Adam Shapiro
Mondoweiss / July 17, 2023
Israeli President Isaac Herzog will speak to Congress on Wednesday and repeat the same fictions his father, Chaim, uttered before Congress in 1987. But the story his father told will not work again this time.
On November 10, 1987, Intisar al-Attar, a 17-year-old Palestinian high school student at the Sukineh Bint al Hussein Girls’ High School in the Deir al-Balah refugee camp near Gaza City, was shot and killed by Jewish settlers. At the time, a few thousand settlers lived in Jewish settlements in the heart of Gaza and regularly attacked Palestinian civilians, while being protected by the Israeli army. A month later, an Israeli army truck collided with a civilian car in Gaza, killing four Palestinian workers and sparking the First Intifada.
That same November day in 1987, Israeli President Chaim Herzog addressed a joint session of Congress in Washington, DC, to mark the 40th anniversary of Israel. President Herzog was born in Ireland and moved to Palestine in 1935 to join the Haganah, a Zionist militia that was involved in atrocities against Palestinians during the Nakba. Herzog spoke to universal values, rights, and freedoms and touted both the United States’ and Israel’s roles in defending freedom and democracy. He repeatedly spoke to the fundamental need for human freedom and fundamental rights, claiming “Israel represents the belief in man and his right to the basic freedoms” and claimed that Israel has “never known a minute without democracy,” thereby erasing Palestinians entirely from the story.
There was no freedom or democracy for Intisar that day, nor for any of the Palestinians who had been subjected to Israeli rule and occupation in the 40 years that Israel had been a state. What Chaim Herzog delivered was a fictional narrative that played into what American policymakers and the public wanted to believe; in today’s terms, it was fake news.
This coming Wednesday, July 19, Chaim Herzog’s son, Isaac — who is serving as the current Israeli President — will address a joint session of Congress and likely tout many of the same points, being sure to drive home the message that the Israeli-American relationship is based on shared values. In some ways, the younger Herzog could not be speaking to a more pliant crowd — Congressional funding for Israel is at an all-time high, members of Congress and the Biden administration often express their self-avowed Zionism, and a new antisemitism policy seeks to outlaw criticism of Israel’s policy. However, the values that bind most of Congress with Israel these days are not democracy, freedom, or even capitalism; rather, it is the value of holding on to power — as an elected representative in the case of Congress and as a repressive apartheid state in the case of Israel.
Despite what will likely be a rehash of Israeli platitudes extolling the US-Israel ties upon which Israel is so dependent, 2023 is not 1987, and the world now sees Israel much differently than it did when the elder Herzog addressed Congress — even in the U.S. Congress. Israeli, Palestinian, international, and American human rights organizations are consistent and unambiguous in labeling Israel as an apartheid state that maintains a military occupation over a civilian population without any basis in international law, abusing the fundamental rights of Palestinians. Even the annual U.S. State Department human rights reports document how apartheid is practiced, even if it is still taboo for the agency to use the ‘A’ word.
More members of Congress also now question the uncritical and seemingly unlimited military and financial support for Israel, seek action from the U.S. government to address accountability issues, and are willing to call on the Biden administration to be consistent in its insistence on a “rules-based international order” and not give a pass to Israel. Some of these members have already announced that they will not attend the speech, refusing to bestow the legitimacy of American democracy upon the President of a country whose forces — including military, police, and paramilitary (settlers) — will undoubtedly violently repress Israeli protesters in the streets of Tel Aviv, injure and kill Palestinians in the West Bank, and continue to maintain one of the world’s most significant humanitarian crises by maintaining the complete blockade of Gaza while the President is speaking in Washington.
From the podium, Chaim Herzog spun a tale that members of Congress wanted to believe because it made them feel good about themselves and about America. His reference to the United States as a “shining beacon of hope” echoed the words of President Ronald Reagan and fed into the dominant anti-Soviet narrative of the latter stage of the Cold War. Today, however, Israel’s actions are all too apparent, requiring members of Congress and the Biden Administration to try to, as Thomas Friedman opined, maintain the “vitally important fiction” that the occupation is temporary. Isaac Herzog will surely reference things like Israeli technology and Israel’s absorption of Ukrainian refugees to align with American concerns, but anyone listening will hear “spyware” and “settlement expansion.” Today’s Herzog will try to promote Israel as a peacemaker, touting the Abraham Accords, but this too will ring hollow, given the agreements are with authoritarian regimes, not unlike the one the United States is confronting in Ukraine, and are primarily about keeping those authoritarians in power through weapons and technology transfers.
When it comes to other fictions, like films, sequels often disappoint. The mystique of the original is difficult to recapture the second time around, and the threshold to entertain when the same basic plot is being presented is much higher. Herzog Part II will undoubtedly disappoint the most ardent of Israel’s supporters because the reality of Israel today just will not allow for anything but messianic self-delusion. However, the real failure here is not Herzog’s attempt to resurrect a past fiction but the Congress’s willingness to host the leader of an apartheid state in the sanctum of American democracy. While it may have lost some of its luster due to the attack on January 6, 2021, and the subsequent efforts by members of the Republican Party to maintain another fiction, to permit the leader of a country that has not allowed a minute of freedom for Palestinians in 75 years to take the podium.
In the end, Herzog may have his moment in Congress, but the sounds of the protesters in Tel Aviv, the wails of Palestinian parents whose children have been killed, the chants of “Nakba now” by right-wing religious extremist settlers, and the demands for freedom and human rights will drown out the sycophantic applause he will receive in Congress.
Adam Shapiro is the Director of Advocacy, Israel/Palestine at Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN)
