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Israel’s prime minister does not say that his country “has the Senate, the Congress and a record strong Jewish lobby in the United States” in a viral video shared on social media;
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The excerpt from a 1988 interview with Benjamin Netanyahu has been inaccurately translated;
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What he actually says is that the United States have a Senate and a Congress, and that Israel has a strong Jewish lobby.
Footage from an interview with Benjamin Netanyahu is being widely shared on social media with inaccurately translated subtitles. The posts claim falsely that in the 80s video, he says to the journalist that Israel controls the Congress – the supreme legislative body of the United States, consisting of the Senate and the House of Representatives.
Factcheck.bg spoke to a Hebrew translator and an Israeli journalist in order to verify the content of the video.
What does Benjamin Netanyahu say indeed?
The video in which Netanyahu speaks Hebrew initially began circulating on social media with English subtitles. Some of the posts on X have been flagged with community notes by users warning about inaccuracies in the translation from Hebrew. The interview excerpt then also started being shared in Bulgarian, containing the same discrepancies between the Bulgarian translation and Netanyahu’s actual words.
In the interview, the current prime minister of Israel does not say: “USA is not a unified block. We have the Senate, the Congress and a record-strong Jewish lobby on our side.” Factcheck.bg spoke to Stella Behar, a translator from Hebrew, who compared Netanyahu’s words in the video to the added subtitles. She was unequivocal: the translation in the social media posts is inaccurate and tendentious.
“What he actually says in Hebrew corresponds to “There is“, Stella Behar explained, and not “We have“.
The inaccuracy of the translation was confirmed by the reply Factcheck.bg got from the Israeli newspaper Globes. The exact translation in English should be: “USA is not a unified block. They are not a unified block. There is the Senate, there is Congress, there is a Jewish strength (according to Stella Behar and the Globes journalists this can also be translated as “a Jewish lobby” – author’s note), which is incredible, stronger than ever. There is popular opinion, there are massive forces within popular opinion opposing this policy, the best commentators. The United States will not force us to do anything.”
„In other words, he did not say that Jews control the Senate or anything like that“, Uria Bar-Meir, a journalist at Globes, explained.
The video is part of a 1988 interview with Netanyahu for the television programme Moked.
„It was a current affairs programme that aired on Channel One every Wednesday from the beginning of the 70s until the 90s”, translator Stella Behar explained. At that time Netanyahu was Israel’s representative to the UN.
Factcheck.bg did not manage to obtain the original full recording of the 1988 interview. Presumably, the context of the conversation could have been the tension between the United States and Israel that developed in the late 1980s over differences in their policies with regard to Palestine and its territories.
The excerpt shared on social media over the last few months was most likely taken from a short documentary overview of Netanyahu’s time in office as prime minister, broadcast on IPBS in 2021. The documentary opens with clips from the 1988 Moked interview.
Fact-checked:
It is not true that in a 1988 interview, Benjamin Netanyahu said: “USA is not a unified block. We have the Senate, the Congress and a record-strong Jewish lobby on our side.” The English and Bulgarian translations of his words, shared on social media, are inaccurate. In the video he actually says: “USA is not a unified block. They are not a unified block. There is the Senate, there is Congress, there is a Jewish strength, which is incredible, stronger than ever.”
Translator: Vasilena Dotkova
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