Israel President Herzog’s ‘honest’ speech to the US Congress

I am honoured to speak to you today at the 75th anniversary of my country’s independence. It is an honour that neither I nor my country deserves.

Throughout our history, your steadfast and generous support has made Israel what it is today. President Woodrow Wilson supported the 1917 Balfour Declaration at the behest of the British Empire, committing to our future Jewish state – a commitment made by those who did not own the land to those who did not live on the land, against the will of those who did live on it.rve that land into a Jewish and Palestinian state, and the first to recognise Israel only 11 minutes after its establishment in 1948. Since then, we have been telling each other how our nations were founded by persecuted migrant communities on the basis of European Enlightenment; how they created strong, vibrant modern states, civilising the savage, and how we have dominated global and Middle East affairs.

We tell each other a tale of how they founded two righteous, God-fearing models to emulate, like “shining beacon of hope” and “light unto the nations”; of sharing common liberal, democratic principles, and of our persistent pursuit of peace.

But if we are honest with ourselves, we should admit that we have also copied the worst of imperial Europe. We share a dark past of settler colonialism, war, ethnic cleansing of Indigenous inhabitants and a persistent history of racism and discrimination including slavery in the Americas, and apartheid in Palestine.

Our success was made possible through the blood and tears of countless victims. We’ve treated our nemeses as warmongers, our critics as enemies, and our enemies as modern-day Hitlers, but no other states have waged as many wars, or embarked on as many military interventions in the past eight decades as we have.Thanks to you, we have become more confident and assertive. With your military and economic aid that reached some $200bn, we have built a formidable military machine, that allowed us to double down on the repression of the Palestinians, and humiliation of the stubborn Arabs, who refuse to accept our pretence that our culture is superior to theirs, and that our settlement of their land is ours by right of a brief sojourn here a few thousand years ago.

When my late beloved father Chaim spoke to you as president of Israel in 1987, he boasted of our peace accords with Sadat of Egypt. And I am inclined to walk in his shoes and do the same; to boast of our Abraham accords with several Arab autocrats.

But unlike him, I can no longer keep silent as our military and civilian occupation mutates into an apartheid system in the Middle East. I do not say that lightly; I say it with a heavy heart. I do not say it out of pity for the millions of Palestinians, most of whom stubbornly linger under occupation and in refugee camps, I say it out of pity for my people and what’s become of us as decades-long occupiers and dispossessors. Our chutzpah is self-defeating. Our hasbara is wearing thin.

I never was a particularly brave or charismatic parliamentarian and head of the opposition. But that stops now, knowing I will never again have a better platform to address your people and mine. We may have become rich and powerful but we’ve never been so divided, so fanatical; so morally bankrupt.

Friends speak truth to each other. Good friends speak the bitter truth. It befalls upon you, once again, to save us from ourselves. To free us and the Palestinians from an entrenching system of apartheid that is bound to lock us in hatred and violence for decades to come. There is little I can do, as a ceremonial president, other than to speak out.

So, I urge you to condemn racism and apartheid today, as you condemned apartheid in South Africa, albeit belatedly in the past. And I urge you to push us to come to terms with the Palestinians, who soon will become the majority between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

Do not believe a word Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says about the Palestinians; he has made a career out of trafficking in fear.

Like my two predecessors, I also believe we have a peace partner in President Mahmoud Abbas; perhaps the last peace partner. We must stop undermining him, as we will never be as lucky with a strong yet accommodating leader.

My father boasted of our liberal democracy and respect for human rights, albeit for Jews only, considering that in our Jewish state, the right to the land, the right to settle (return), and the right to self-determination is for the Jewish collective.

But even this communitarianism has eroded with time, culminating in a government of hyper-nationalists and religious fanatics that is demonstrably bent on destroying our Jewish democracy and squashing our liberal values.