For the fourth time since 1996 Binyamin Netanyahu delivered remarks to the Congress of the United States. As the New York Times reported it:
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel on Wednesday turned an address to Congress into a forceful defense of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. He cast it as a battle for survival of the Jewish state while making almost no mention of the tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians killed in its drive to destroy Hamas.
The address laid bare deep divisions in Washington over the nine-month war, whose toll on civilians has outraged many Democrats and drawn international condemnation. Dozens of Democrats did not show up, with some openly boycotting the speech.
Vice President Kamala Harris, the party’s presumptive presidential nominee who was campaigning in the Midwest, declined to preside in her capacity as president of the Senate alongside Speaker Mike Johnson, a break with tradition.
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In a speech in which he condemned critics of the war as dupes aligning themselves with the world’s most dangerous actors or apologists for terrorists, Mr. Netanyahu portrayed the conflict as a proxy fight with Iran that must be won at all costs to protect both Israel and the United States. (Netanyahu Delivers a Forceful Defense of Israel to Applause in Congress）
This post adds nothing to the debate about Israel or Israeli policies; nor does it contribute anything to the current debates around the Israel-Gaza War and its many fronts (eg, on social media, before the international tribunals, on the streets, etc.). Nor does it speak to Mr. Netanyahu's place, performance, approval. opposition, or role within Israeli politics. I leave all of that to others (e.g., here).
What this post does is to consider the semiotics of the construction and deployment of perception frameworks within which or through which certain conclusions become inevitable. The discursive construction of this conflict, in particular, has become a critical front in the war, one which has seen much of its institutional action before international bodies within the UN system and the ICC in recent times but which goes back a long way before then. The remarks delivered on 24 July to Congress by Mr. Netanyahu are a critical element in those discursive battles from the Israeli side. This is not to suggest that Mr. Netanyahu speaks for anyone, though he speaks as an Israeli official--the focus is on the discourse rather than on the issues of representative authority, all of which I also leave to others to parse and argue about. Here one starts with the premise that in the context of discursive warfare, warfare about foundational perception, the discourse speaks for itself. This applies as well, one might suppose, to the discursive performances of the US Vice President and others (absence), Mr. Schumer (no handshake), and those who elected to attend the session, with or without counter discursive tropes, for example placards of one sort or another. The focus here, though, is on textual tropes, and in particular that of Mr. Netanyahu's remarks over almost 30 years, rather than on the performances (the forms of which are also common and retain a well understood collective social signification) of discourse at the margins of textually (oral and written) events, which I leave to others, though the analytical framework does not vary.
And all of this serves as a reminder that facts are a function of perception as they are consumed and transformed into information, informed by that perception into pathways toward judgment that are themselves a function of perception. Bias forms an essential element of both perception, and of the discovery and constitution of facts signified as information and then judged by the and trough the bias that informed both the finding and constitution of "fact" and the nature of its signification in the service of a perception framework inclined to "see", "understand" and "give meaning" to things in its own terms. All societies distinguish among the biases--disfavored bias serve both as taboos in the way society is trained to think about and perceive the world; these disfavored biases are fully invested in and lend power to the etymology of its negative and disapproving sense (from a societal perspective) as going against the grain--that is as a set of premises and perceptions that threaten the good order of the premises on which a given social order is grounded. The issue that Mr. Netanyahu's remarks then spotlight, in the context of the discursive battlefield waging over ancient Judea, Roman through Ottoman Palestine, centers on the fundamental question: which set of premises, discursive tropes and applied principles "go against the grain." Bias here affects everything--from the way facts are perceived (eg, how does one account for death), to the assignment of moral and legal responsibility for those deaths), to the judgment about the justification for taking life in the service of a cause, aided by fundamental perception judgments about the moral-social characteristics of a people (the "Jewish question" that sits just beneath the surface and sometimes emerges in the discourse) that contribute to or confirm perception disfavored bias. It is to those that victory on the discursive front becomes critical. One is reminded that here, as in the battles between the liberal democratic, post-colonial, and Marxist-Leninist perception structures around "democracy" what is threatening to one order may serve as the basis for the other.
Mr. Netanyahu's remarks, then, are worthy of study, one that is more usefully undertaken by reading the remarks in the context of his earlier speeches to Congress. Indeed, 2024 was not the first time that Mr. Netanyahu has addressed Congress. Nor was it the first time that he addressed Congress in the midst of significant divisions among the American political classes and their elected officials and between Israel and the U.S. If anything, the circumstances of the 2015 Remarks might have been viewed as delivered under even more contentious circumstances.
The contrasts in the 1996, 2011, 2015 and 2024 speeches are to some
extent remarkable. But things changed. Between 1996 and 2011 came the Palestinian rejection of U.S brokered peace deals and the brief rise and complicated collapse of the Arab Spring movements. Between 2011 and 2015 came the perception of a palpably rising threat of Iranian ambitions projected back into the subaltern regions of traditional Persian hegemony (when their empires were at their apex). And between 2015 and 2024 came a radical transformation of narrative and perspective within and among all of the actors with something to say about the region--and 7 October 2023 and its aftermath set the current conditions in motion. Throughout, the end goal appeared to remain the same, though the details of its construction vary widely, along with the construction of the discursive tropes necessary to make it plausible and consonant with the foundational operating premises of the global order--a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural Israel alongside a Jew-free Palestine. For some, Mr. Netanyahu stands in the way of the realization of that vision; for others he does not, and for many he no longer has the confidence of his people to find a means of following the path toward that objective. The difficulty remains at the extremes, but this seems to be the era in which the extremes have moved to the center, at least for some. In the meantime the question becomes how to preserve something like a status quo so that all sides can play the now expected waiting game in which history belongs to the side that collapses last (a Cold War strategy).
Whatever one's view of things, and however strongly one feels them, a careful parsing of the remarks may be useful; more useful still an effort at that parsing in the context of what came before.
The text of each of the 2024, 2015, 2011, and 1996 remarks follow with links to the original sources.
