On July 31, I received an email from my Congresswoman, Bonnie Watson Coleman (NJ-12), about her important July activities. She wrote about supporting a food bank, a passport clinic, and the Stay Cool Act; opposing recent ICE raids in Princeton and political violence following the attempted assassination of President Trump; and offered praise of President Biden’s stepping aside as a “selfless act of patriotism, putting the need to defend democracy ahead of his own personal ambition.”
Watson Coleman also excoriated the July 24 speech by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at a joint session of Congress, explaining her decision to boycott his remarks.
For someone whose congressional tenure and experience are about domestic issues, the nature and tone of her comments were out of place at best. Watson Coleman uses language that conflates Netanyahu with the likes of Vladimir Putin, Ayatollah Khamenei, Kim Jong Un, and other actual tyrants saying, “(Netanyahu) has shown himself to be a war criminal.” This begins her slippery slope of outright lies, about which she is, at best, grossly misinformed.
In fact, war criminals are those who slaughtered 1200 people on October 7; raping, sexually mutilating, beheading, dismembering, burning alive, executing parents in front of their children and executing children in front of their parents. War criminals kidnapped more than 250 people from dozens of nations, among whom 109, including several Americans, are still being held hostage in Gaza by the terrorists.
War criminals use schools, mosques, hospitals, UN facilities, and other civilian infrastructure to store weapons, hide hostages, and from which to engage combat and aim at Israeli soldiers and civilians alike.
Watson Coleman crossed a red line with “facts” that even Hamas did not have the hubris to suggest. “Over the past 9 months, over 40,000 Palestinians have been killed - most of whom are women and children.” Simple fact checking which she outrageously neglected, showed that as of July 31, not even the Hamas-run “Health Ministry” claimed that over 40,000 people were killed, forgetting the fact that even the UN discredited these numbers, saying they were inflated by some 10,000.
By citing and inflating the Hamas fake numbers, Watson Coleman also misses the fact that when the terrorists claim a certain death count, they include the thousands of terrorists who invaded Israel on October 7, and those killed by Hamas and its sister terrorist organization Islamic Jihad as well.
Watson Coleman also ignores the precision of Israeli strikes against terrorists, which allows it to provide a much more accurate account of terrorists killed, some 17,000. So even going with her fake numbers, not excluding the terrorists killed on October 7, not excluding Gazans killed by the terrorists themselves, or discounting the total by 10,000 as the UN has done, the misguided congresswoman proves a critical point: that the ratio of civilians to combatants (terrorists) is incredibly close to 1:1. All military experts know that in urban warfare the ratio of civilians to combatants is more like 9:1.
Despite Watson Coleman’s assertion that Netanyahu is a war criminal, the success of this war in preventing civilian casualties is historic, and the actual low civilian death toll is not only not a war crime, but will be studied and indeed celebrated by people who are actually interested in the truth. Unfortunately, Watson Coleman is not interested in the truth as her words demonstrate.
She goes on to claim with no actual proof that, “Roughly 1.1 million Palestinians are facing starvation - half the population of Gaza.” This has also been disproven given the hundreds of truckloads of humanitarian aid brought to Gaza daily, along with air drops of the same (that I have witnessed). She overlooks the truth that it is Hamas and other armed gangs that hijack these supplies, preventing them from getting to the actual Gazans.
Whether deliberately and maliciously, or from ignorance and bias, when speaking of food, Watson Coleman wants to have her cake and eat it too. She easily accepts and inflates Hamas’ propaganda number of casualties, but neglects one critical thing: If half of Gaza’s population were actually facing starvation, Hamas would be bombarding the world with images of Gazan children with sunken eyes and distended stomachs. Seeing none of this alone is evidence that it doesn’t exist.
Watson Coleman claims, “Schools, homes, hospitals, and mosques, all have been destroyed and 85 percent of the population has been displaced.” Whoa! Back up, Bonnie. “ALL” schools, homes, hospitals and mosques have been destroyed?! Either someone didn’t pass high school English, or someone deliberately wants to distort the facts. Please, congresswoman, join me at Israel’s border with Gaza and let’s take a look. You see most buildings still standing. That’s because Israel has used precision attacks to target the terrorists. But please don’t forget that in most cases the schools, homes, hospitals, and mosques that have been destroyed are because Hamas brazenly uses these to store weapons, hide within them, and turn them into legitimate targets. These, congresswoman, are the actual war crimes that have taken place.
Hamas also massacred the third largest number of Americans killed this century, kidnapping hostages, of whom eight are Americans still in Gazan captivity.
Watson Coleman glaringly shows her foreign policy ignorance by deriding Netanyahu for abandoning “a two-state solution, the only viable option for an enduring peace.” In fact, maybe it will interest her that as her constituent, I have proposed a true long-term solution for peace in Gaza. By every objective measure, even standards of the Biden administration’s own spokesmen, this is the only actual solution.
But even if she were right that the two-state solution were at least a viable option, she’s grossly mistaken, blaming Israel for preventing that. Israel has embraced a two-state model since 1947. The true reason why two-states is neither viable nor possible is Hamas and its genocidal goal to eradicate all of Israel “from the river to the sea,” not just destroying the state of Israel but mass murder of the Jewish people. Recent polls among and by Palestinian Arabs prove that the vast majority do not want and never wanted a two-state solution.
This week, my youngest son (and her constituent) joined the IDF. He will be sworn in to defend Israel from terrorists and other threats and trained to do so by respecting all human lives, including those who support terrorists, according to the highest standard possible. If he violates these standards, he will be brought to trial according to the strict IDF procedures.
By calling Netanyahu a war criminal, she indicts all Israeli soldiers with no basis of proof.
Bonnie Watson Coleman is neither a lawyer, a foreign policy expert, nor an intellectual. She’s entitled to her opinion. But with opinions based on lies, other than being mistaken, the question remains whether it’s out of ignorance or malice. New Jersey and the US deserve better.