Those applauses for the death of American democracy

However surreal the footage of the address to the US Congress by Benjamin Netanyahu, the blood-stained Prime Minister of genocidal Israel, and of the repeated standing ovations by members of Congress may seem, it represents the real face of our age, of the world order we live in, of our modernity, of our contemporaneity. Of course, the distance between lived realities and representation, the distance between the Congress that represents the people and the people themselves, the distance between the US and other worlds, the distance between the American mind and justice and conscience... A mind, a conscience, a truth lost among all these distances. Precisely because they are lost there, they are values to be sought there and found there.

In the Middle East, or in the Islamic world in general, the distance between state elites and peoples is always the first reality emphasized on the subject. It is the first reality that confronts those who, looking at the genocide Israel has been carrying out against Gaza for 295 days, cry out "Where is this Islamic World!" It is, unfortunately, the most obvious explanation for the inadequacy of so many Muslims in the face of all these attacks, which can be regarded as an insult and mockery to the whole of 2 billion Muslims themselves.

If they have no head, if they lack a political formation that will represent them, what value would their numbers have, even if they were not 2 billion but 100 billion? This inaction is not only about Israel's occupation and aggression against Palestine, against the Al-Aqsa Mosque and all its sanctities, which has continued for 75 years. In essence, for 100 years Muslims have been exposed to every kind of occupation, oppression, massacre, genocide and hate speech. Muslim peoples are grieved to the point of being crushed, they suffer in the face of all this, and they want a measure against these from their own rulers. But the rulers are very far from fulfilling these wishes of their peoples. They do not even care.

The fact is, in the Islamic World there is a very clear, obvious distance, a gap, a difference between peoples and their political representatives. Indeed peoples and rulers play entirely different tunes. We had supposed that this difference and distance, which could be explained by conditions of occupation or colonialism, was peculiar to the Islamic world. The most important reality exposed by the Al-Aqsa Flood that began on 7 October is that, despite all the democratic, free-thinking, free-acting and free-speaking, state-nation-hand-in-hand appearance, the Western world too is governed with the same distance. For there are places where the reactions that peoples show against the Israeli genocide are very different from the position of their states. Especially the USA, Britain and Germany. The Al-Aqsa Flood has exposed in all its nakedness the reality that these too are under occupation.

The USA's unlimited support for genocidal Israel is in any case the root of all the problems in the Middle East. The American people show on every occasion that they do not approve of the genocide that has been under way since 7 October. American universities are witnessing protests not seen even then, perhaps, since the events of 1968. Protests unprecedented in American history in all the big cities show that the American people are not with their country on Israel policies. Despite this, the government continues its support for Israel, though seemingly with some hesitations.

This will that has emerged among American universities, civil society and people is evidently at the utmost odds with the government's stance. But members of Congress, as if stubbornly standing against this harsh wind of their people, are in effect doing the hard thing. They do not shrink from receiving with great enthusiasm Netanyahu, a perpetrator of genocide, whose place should be not Congress but the courts, and then a dungeon. That those who claim to be the direct representatives of the Congress, that is, of the will of the people, can be so reckless against this will of their people shows how democracy in the USA has been hijacked. Everything seemingly takes place through a democratic process, but people who hold decisions the people never wanted are elected as representatives.

In the elections to be held in the USA in 100 days, Biden (now Kamala Harris) and Trump are competing with each other in promises of support to Israel, precisely during this genocide agenda, in a context in which the whole world shies away from being seen side by side with Israel. That is, the mass anti-Israel sentiment we see from the outside among the American people has no representation in the elections. Whom will those who do not want the USA to support Israel vote for in the elections? There is no option for them. One of two evils will be chosen.

Members of Congress believe more than they should the myths circulating to the effect that they depend on, and are in need of, the support of the Zionist lobbies in the USA. This superstition chains them to these myths, and they are not aware of it. The fact is, of course, these lobbies have money, media, networks and other powers. The power they establish over members of Congress with these strengths has turned the power of voting into the most ineffective and meaningless link of democracy. Such a result that American democracy falls to a level somewhat better than Egyptian democracy.

Meanwhile it appears that these cheap and despicable calculations of the members of Congress may come to nothing, for the presidential candidate and Vice President Kamala Harris made an unexpected statement after her meeting with Netanyahu. In saying that they cannot ignore the massacres in Gaza, the deaths of children and civilians, and that the time for this to end has long since come and gone, she was perhaps also shedding light on the state of frenzy of the members of Congress, whose eyes have been turned by greed for the lobbies' support.

The members of Congress who gave Netanyahu a standing ovation describe Israel as the USA's greatest ally in the region, but they do not see that Israel, as a project, is in fact the greatest burden on the USA. Middle East policies centered on Israel have turned the USA into an actor that cannot hold on in the region in the long run, is discredited in the eyes of the region's peoples, whose word and alliance cannot be trusted, and which is ill-intentioned. Along with the fortunes the USA sacrifices for Israel, its reputation is also taken away, and in return the USA in fact gains nothing. This reality is in fact being understood more every day in the USA, whose demographic structure is also constantly changing: Israel's alliance yield for the USA in the region is nothing compared with what it takes away. Israel is in fact an enemy of the USA. And the indicator of its greatest enmity is that it has hijacked the US Congress with its lobbying activities and the power of money.