Netanyahu Rages Against Friends and Enemies Alike During Delusional UN Speech

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stood before a half-empty General Assembly chamber on September 24 and delivered a speech steeped in delusions of grandeur, casting himself as the indispensable guardian of Jewish survival while attacking enemies and nominal friends alike, vastly overstating the results of Israel’s recent wars, and promising endless conflict under the banner of “we have no other choice.”

Dozens of foreign delegates walked out as Netanyahu took the podium. Iran’s representatives left a portrait of Qasem Soleimani, the former commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force, on their desk. Soleimani was killed in an American drone strike near Baghdad airport in January 2020 that was ordered by then-President Donald Trump.

Click to see full-size image. (Screengrab/UN)

Some other representatives who opted to stay booed and jeered. Very few other than the Israeli delegation stood and applauded.

Netanyahu then began his fiery speech by addressing those who had remained in the hall but had not yet left.

“If there are any other moral cowards who haven’t yet left this hall — please do so now,” he said.

He turned immediately to Iran’s nuclear program, recalling that he had stood at the same podium 14 years earlier and drawn what he called a red line against Tehran developing nuclear weapons.

Netanyahu said Israel had fulfilled that pledge and argued that destroying Iran’s nuclear facilities had been difficult militarily but straightforward for him as a political decision.

“Devastating Iran’s nuclear facilities was hard. It was very hard to do. But for me, it was one of the easiest decisions I’ve ever had to make as prime minister,” he said, adding that without the action, “we’d all be dead.”

He also accused countries whose representatives had walked out of privately thanking Israel for destroying Iran’s nuclear capabilities, describing that alleged contrast between private gratitude and public criticism as “mind-blowing hypocrisy.”

Netanyahu then moved back to the 1967 Six-Day War, arguing that Israel’s conflict with its enemies was not fundamentally about territory. He noted that Israel did not control the West Bank, Gaza or the Golan Heights before the war and directly addressed Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa, saying Jews had been on the Golan Heights since the days of Moses.

He rejected accusations that Israel was a colonial project and directed particular criticism at Britain and France.

“They accuse Israel of colonialism — some colonialism. And who’s accusing us? Among them are people in Britain and in France. For God’s sakes, they invented the term,” Netanyahu said. “Colonialism … Give us a break … Another lie.”

He argued that Israel had faced the threat of annihilation even when it controlled only a small portion of the territory and said the conflict was about the survival of a Jewish state “at any boundaries.”

Netanyahu then connected the 1967 war to the story of his older brother, Yonatan Netanyahu, recalling a conversation shortly before Israel went to war. He said he had returned to Israel from high school in Philadelphia as the country prepared for the conflict and found Israelis digging mass graves in anticipation of large numbers of casualties.

Yonatan, then a young paratrooper officer, told him that Israel would win because it had no other choice. Netanyahu later invoked those same words when recounting the 1976 Entebbe hostage rescue in Uganda, where Yonatan commanded the assault team.

Netanyahu said 103 Jewish hostages were rescued and that his brother was the only Israeli soldier killed in the operation. He also thanked Uganda for recently erecting a statue honoring Yonatan at the place where he died.

“Yoni’s words are as true today as they were more than half a century ago,” Netanyahu said. “We’re going to win. We have no other choice.”

That brought the speech to October 7, 2023, which Netanyahu described as “the darkest day in Israel’s history.” He recounted the Hamas attack in stark terms, saying 1,200 Israelis were killed and comparing the scale of the deaths, relative to Israel’s population, with 40,000 Americans being killed in less than 24 hours.

Netanyahu emphasized that there were no Israeli civilians or soldiers in Gaza at the time of the attack, saying Hamas nevertheless carried out what he described as a mass slaughter of Israeli civilians. He claimed that the attackers killed Holocaust survivors, burned babies, beheaded men and raped and murdered women, while accusing Hamas of filming and livestreaming the violence. He then presented the war that followed as a seven-front conflict involving Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Palestinians in the West Bank.

“They all ganged up on us to wipe us off the face of the Earth,” Netanyahu said. “They failed.”

He claimed that Israel, with U.S. support, had inflicted major damage on Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah, including striking Iran’s military and nuclear facilities and destroying much of Hezbollah’s arsenal.

Holding up a pager, he referred to the 2024 communications-device attacks on Hezbollah. “Remember the beepers? Well, I can tell you this: Hezbollah certainly remembers them,” he said.

Netanyahu said the bulk of Hezbollah’s reported arsenal of 150,000 ballistic missiles and rockets was gone and declared that the group’s leadership had been killed. He also listed Iranian and Hamas leaders, including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Mohammed Deif, Yahya Sinwar, Ismail Haniyeh and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, whom he said had all been eliminated.

From there, Netanyahu turned to violence in the West Bank, where he sought to counter international criticism of Israeli settlers by portraying Palestinian attacks as the much larger problem. He said Israel opposed vigilantism and had deployed the Shin Bet security agency against a small group of settlers whom he described as “juvenile delinquents,” while arguing that international attention focused disproportionately on them.

“I can’t stand that. I won’t stand for vigilantism. We’re a country of law,” Netanyahu said, referring to Israeli measures against settler violence.

He contrasted what he described as a small number of casualties associated with settler attacks with what he characterized as thousands of Palestinian terrorist attacks against Israelis. He then cited two recent attacks in the West Bank.

Netanyahu said French citizen Netanel Shukrun, a father of six, was shot dead while visiting a spring with his 16-year-old son and quoted his final words to the boy: “Flee, flee, son. Save yourself.”

