Fintan Drury: As genocide proceeds, Netanyahu is yet again being feted in Washington
US president Donald Trump shakes hands with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu during their meeting in the Oval Office of the White House on April 7, 2025. Picture: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty
And so it continues.
Without so much as a blink of its legislative eye, without pause, be the White House home to a Democratic blue or a Republican red president — and certainly without the United States’ political establishment having any interest in the behaviour of Israel — its prime minister will again be feted in Washington today.
The risible notion that the US somehow still considers itself the leader of the ‘free world’ is beyond warped when it is so beholden to a state that has, for approaching two years, engaged in a genocide against the people of Palestine.
Almost a year ago, on July 24, 2024, Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the joint houses of the US Congress for the fourth time in his career.
That morning, US president Joe Biden and vice president Kamala Harris received a letter from 45 US medical professionals who had just returned from volunteering in Gaza.
The letter was explicit.
It warned Biden of what the support of his administration was enabling.
They detailed how they’d witnessed scenes of unbearable cruelty to women and children, that every day, each of them treated children who’d been shot in the head and that many of their Palestinian peers had been captured by the IDF, were physically and mentally tortured before being dumped naked on the side of a road. The letter continued:
That letter did not reveal anything new to the president and his inner circle.
Earlier in July, a group of former and serving US officials had addressed similar concerns directly to him and, two months earlier, in May, Doctors Without Borders had warned that the administration’s support of Israel ran counter to US law.
Allowing for how much it already knew, the language of that letter from the group of doctors and nurses on the very day Netanyahu addressed Congress should still have shocked the US political establishment. It pulled no punches:
The US political elite was not shocked.
There were absentees, but when House Speaker Mike Johnson introduced Netanyahu, the majority of federal legislators competed with each other in whooping and hollering their support of him in a manner more befitting a rodeo than Capitol Hill.
The opening of his address was revelatory. The Iran card, a constant throughout his career, was played when Netanyahu referenced the ‘crisis’ as "a clash between those who glorify death and those who sanctify life".
This man, who was leading a murderous campaign that had already killed tens of thousands of children, women, and men, was lecturing the world on the sanctity of life.
They loved it.
When he then addressed what he termed the ever-present threat of Iran and how Israel alone could protect the United States from doom, they loved it even more.
I was in Lebanon that day. Just days later, 11 people were killed when rockets landed on a football pitch in Majdal Shams, a Druze village in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.
It was the prompt for Israel to widen its territorial ambition, its prime minister immediately claiming Hezbollah was responsible and warning, while still in the US, that it would “pay a heavy price, the kind it has thus far not paid".
The Biden administration rushed to assure Israel that its support was “ironclad and unwavering against all Iran-backed threats, including Hezbollah".
The US had again taken the Iran-bait.
There was evidence that Israel’s defence system had caused the missiles to land on Majdal Shams. ICLAD established that, between October 7, 2023, and late summer 2024, 82% of the rockets fired between Israel and Lebanon were fired by Israel.
Whatever had caused the horror of Majdal Shams, Israel was the aggressor, not Lebanon.
When Netanyahu visited the scene in the days after the incident, he was surrounded by villagers chanting that he was a war criminal.
Still, he played America as he’d always done. Within weeks, Israel had declared war on Lebanon on the pretext that Iran was using Hezbollah as its proxy to trigger a regional conflict.
Its ground invasion weeks later was the sixth in almost 50 years; as always, Israel was the aggressor, not Lebanon.
What followed last autumn was a faux-conflict where Israel successfully killed senior Hezbollah figures, but it also deployed unconventional tactics like exploding pagers that killed 46 Lebanese and put thousands of civilians at high risk.
As the evidence of Israel as the aggressor grew, its opposition parties, unenthusiastic about Gaza, supported Netanyahu’s targeting of Lebanon.
Israeli president Herzog, too, so much so that he toured US and UK networks to applaud his government and, largely unchallenged, claimed the threat of Iran and Israel’s determination to save the West from Islamism as due cause for the widening of Israel’s territorial ambition.
When, after a few months, this Israeli-manufactured conflict with Lebanon ended, more than 3,500 Lebanese had been killed, the great majority civilians, and 1.2 million had been displaced, the most significant forced movement of people for decades according to the UN. Israel suffered losses of 56, all of them soldiers.
One year on, with a dangerously petulant Republican president in office in place of a dangerously senile Democrat, the bond between the US and Israel is as unbreakable as ever.
Only weeks ago, Netanyahu and his Zionist collaborators in government took the region to the brink of all-out war.
This time, Israel ignored Iran’s proxies and went straight after the Islamic Republic itself. There was to be no elaborate subterfuge; it simply declared Iran a nuclear risk and purported to act in the interest of the West by carrying out raids on targets in Tehran and Istafan.
There was no provocation, but to gain the approval of the US and most of Europe’s ‘strongmen’, none other than the old trope of Israel as the bulwark against creeping Islamism, was needed. Iran does not have nuclear weapons; Israel does.
Tomorrow’s White House charade will be as we have come to expect — two oversized male egos fawning over each other and suggesting their alliance can save the world from Islam.
Israel is not the West’s friend; it is our foe.
The state of Israel is the most significant single inhibitor to the United States, the EU, and Britain moving towards a realignment of our interests that would allow us to form relationships with nations and cultures that are dramatically different to our own.
We need to acknowledge and respect those differences without feeling threatened to the point where we believe we need protection. It is, to paraphrase Robert Fisk in his last book, , the West’s craven genuflection to Israel that leaves it exposed.
And so it continues.
• by Fintan Drury (Merrion Press) is available in all bookshops, priced at €18.99.
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