Netanyahu in Congress: Was he Right to Invoke Winston Churchill?
Nu’man Abd al-WahidNu’man Abd al-Wahid
Source: Al Mayadeen English
13 Oct 2024 18:11
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As we can see in the current genocide in Gaza and the Zionist attacks on Lebanon, Netanyahu, like Churchill, will be relying on the United States to bail him out.
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Almost ten months into the world’s first ever livestreamed genocide in Gaza, Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu addressed a joint meeting of the United States’s Congress. In a speech predictably fawned over by the elected representatives of the United States, the Zionist leader aptly invoked the British Empire’s war time leader, Winston Churchill. Towards the end of his warmongering diatribe, Netanyahu appealed to the United States to continue showering the British-conceived, Zionist colonial-settler regime with more weapons to slaughter Palestinians. He requested that:
“In World War II, as Britain fought on the frontlines of civilization, Winston Churchill appealed to Americans with these famous words: “Give us the tools and we’ll finish the job.” Today, as Israel fights on the frontline of civilization, I too appeal to America: “Give us the tools faster, and we’ll finish the job faster.”
The Churchill speech from where the “Give us the tools and we’ll finish the job” line is taken was broadcast to the United States in February 1941. A closer inspection reveals when Churchill made this appeal for weapons there was not even a “World War II” to speak of. The war at this point was predominately limited to Western Europe. It was still in effect an inter-European white supremacist imperialist war. The German leader, Adolf Hitler was still four months away from invading the Soviet Union and Japan was not to attack Pearl Harbour until later in the year. It’s empirically incorrect and palpably absurd to speak of a “World War” in February 1941.
So this leads us to ask, why would the leader of the British Empire, which was said to not have the sun ever set upon it, all of a sudden be begging its former colony, the United States for weapons? The answer is simple. In May-June 1940 the British Army a.k.a British Exemplary Forces (BEF) had left all their weapons on the beaches of Dunkirk on the French northern coast after its desertion from the fight on the mainland European continent. In mid-May, the BEF, realising they had been outwitted on the continent by advancing German Nazi forces, decided to retreat to Dunkirk with a view to escape across the English channel. The French too were retreating to Dunkirk, but initially with a view to use Dunkirk as a springboard for a counter-attack.
More so, Churchill implies in his broadcast that once American weapons were provided to him, he would “finish the job”. Obviously, this was quite fanciful because the British desertion from the continent in May 1940 had shown the BEF were in no position to finish any job whatsoever. Anyway, the point is both Netanyahu and Churchill consider the United States as a source of sophisticated weaponry to fulfil their military objectives. The main difference between the two appeals is that while the United States has supplied the Zionist settler-colony in Palestine with hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of American weapons since 1967 and has been an ally for decades, Churchill, on the other hand, according to Clive Ponting’s biography of the Western legend, had actually drawn up plans to invade the United States in 1927. Within the space of 15 years, Churchill had journeyed from planning a war against the United States to cheaply swallowing his pride and begging it for weapons.
However, the need to invoke Churchill is nothing unique for Western war criminals. The West has long laundered its imperialist warmongering and gangsterism through the mythology of Churchill as the person who “saved the West”, or in Netanyahu’s words, as a leader who was on the “frontlines of civilisation”. Ipso facto, the person the West has in its crosshairs becomes the “new Hitler”. In this essay, I identify three other commonalities Netanyahu shares with the actual historical figure of Winston Churchill and not the mythological Churchill.
Firstly, Netanyahu and Churchill are champions of genocide and specifically the extinction of Palestinians. After the Palestinian Resistance broke the siege on Gaza and launched its military raid on the Gaza envelope on October 7th, Netanyahu addressed the Zionist army about to invade Gaza by invoking the biblical story of how God commanded the Israelites to treat the people of Amalek. Netanyahu said, “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible.” The Bible is absolute about how the Amalek should be treated.
In the Old Testament, the command given is “Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass…”. Since this command, the Zionists have further erased Gaza, killing tens of thousands of men, women and children, destroying mosques, churches, universities, schools, hospitals, water sanitation plants and bakeries; actually, all institutions which function to maintain human life, and in effect ensuring malnutrition, starvation and disease. As such, women and children make up over 70% of Palestinians killed in Gaza. Likewise, Churchill propounded his belief in genocide in the 1930s when the British imperial occupation forces were crushing the indigenous Palestinians to make way for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in the mid-1940s. He informed a British parliamentary commission on the Palestinian resistance to British-Zionist colonialism of his moral approval of the genocide of the indigenous populations of North America and Australia and strongly implied that this fate awaits the Palestinians:
“I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time…I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia…I do not think the Red Indians had any right to say, ‘The American Continent belongs to us and we are not going to have any of these European settlers coming in here’. They had not the right, nor had they the power.”
One can see that Netanyahu’s genocidal intent in Gaza is not only inspired by the Bible but also seamlessly dovetails with the belief of the white supremacist genocidist Winston Churchill. Indeed, if Churchill was around today, the monster most certainly would rebuke Netanyahu for not also using poisonous gas on the Palestinians.
Secondly, a war allowed Netanyahu and Churchill to remain as Prime Ministers of their respective countries. If the genocide in Gaza were to stop, then attention would be focused on Netanyahu’s politically fragile domestic situation. It is said that Netanyahu faces bribery and fraud charges once the war stops, and there is a possibility that if found guilty, he’ll face a prison term.
