Portside

Dear Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu:

In a few minutes you will enter our United States Congress to give a rare speech by a foreign leader to a joint session of Senators and Members of our House of Representatives.

As you approach the podium, you might notice that the President of the Senate will not be seated there above you presiding, as per tradition, over the chamber. That’s because the President of the Senate is Vice President Kamala Harris. She has decided not to attend. It is extremely rare for the President of the Senate to skip a big event like this. She will not be there to applaud you or stand with you. She’s decided instead to spend the day in, um, Indianapolis. At a sorority meeting. 

In one of the worst-kept secrets in Washington, Kamala Harris has for months been quietly urging President Biden to end your war on the people of Gaza. Biden has funded this war for you and has supplied you with your weapons of death. And with that you have murdered over 40,000 innocent civilians who had nothing to do with the abhorrent massacre of October 7th. 

Harris has been the voice of peace within the administration, calling for a ceasefire and an end to the assault on Gaza’s civilian population. She has also pushed to get the Palestinians all the humanitarian aid they need immediately.  

But nothing has happened in over 9 months. The rain of death continues each day. Mass starvation is underway. And Democratic Party insiders know all too deeply how this has contributed to Biden’s decreasing poll numbers and has virtually guaranteed the loss of Michigan to Trump. A damning article in today’s New Republic warns that if Harris picks pro-war Governor of Pennsylvania Josh Shapiro as her running mate, this may sink her election chances, especially with young voters and the large progressive wing of the Party. 

This is how toxic you are, Mr. Netanyahu — you hugging Mr. Biden did him no favors. And anytime Indianapolis looks more inviting than you, well, I guess you gotta be from the Midwest to get the joke. 

Dearest Bibi, with blood on your hands, you, the indicted felon — bribery, fraud and breach of trust — the Trump of Israel, blood caked all over your face, you the funder of Hamas — billions of dollars you’ve arranged to flow to them in order to sow the chaos that would allow you to conduct an ethnic cleansing you now so joyfully lead, knee deep in the blood of the children you’ve slaughtered. 

How dare you enter our hallowed Hall of Democracy today, wiping your hands on the backs of the bipartisan political hacks who have funded your evil and armed you to the teeth. You relish at the thought of more dead Palestinians — “animals” your Defense Minister called them — no wonder so many of your own people despise you and want to see you behind bars — you, ironically, the jailer of 2.3 million Gazans whom you’ve kept tortured and suffering in an open-air prison for 17 years. YOU, whom history will judge as the destroyer of Israel, the true enemy of the Jewish people we love so dearly, a faith that sees no human being as an “animal” but rather as a gift from God. YOU who pulled reserve forces back from the Gazan border in the days before the massacre of October 7, knowing full well what would happen. YOU who’ve always hated your fellow Jews who live in those kibbutzim because they always vote against you and your party, because many of them are socialists, peaceniks, atheists, ex-hippies, putting on outdoor music fests, marching in the streets against your attempts to destroy the Israeli judicial system — yes, they despise you, and so like any good autocrat or fascist, you took away their protection and left them to the slaughter. Forced them to cower in their homes’ “safe rooms” for 14 hours hoping the Cavalry would come to save them, but few did, thanks to you. They were the sacrifice on your altar of crime and racism —and their deaths would allow you to cancel your upcoming criminal trial, allow you to form your own war council, allow you the justification to starve millions, cut off their water, carpet bomb their homes, the bodies decapitated, limbless children, elderly and the impoverished offered up as a necessary genocide in the name of hate, greed and the Big Lie that an ancient book contained a deed that said this land was given to you by God! God made the Earth for ALL, and Jews throughout the centuries knew this. Which is why they always fought on the side of Justice, on the side of the oppressed, the have-nots, the mistreated and the abused, the forgotten and the discarded. And for this, they were continually rounded up throughout history and led to their slaughter, the pogroms, the Holocaust. Little did they ever think that one of their own would one day do the same to others — especially to their own cousins — the Palestinians! The Muslims who revered Moses and Abraham and Jesus!

Bibi, you do not belong in our sacred space of Democracy today. Although, it could be argued, that you’ve come to just the right spot as we, a nation founded in genocide and built on the backs of enslaved humans, an apartheid nation that claimed to be a Democracy but would not let a single member of the majority of the population — women, people of color, the indigenous, those who didn’t own property because they were women, of color, here first and poor — and thus they were not allowed to vote or participate in the apartheid, de facto White Christian Nationalist patriarchy who ran the whole American show. No wonder we are the perfect model for your segregated and brutal Theocracy posing as a real Democracy — just as we have never truly attained our full and complete Democracy for 248 years. You are not You — you are US, the O.G. of slaughter! And you are soooo good at it! Of course we’ve rolled out the red carpet for you today! Welcome home, Bibi of Brooklyn!

But don’t be too quick to think our leaders really like you. Your nation was set up by predecessors of this Congress to be our puppet state in the Middle East so we could keep an eye on our favorite drug — oil!

And please remember you are standing in a chamber of power of a country that refused to let boatloads of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany in the 1930s to dock in any U.S. city, thus sending back thousands of desperate Jews to their deaths in Europe. The same country that refused to bomb the German rail lines that led to the concentration camps (which would’ve saved many thousands of lives). The same country that was filled with establishments which posted signs that read “No Jews. No N-----s. No Irish.” 

But most Americans did not feel that way. It was the Jewish union organizers from New York who helped us create the United Auto Workers in Flint — the same union that this week issued its official condemnation of your appearance in our Congress. Most Americans are grateful to our Jewish brothers and sisters who have helped lead our civil rights, feminist and gay rights movements. And we know America wouldn’t be America without Steven Spielberg, Gloria Steinem, Bob Dylan, Arthur Miller, Judy Blume, Lillian Hellman, Jonas Salk, the Coen Brothers, the Warner Bros., the Marx Brothers, Barbra Streisand, Albert Einstein, Emma Goldman, and on and on. 

Bibi you have attacked your critics here by smearing them as antisemites. Again, remember — you are the antisemite, killer of the Semitic peoples.  Yes, there is antisemitism in the U.S. as there is everywhere. But you slander us only as a cover for your own vile crimes. Get a grip, Bibi. The people in a place like Georgia have voted to be represented in the U.S. Senate by a Jew and a Black man. For the better part of the past four decades around 10% of the entire Senate has been Jewish — when only 2% of the American population is Jewish. How did that happen?  

Each time Pew Research conducts a poll of Americans’ attitudes toward the country’s various religions, when asked the question, “Which religion do you have the most favorable feelings toward?”, the Number One answer the majority of Americans give is “JUDAISM!” And these are mostly Christians answering the question! Hiding behind the charge of antisemitism is a lie, and everybody knows it. Stop. You’re making it harder for us to deal with true antisemitism and bigots like you. 

It is a strange day indeed to see an actual war criminal addressing a joint session of Congress. In the future, let’s keep that honor reserved for our own war criminals (George W. Bush, Richard Nixon). As for you Bibi, enjoy your closed-door meeting tomorrow with our next President (I’m sure she’ll have some choice words for you). Say hi to The Donald for us on Friday at Mar-a-Lago. And we’ll look forward to your trial some day soon at the International Criminal Court. The irony that this court was originally set up to conduct the Nuremberg Trials won’t be lost on anyone. 

Michael Moore was born in Flint, Michigan and raised on a dirt street by loving parents, two sisters and a lot of Green Giant in a can.