Knesset members of Hadash (the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality) described the Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s speech to the US Congress on Tuesday as dangerous for the peace between the peoples and criticizing it in a plenum discussion.

MK Hanna Sweid (Hadash) compared Netanyahu to Syrian President Bashar Assad. “When things are very tense, like in Assad’s last speech, the whole [Syrian] parliament stood up and clapped,” Sweid said. During Netanyahu’s speech, “first the Republicans got up, and then the Democrats felt like they couldn’t sit, so they got up later.”

Sweid also accused the prime minister of “turning peace in the Middle East and the occupation into a matter of internal American politics, and everyone with a brain knows that is dangerous.”

MK Eitan Cabel (Labor Party) accused Netanyahu of being “more American than Israeli. His English is so polished, so American,” he said. “He speaks their language”. However, “speeches don’t change the situation, pretty as they are,” Cabel added. “I know that Israelis feel like ‘he showed them,’ ‘he told them off,’ but we have reached a dead end that is going to set the region on fire.”