An Israel/Gaza Reality Check

Schumer goes off on Bibi, but it won't dislodge the Israeli Prime Minister from power. A genocide in Gaza is still not happening and Hamas remains the obstacle to a cease fire .

I’m Michael A. Cohen, and this is Truth and Consequences: A no-holds-barred look at the absurdities, hypocrisies, and surreality. If you were sent this email or are a free subscriber and would like to become a paid subscriber, you can sign up here.

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I haven’t written anything in the newsletter for a while on the situation in Israel/Gaza, but with so much going on in the news, it seemed a good time to rectify that.

Schumer Goes Ham

Yesterday, I wrote a piece about Chuck Schumer’s big speech in the Senate condemning Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and calling for new elections in Israel … and then my editor at the Daily Beast asked for an article on that exact subject.

On Thursday in the U.S. Senate, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer let it all hang out.

Schumer excoriated Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu, labeling him an obstacle to peace in the Middle East and calling for elections in Israel to choose a new leader.

… Everything that Schumer said about Netanyahu is correct. The Israeli prime minister is kowtowing to the far-right members of his governing coalition because it’s the only way he stays in power. In the process, he is poisoning relations with Israel’s key ally, the United States.

Coming from the country’s most powerful Jewish elected official—and the senior senator from New York state, which is home to the largest community of Jews outside of Israel—Schumer’s words are truly unprecedented.

Unfortunately, they won’t make a dime’s bit of difference in Israel.

As I note in the piece, Israel’s byzantine coalition politics provide every incentive for the members of Netanyahu’s governing coalition to stick with the status quo.

If Netanyahu’s government fell tomorrow, new elections would be held soon after, and not only would Netanyahu almost certainly lose power… but so would most of his fellow coalition members.

Right now, polling shows that Netanyahu’s Likud party would likely lose more than ten seats in the country’s parliament, the Knesset. The biggest beneficiary of Likud’s decline would be the center-left National Unity party helmed by retired general Benny Gantz, who joined the current government after Oct. 7 as a minister without portfolio.

That means there is little incentive for any of Netanyahu’s coalition members to topple the government until the next scheduled elections, which would be in October 2026.

Finally, I note that the motivation for Schumer’s speech is undoubtedly domestic American politics and giving political cover to President Biden and Senate Democrats — you can read the whole thing here.

What Is Not A Genocide?

Over the past several weeks, as the Israeli offensive in Gaza has continued, pro-Palestinian activists have escalated their use of the term genocide to describe the campaign. The word has become omnipresent and practically routinized in the discourse on Israel and Gaza.

Yet, it is a slanderous, historically illiterate, and idiotic argument.

For example, here are a host of things that do not happen when a country is engaged in genocide.

• Negotiations over a ceasefire. Even rarer is the country or group perpetrating the genocide endorsing a ceasefire and the country or group that is the alleged victim of the genocide rejecting it.

• Allowing the flow of humanitarian aid to the party allegedly targeted — including a pledge to “flood” the area with aid.

• Civilians warned of military attacks and told to evacuate.

• The country or group perpetrating the genocide develops and publicizes a plan to evacuate civilians ahead of an impending military offensive.

Suppose Israel wanted to perpetrate genocide in Gaza. In that case, there are relatively easy ways to do it — carpet bombing, mass slaughter of civilians, cutting off humanitarian assistance and food aid altogether, not warning or evacuating civilians, etc.

Israel is not doing any of those things.

Those making the genocide argument …