The pictures from Gaza are burned into my memory and will be with me for the rest of my life. Little children’s bodies just turned into a pulpy mass. A beheaded toddler. A father holding pieces of his child in a bag. People burned and squashed and pulverized. Even from thousands of miles away, I feel such sickness and anger and pain. What it’s actually like for those there, for the parents of the children themselves, or the children wandering the rubble after their whole families have been gruesomely killed, that is literally unimaginable—it is beyond the power of my imagination to even conceive of the experience. 

Americans are not exposed to most of the realities of the Gaza genocide. The news media publishes only sanitized images. They will show a parent crying, but not the crushed body of the dead child. At the moment, the New York Times website showcases stories about the U.S. economy (“2025 Could Be a Great Time to Be President, Economically Speaking”) and the Kamala Harris campaign (“Kamala Harris’s Fund-Raising Machine Cranks Into High Gear”) but not news about the situation in Gaza, which is buried in tiny type. As with prior mass killings, it’s not that the facts aren’t reported, it’s that they’re buried and not given the appropriate emphasis for the moral urgency of the situation. Astonishingly, Wikipedia has a far more comprehensive, well-researched, and serious examination of the ongoing genocidal atrocity than most of the U.S. news, which continues to be more interested in the “horse race” of the presidential election. 

It does not take much effort to find out the truth, though. We have discussed in this magazine before the evidence that Israel is destroying Gaza as a livable place. We now have more information than ever. We know that Israeli soldiers are permitted to shoot anyone they like. (They admit as much themselves: “It’s permissible to shoot everyone, a young girl, an old woman.”) Euro-Med Human Rights monitor reports that the Israeli army is escalating its “targeting of all aspects and basic elements of life” using “mass killings, starvation, deprivation of medical care, intimidation, arbitrary arrests, torture, and forced evacuations.” Gaza has become “the world’s most dangerous place to be a child” or an aid worker. Israel has been “blocking any attempt to restore even the barest necessities of life,” and Euro-Med documents disturbing instances in which civilians peacefully going about their business have been attacked and killed by the Israeli army. Every American ought to read the testimonies of doctors who have been to Gaza. Here is just a tiny sample:

[warning: graphic descriptions of violence]

• “You watch the news, you have some idea of what you’re going to see. But experiencing in real time entire family structures collapsing, entire families being wiped off the civil registry, having to tell a father or a mother that their entire family, their lifelong partner and all of their children, have just been killed and you weren’t able to resuscitate them, is something that was very difficult to experience and something that I hope I never have to experience again. And frankly, it’s something that I just feel ashamed that we’re still talking about, you know, seven months into this. It just is such a stark representation of our failure, of our failure as humanity. This is not a humanitarian crisis. This is the worst of what humanity is capable of, and it’s entirely all man-made. And when you witness it firsthand, it’s an unbearable injustice.”  — Tanya Haj-Hassan, pediatric intensive care physician, Doctors Without Borders 
• “I remember one particular night, it was a family of 20 that had come in – Their house had been bombed – And out of the 20, 6 were what we would call dead on arrival, so there was nothing for us to do. But 3 of those 6 were young girls under the age of 12, and their small bodies couldn’t survive the blast. That’s something we would say to each other, it’s something we are going to have to live with for the rest of our lives: Not just those images, but these kids that are lost. Everything that’s happening in Gaza, when it comes to kids, is intensified. I talked about how they’re not going to school. I talk about how they are so easily killed with these bombs, that their bodies can’t survive it. But you talked about malnourishment and the hunger and the starvation. We’re talking about an entire generation. It’s not just about being hungry; It’s how it’s going to affect their lives forever. Their immune systems are weakened, their growth will be stunted, and their coping mechanisms in terms of hunger are going to be different for the rest of their lives. It is so jarring to think about the future for these kids.” — Dr. Thaer Ahmad, ER physician 

• “I know we talk about the death and the disease and all that, but one thing that we also need to more talk about — and this relates to how they’re doing is the death of their culture and their civilization, which is a genocide or plausible — that’s part of the definition of a genocide, is it not? Every single playground, hangout place, café, restaurant, 500-year-old ancient mosque, 500-year-old ancient church, destroyed. There’s schools destroyed, there’s stadiums, sports facilities destroyed, their hospitals destroyed, their cinemas destroyed, museums destroyed, archives, where they kept their archives, erased, destroyed, burnt, their homes, 80 percent of homes, are all gone now.” — Yasser Khan, ophthalmologist and plastic surgeon 
• “We started seeing a series of children, preteens mostly, who’d been shot in the head. They’d go on to slowly die, only to be replaced by new victims who’d also been shot in the head, and who would also go on to slowly die. Their families told us one of two stories: the children were playing inside when they were shot by Israeli forces, or they were playing in the street when they were shot by Israeli forces… Several staff members told us they were simply waiting to die, and that they hoped Israel would get it over with sooner rather than later.”  — Mark Perlmutter and Feroze Sidhwa, surgeons  
• “All of the disasters I've seen, combined – 40 mission trips, 30 years, Ground Zero, earthquakes, all of that combined – doesn't equal the level of carnage that I saw against civilians in just my first week in Gaza.” — Mark Perlmutter 
• “I didn’t believe that this many children could be admitted to a single hospital with gunshot wounds to the head.” — anonymous doctor quoted by CBS
• “[Gaza] is like no war zone I have ever witnessed… It was worse than I could have imagined.” — David Nott, consultant surgeon at St Mary’s Hospital in London

