He might be hated in Israel as much as he is throughout large swathes of the West, but watching Benjamin Netanyahu deliver his address to congress on Wednesday (Thursday AEST) was to behold a master politician in action, a cut above almost any other leader in the world.
The eloquence, perfect rhetorical timing and power of his roughly hour-long speech couldn’t be denied, and one delivered in English, too, which is not even his native language.
The content of the speech was as much designed for his domestic – and far more critical – audience back home (where the speech kicked off in the prime-time slot of 9pm) as it was for the largely fawning congressional American audience.
He has barely 33 per cent approval rating at home, amid ongoing cabinet defections over his handling of a war now into its ninth month.
Those in congress who publicly disapproved of him stayed away, including Vice-President Kamala Harris, who in her role as president of the Senate would have sat behind him, and former House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who’s proved herself in semi-retirement perhaps to be still the most influential Democrat in the nation.
Support for Israel remains toxic among a large minority of the Democratic Party, especially in certain mid-western states with large Arab populations, which Harris will need to turn out to vote for her in November.
Democrat firebrand and “Squad” member Rashida Tlaib attended but held up a sign reading “war criminal”. Thousands of pro-Palestine protesters rioted a few hundred metres away outside Union Station, burning American flags. Netanyahu mocked them as “Iran’s useful idiots”.
Their simplistic chants were no match for the skills of Netanyahu, who despatched all the arguments with aplomb: Israel isn’t a colonial state; its war record in Gaza is exemplary by historical standards; and the International Criminal Court is biased
“Don’t they know that the land of Israel is where Abraham and Isaac preached, where David and Solomon ruled,” he said.
His claims were all disputed but it didn’t matter: he had the most powerful parliament in the world in thrall.
In his speech he cast Israel’s war with Hamas as America’s war as much as Israel’s, a critical measure of success for a small country that increasingly depends on America’s good will, financial and military, for its long-term survival.
“My friends, if you remember one thing, one thing from this speech, remember this,” he said. “Our enemies are your enemies. Our fight is your fight. And our victory will be your victory.”
He couched the conflict as one of good versus evil, terms ordinary Americans have readily accepted for a generations.
Echoing first the words spoken by Franklin Roosevelt after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Netanyahu then declared October 7 to be the equivalent of “9/11”, and was “a day that will live in infamy”.
He movingly revealed he authorised the daring rescue of Noa Argamani, whose capture by Hamas terrorists became one of the most poignant images of that horrific day, and three other hostages, only after he met her dying mother, who told him she wished to hug her daughter one last time.
Pushing back against critics who cast Israel as an “apartheid state”, he had brave, gravely wounded Israeli soldiers in the audience stand up: an Ethiopian Jew who ran 13km to fight Hamas on that day, a Bedouin Muslim Israeli who lost his leg, and a tank commander who lost his arm and sight in one eye.
The only valid criticism of the speech might be the lack of a single mention of the various ceasefire proposals and peace deals the Biden administration has been furiously working on for months.
At 74, Netanyahu remains at the peak of his powers, however dim his electoral prospects back home. Even if he loses office over his handling of the war in Gaza, he will go down as the most influential Israeli politician since the nation’s founding in 1948.
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