Benjamin Netanyahu delivered an inflammatory address to the United Nations on Thursday, decrying what he said was a global anti-Jewish conspiracy and swatting aside criticism of Israel’s war in Gaza, as he faces down international isolation and a fight for political survival in upcoming elections in Israel. As planned protests erupted on the streets of New York City, Netanyahu took aim at critics of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, the international media, regional leaders such as Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the leftwing commentator Hasan Piker and the New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani in an address that doubled as a stump speech to ignite his rightwing base for the elections. Invoking his late brother Yonatan Netanyahu, a commando killed in a 1976 raid to free Israeli hostages from a hijacked airliner in Entebbe, Uganda, he repeated the lines: “We are going to win.
We have no other choice.” Dozens of delegates, inspired by a Palestinian call, walked out of the General Assembly Hall of the UN headquarters as Netanyahu took the stage, leading a speaker to pound his gavel and announce: “I’m calling for order in the hall.” Palestinian representatives organising diplomatic missions to bring staff for a planned walkout of Netanyahu’s speech said they wanted to “send a clear message to Netanyahu and his government that no one is willing to aid, abet, or be complicit in its genocide and war crimes and illegal occupation, which all peace-loving states and peoples demand must come to an end”. The speech revealed little new in terms of Israeli policy over the war in Gaza, militant settler violence in the West Bank, or Israel’s plans to end other regional conflicts including its joint war with the United States against Iran. But he argued that the world faced an existential threat from Iran, suggesting that several missiles from Tehran could have destroyed the UN, and cited quiet support from world leaders for Israel’s actions that could not be aired in public.
Because if we hadn’t done it, we’d all be dead.” He branded Turkey’s Erdoğan as a “tyrant” who “hosts Hamas terrorists”, decried Mamdani as the “antisemitic mayor of New York”, and declared that Israel’s war in Gaza is not genocide – “it’s the opposite of genocide”. Netanyahu delivered the controversial address to the United Nations on Thursday just hours after Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas said his delegation was “unlawfully” denied visas by the Trump administration to attend the meeting of world leaders. In a video address from Ramallah, broadcast in the General Assembly Hall, Abbas condemned Israel’s policies in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem as a “malicious colonial plan” to establish a “‘Greater Israel’ and erase the Palestinian presence”.
Citing the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the violent expansion of settlements in the West Bank, Abbas said that the Israeli government “now threatens the very life and existence of the Palestinian people in their homeland”. For the second year in a row, the US state department denied visas to Abbas and the Palestinian Authority delegation, arguing that they had failed to live up to their commitments to seek peace with Israel. In his speech, Abbas said his delegation “[rejects] these unlawful punitive measures, as well as the accusations and justifications on which they were based”.
He said: “Preventing the Palestinian delegation from reaching United Nations headquarters is inconsistent with the obligations of the United States as the host country.” As he spoke, protests were forming on the streets of New York near the United Nations headquarters in advance of Netanyahu’s arrival. Hundreds of demonstrators crowded into the street on Manhattan’s east side in midtown and held signs that said “End the Genocide” and wore shirts reading “Fund people not bombs”. By the end of Netanyahu’s speech, more than 100 demonstrators, including several local elected officials, had been arrested by New York City police.
Earlier this summer, the mayor, Zohran Mamdani, had said that Netanyahu was “not welcome” in New York, and said he was reviewing whether Netanyahu could be arrested by city police under an international criminal court warrant for his arrest. He has since tempered that stance, saying this week that he wouldn’t attend the protests but promising to protect their “right to [protest] in this city”. Netanyahu is not expected to meet Donald Trump, who is in Washington to host the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, nor with other senior US officials, as he faces growing international condemnation over his hardline stance.
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