Knowing all of this, what would you do if you stood face to face with the single man most responsible for it? Well, if you are the United States Congress, you would give him a standing ovation. 

It’s hard for me to overstate how disgusting, how morally depraved it is to applaud a person who has killed so many children. It’s far, far worse than inviting the leaders of Hamas to address Congress. Benjamin Netanyahu has used genocidal rhetoric against Palestinians, encouraged it in others, and has a cabinet filled with fascists who want to murder and expel Palestinians. He has made it clear that he believes Israel fully owns Palestine,  and that Palestinians should only ever have whatever rights Israel chooses to give them. Netanyahu has resolved to destroy Hamas even if he has to obliterate all of Gaza in the process, and that’s precisely what he’s doing, totally rejecting diplomatic offers that would end the war. The Israeli military knows that the goal of eliminating Hamas is impossible, meaning that Netanyahu is simply pursuing a policy that will continue to ruin what is left of Gaza. 

Netanyahu’s speech was predictably full of lies designed to conceal his monstrous acts, which even CNN easily exposed. Ignoring the legions of experts who say Israel has been starving Gazans and attacking civilians, Netanyahu repeated the laughable claim that Israel cares about preserving Palestinian lives, which one only needs to look at his own government’s rhetoric to see through. 

Now, I said that Congress gave Netanyahu a standing ovation, but that’s not strictly accurate, as Seraj Assi describes in Jacobin:

A dazzled Congress gave Netanyahu fifty-eight standing ovations, lasting about half of the speech’s duration and marking a record in US history, or perhaps any country’s history, at more than 400 percent the number Kim Jong Un receives in North Korea, thus breaking Netanyahu’s own record from 2015, when his forty-three-minute speech received forty-three standing ovations and rounds of applause from nearly every single US lawmaker. After a long, torturous hour of cheering and clapping, lawmakers scrambled on the House floor to shake Netanyahu’s hand.

Only one lawmaker made a visible protest. Rashida Tlaib courageously held up a sign accusing Netanyahu of war crimes and genocide. Evidently, her fellow congress members did not stop to wonder why their only Palestinian American colleague might find the invite to Netanyahu unconscionable, or consider how their cheers and applause looked through her eyes or the eyes of other Palestinian Americans. 

Other Democrats skipped the event, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Kamala Harris. Nancy Pelosi denounced the speech. But for the most part, the celebration of Netanyahu was a bipartisan affair, with half of the Democrats attending and many applauding. (Republicans, of course, have never met a pro-American murderer they didn’t like.) And it’s hard to praise even the actions of Harris. Anyone sincerely concerned with Palestinian suffering would have staged a public act of protest like Tlaib did. Instead, Harris took time to denounce protesters supportive of Hamas, and while she has lamented the suffering of Gazans, she has not said what is plainly obvious: Netanyahu is a war criminal who should be in the Hague, not the U.S. Congress. Harris’ failure to meet the elementary moral test of being able to call a war criminal a war criminal does not augur well for her Palestine policy should she be elected president.

Importantly, the U.S. government could put a stop to the horror in Gaza whenever it wanted to. Israel’s crimes are in fact best understood as U.S.-Israeli crimes, because the U.S. funds and arms Israel. We could cut them off whenever we chose, support the overwhelming international consensus that a Palestinian state should be recognized, and force Israel to respect Palestinian sovereignty. Our leaders choose not to do this, opting instead to fund and celebrate some of the worst crimes against humanity of our era.  

I recently asked leading Israeli journalist Gideon Levy about Netanyahu’s appearance. He replied:

“I think it was the most shameful session of the American Congress ever. What did they cheer for? Whom did they cheer for? Someone that very soon might face an international arrest order. Someone who is suspected in crimes of war. Why did you cheer it?”

Netanyahu’s rapturous reception before Congress should make any American with a conscience feel deeply troubled by their country. There is something very, very dark and wrong about a place that celebrates child-killers like Netanyahu. I don’t recall ever having been quite so disturbed by our politicians’ actions. This must stand as one of the most shameful spectacles in all of American history.