In a mass visual rebuke for the world to see, hundreds of delegates walked out of the United Nations General Assembly Thursday just as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stepped up to the podium. He delivered a fiery speech defending the seven-month war on Iran launched jointly by the U.S. and Israel, rejected allegations of genocide in Gaza and attacked New York City's first Muslim mayor, Zohran Mamdani. "If there are any other moral cowards who haven't yet left this hall, please do so now," exhorted Netanyahu, as diplomats from more than 70 nations were in the process of walking out.
But one veteran Israeli political analyst told CBS News on Friday that Netanyahu's primary goal in making the speech was shoring up his political position back home, with Israelis being his main intended audience. Israel is set to hold legislative elections on Oct. 27. Netanyahu and his right-wing coalition government — the most far-right in modern Israeli history — are trailing in the polls.
Yaakov Katz, former editor-in-chief of the Jerusalem Post, said Netanyahu's address was very deliberately planned to counter that trend. "People look at the hostility and they say, 'Oh, Netanyahu is not popular. People are walking out.' Israelis, I think, look at this and they say to themselves: 'The world is against us no matter what, but thank God we have a leader, in this case, Netanyahu, who can stand up to everyone and stick it to them,'" Katz told CBS News.
"That could bring him some votes, or at the very least consolidate the base," he added. The Israeli leader also used Mamdani as a foil, labeling him antisemitic and claiming "many Jews no longer feel safe in New York." "This plays out well, because Israelis look at people like Mamdani and they don't see much of a difference, whether it's Mamdani or it's President Erdogan of Turkey," said Katz, referring to another regular target of Netanyahu's ire, "or it's some other tent encampment or protest on the streets of Sydney or Paris or London. It's one and the same." Hundreds of people who strongly disagree joined a protest near U.N. headquarters in New York on Thursday.
Police arrested dozens of people denouncing both Netanyahu and the U.S. government for continuing to sell weapons to Israel. Many of the protesters identified as American or Israeli Jews. Some held up signs calling Netanyahu a terrorist, while others repeated the accusation, made by a panel of U.N. experts last year, as well as Mamdani and numerous others, that Israeli actions in Gaza amount to genocide against the Palestinian people.
Since Hamas sparked the Gaza war with its Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, killing more than 1,200 people and taking 251 others hostage, Israeli operations in Gaza have killed more than 73,000 people, according to the latest U.N. report, citing data compiled by Gaza's health ministry. Israel has always rejected the death toll figures reported by Gazan authorities, but it has not offered its own estimation of the cost of its war in the Palestinian territory in human lives. "What genocidal regime enables the distribution of 2 million tons of food into Gaza?
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