With Churchill, if he had accepted any of Hitler’s five peace offers in the summer of 1940 after the latter had allowed the BEF to escape at Dunkirk in May, it is very unlikely that he would’ve maintained his position as Prime Minister. Up until assuming office in 1940, Churchill had been considered a military and political failure. When the Conservative Party opted for a new leader after the Norwegian failure – that is, Britain’s and Churchill’s idea to mine neutral Norway’s ports in April 1940 to prevent Nazi access to raw materials – they opted for Lord Halifax as Prime Minister but he declined the position. Churchill became leader by default. The position he failed to achieve during peace was literally handed to him on a plate without a popular vote.
A peace with Hitler would risk Churchill being deposed. As Richard North argues in his The Many, Not the Few as of late July, “Hitler had been holding back the Luftwaffe, in the hope of negotiating peace.” He further argues that if Russia had capitulated in the summer of 1941, as was expected then, the Luftwaffe would’ve returned to “northern Europe for Battle of Britain, round two.” Hitler had wanted peace with Britain, a country he long admired and whose Empire he saw as the blueprint for his Third Reich. The war had allowed Churchill to be in the political position he had long hankered for.
When the British people were allowed to give their verdict on Churchill in 1945, he was overwhelmingly voted out. This is understandable, because the American led Western global media machine had not yet turned Churchill into the heroic “man who saved the West”. When he returned to the Premiership in 1951, he had electorally won more constituencies than the Labour opposition, but lost the popular vote by over 200,000 votes. It was his only victory as Conservative Party leader.
Thirdly, for Churchill, like Netanyahu, America has bestowed and helped to bestow prosperity on both the UK and “Israel”. As mentioned, some have estimated American aid money to the Zionist colonial entity to be in the hundreds of billions of dollars since 1948. Likewise for Britain, the United States’ entry into the war in the early 1940s allowed the British economy to be sustained with American finance.
Britain had spent the previous centuries plundering and pillaging many nations most notably the Indian sub-continent. In the 1930s the average life span of the average person from the sub-continent was less than 30 years because of the mass resource extraction of the British Empire to the imperial metropole in London. After Indian independence in the late 1940s, it was eventually the turn of the Middle East to financially sustain Britishness. Therefore, the United States, for Cold War reasons, underpinned the British order in the Middle East, that is, the Sykes-Picot division. When this divide-and-rule order was challenged by politically unitarian projects led by Socialist, Communists and Third World nationalists, the United States sided with Britain, as it could not lose Britain as a viable economic and military ally in its Cold War with the Soviet Union.
Harold Macmillan, a former British Prime Minister, said during the Cold War that without the oil of the Arabian Peninsula, the British nation would be “lost” and the whole structure of the British “economy would collapse.” Furthermore, “without oil,” Macmillan noted, “and without the profits from oil” the UK will not be able to survive. This divide-and-rule has allowed British-created principalities in the Persian Gulf, such as Kuwait, UAE, Qatar, UAE, and Saudi Arabia to neo-colonially pump hundreds of billions of dollars into the British economy under the pretext of “investments”, as well as British banks holding hundreds of billions of these statelets’ petro-dollars, which provide liquidity to these otherwise bankrupt institutions. The United States’ global hegemony has allowed Britain to survive as a viable prosperous Western economy.
Without American support, Netanyahu and the Zionist colonial entity would simply not be able to proceed with the genocide in Gaza and the war on Lebanon. Likewise, Churchill and Britain, without American support would not have been able to continue resisting Hitler’s war machine. By comparison with the Soviet Union, Britain won next to nothing in World War Two. Most of the heavy lifting against the Nazis in Europe was done by the Soviet Union. According to author and former ‘Battle of Britain’ pilot, Len Deighton, Britain only faced 8% of the total Nazi army. Over 90% of the Nazi army was in war with the Soviets, which is understandable since Hitler wanted his Third Reich based on the subjugation of eastern Europe and specifically Russia, or as he is on record as saying, ‘Russia will be to Germany, what Indian sub-continent is to Britain’. Of the 8% of the Nazi forces that Britain actually fought, it is not known how much of that figure was after the Americans entered the war when Britain was now heroically standing on American shoulders.
In conclusion, future historians of genocide, imperialism, colonialism and mass murder will appreciate the war criminal Netanyahu for invoking his fellow colonial genocidist Winston Churchill in the American Congress. Both Netanyahu and Churchill were committed genocidists who owed their warmongering, personal legacies and their respective nations’ prosperity to the United States’s military and economic global hegemony. As we can see in the current genocide in Gaza and the Zionist attacks on Lebanon, Netanyahu, like Churchill, will be relying on the United States to bail him out to ensure his legacy as a ‘saviour’ of the Zionist settler-colonial project in Palestine.
The opinions mentioned in this article do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Al mayadeen, but rather express the opinion of its writer exclusively.
Benjamin Netanyahu
Winston Churchill
Israel
war on Gaza
Palestine
Gaza
Gaza Strip
Nu’man Abd al-Wahid
Nu’man Abd al-Wahid
Author of “Debunking the Myth of America’s Poodle”.
