Israelis Contrast Netanyahu’s Speech in Congress With Grim Reality at Home

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to Washington, a long-awaited trip intended to shore up waning support at home and abroad for the war in Gaza, was already overshadowed back in Israel by news that the military had recovered the bodies of several hostages from the Palestinian enclave.

Mr. Netanyahu was preparing for meetings with President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris at the White House on Thursday, the day after delivering an hourlong speech in Congress justifying Israel’s war in Gaza. But in Israel the dissonance between the repeated applause from U.S. lawmakers during his address and a grimmer domestic reality was apparent on the front pages of Thursday’s Hebrew-language newspapers.

Yedioth Ahronoth, a popular mainstream daily, split its front page horizontally, devoting the top half to portraits of four captives whose bodies were recovered, and the bottom half to the speech. A fifth body was subsequently identified by the Israeli authorities, who said all five had been killed on Oct. 7, during the Hamas-led assault on southern Israel that prompted the war.

Many Israelis want Mr. Netanyahu to agree to a cease-fire that would allow for the release of the remaining hostages in Gaza. Commentators noted the gap between what they depicted as an almost festive occasion in Congress and the widespread sense of government failure in Israel as the war dragged on, the fighting having expanded to multiple fronts and the leadership offering little vision for what comes next. (The war has divided U.S. lawmakers, with dozens of Democrats boycotting the speech, and the address was met outside the Capitol by thousands of protesters.)

“It was a speech devoid of disappointments or good tidings,” wrote Ben-Dror Yemini in Thursday’s Yedioth Ahronoth. “Never, ever was there such a large chasm between high words and contradictory actions.”

Mr. Netanyahu in his speech to Congress cast the war as a battle for survival of the Jewish state while making almost no mention of the tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians killed in Israel’s drive to destroy Hamas. Many Israelis had little objection to much of what Mr. Netanyahu said, which broadly reflected their sentiments, but they criticized what he did not say.