian brothers and sisters, is to boycott Netanyahu’s speech.
Khury Petersen-Smith is the Michael Ratner Middle East Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and a co-founder of Black for Palestine
