An old saying advises against “looking
a gift-horse in the mouth.” Another says, “Don’t bite the hand that feeds you.”
As of mid-June, 2026, Israel had not received either memo, because the
country’s military, the IDF backed up the position of Israeli settlers who had just
illegally detained—technically “kidnapped”—Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) while he was
on a trip in the West Bank. U.S. President Trump had recently told the media
that without the United States, Israel would not exist. The lack of gratitude shown
to the U.S. by making sure that a visiting Congressman was treated well during
his visit was palpable.
“Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) said he
was detained by Israeli settlers armed with U.S.-made rifles during a trop to
the West Bank . . ., where residents [had been facing] frequent attacks.”[1]
The Congressman was with a group that was “at a village that Israeli settlers
had destroyed; they had destroyed the school, they had destroyed that village,
and we were just looking at it,” he told reporters.[2]
The destruction, being in the West Bank, violated international law, so the
settlers and even the Israeli government had an interest in attempting to hide
the atrocity from the group containing the Congressman. Irony inheres to the
words used by Rep. Khanna to describe the settlers’ aggression: “An these
hoodlums come in with machine guns—M4, an American-made machine gun—and they
detain us. They block off the road. And then they call the IDF and the IDF is
on their side, not on the side of the Americans.”[3]
The IDF, the Israeli military, even “continued our detention,” Khanna later
said before adding, “They made a huge mistake.”[4]
The lesson for the U.S. is perhaps: be
careful to whom you sell weapons; the possessors may use them against even
members of your Congress.
At least the IDF was an official
part of the Israeli government; the settlers were merely private individuals
who were presumptuously taking matters into their own hands while being utterly
unappreciative of everything that the U.S. had done for Israel even though it
was decimating Gaza and its people. At least the Israelis were being consistent:
wanton disrespect of Palestinians in the West Bank and an American elected
representative. That the military sided with the settlers and thus against the
Americans implicates the Israeli government as being an ungrateful recipient of
American support. Perhaps all the money circulated to federal elected officials
by AIPAC (the American Israeli Political Action Committee) was thought
sufficient to allow for such a luxury; perhaps the indolence of the American people
with respect to opposing Israel’s mass genocide in Gaza was thought sufficient
to guard against any adverse reaction to a member of Congress being detained by
means of American guns. On December 7, 1941, the Japanese attack on Pearl
Harbor is said to have awakened a sleeping giant. By the time of Israel’s mass
destruction and killing in Gaza, with additional sordid ventures into the West
Bank and even Lebanon, the giant was back asleep and with it, its conscience, and, frankly, its self-respect.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