He next referred to Neria Leiter, an Israeli reserve soldier and the son of Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Yechiel Leiter. Netanyahu said the younger Leiter had been seriously wounded in a Palestinian attack and was fighting for his life in a Jerusalem hospital.

Netanyahu said he would not allow Leiter’s sacrifice or the sacrifices of other Israeli soldiers to be in vain, adding, “We will continue to defend our state. We will continue to win. Because we have no other choice.”

That led into Netanyahu’s praise for Trump, whom he described as Israel’s most important partner in the war.

“In this battle against the barbarians, we’ve had no greater partner than President Trump,” Netanyahu said, thanking him for what he called bold leadership against the Iranian threat.

He said U.S. and Israeli pilots had flown joint missions over Iran and that the two countries had also worked together to bring Israeli hostages home from Gaza.

“America and Israel also worked together to bring back our remaining hostages,” Netanyahu said. “We brought back every last one of them.”

Netanyahu then shifted from the battlefield to Israeli unity, arguing that the country’s divisions had not prevented it from standing together during the war. He said Israel’s political and social differences remained, but that its shared history, values and courage were stronger than those divisions.

“Throughout this long war, our goal never wavered: To win,” he said. “To win with unwavering resolve. To win with unrelenting courage.”

He pointed to the Iranian missile campaign against Israel, saying Israelis had endured 1,000 ballistic missiles. He then asked the General Assembly to imagine the effect of a one-ton ballistic missile striking the U.N. complex, telling delegates that one such missile would devastate the compound and two could destroy it.

Netanyahu then praised Israeli troops of different religious backgrounds and described the Israel Defense Forces as “the most moral army in the world.”

At that point, Netanyahu even declared that Israel was fighting an “eighth front” in addition to the seven military fronts — what he called a war for truth in the international media and on social media.

The first country he singled out was Qatar, accusing it of spending billions of dollars on American universities and Al Jazeera and saying the goal was to make young people “hate Israel, hate America and hate the West.” He also attacked Qatar for hosting Hamas leaders.

Turkey was next. Netanyahu called President Recep Tayyip Erdogan a tyrant and accused Turkey of hosting Hamas leaders, suppressing journalists and opposition figures and persecuting Kurds. He also accused Erdogan of denying the Armenian genocide, occupying Northern Cyprus and threatening Greece, while claiming that the Turkish president sought greater influence in Syria and wanted to rule Jerusalem.

“He calls for Israel’s destruction almost every single day. He says he’s going to be the ruler of Jerusalem,” Netanyahu said. “No, Sir. You won’t. This is our country, our city, our eternal capital.”

Netanyahu then returned to Gaza and the accusation that Israel has committed genocide. He argued that Hamas had used Palestinian civilians as human shields and had operated from hospitals, schools and mosques, while also accusing the group of taking food entering Gaza. He said Israel had repeatedly warned civilians before military operations, citing millions of text messages, phone calls and leaflets intended to tell residents to leave combat areas. He also pointed to the administration of polio vaccines and the delivery of food into Gaza as evidence against the genocide accusation.

“What genocidal regime gives a million polio vaccinations to the enemy’s population?” Netanyahu asked. “What genocidal regime enables the distribution of two million tons of food into Gaza?” “Accusing Israel of genocide is the greatest lie of the century,” he said.

Netanyahu also invoked U.S. Army veteran and urban-warfare scholar John Spencer, saying Spencer was considered a leading expert on the subject and quoting him as saying, “Israel has done more to prevent civilian casualties in war than any other military in history.”

“Is this genocide? Of course not. It’s the opposite of genocide,” Netanyahu said.

He used that argument to directly confront Mamdani, accusing the New York mayor of seeking to prevent him from coming to the U.N. and attacking Mamdani over his associations and statements.

Netanyahu said Jewish New Yorkers had become less secure since Mamdani’s election and accused him of associating with people who had praised Hamas or criticized Israel.

“Mr. Mamdani, you tried to stop me from coming here; you tried to silence me. You can’t silence me. You can’t silence the truth,” Netanyahu said. “And here’s the simple truth. Israel didn’t commit genocide. Israel prevented genocide.”

Netanyahu broadened the section into an attack on antisemitism, saying Jews were being threatened or attacked in cities including New York, Sydney, Manchester, Montreal, Boulder, Los Angeles, London, Paris, Berlin and Washington.

“The days when Jews were defenseless victims marched to the slaughter, those days are over!” he said, calling on Jews around the world to “raise your head high,” be proud and stand up against intimidation.

He then criticized Western European governments, accusing their leaders of giving in to what he called antisemitic pressure and failing to defend Israel.

“The leaders of these countries have chosen to succumb to the antisemitic mobs,” Netanyahu said. “They have chosen weakness. They have chosen appeasement.”

He framed what he described as a choice facing the West as “the brotherhood of democracies or the Muslim Brotherhood” and argued that Israel would continue to develop technologies in areas including health, agriculture and artificial intelligence regardless of its critics.

Click to see full-size image. (Screengrab/UN)

The speech then returned to Iran, but this time Netanyahu addressed the Iranian people rather than the Iranian government. He held up a Starlink terminal and said the satellite communications system could give Iranians greater access to information and freedom of communication.

“The Iranian regime is especially afraid when their people have this,” Netanyahu said, holding up the device. “This is a communications device, Starlink, that allows people to access truth, to exercise choice and to exercise freedom of thought and freedom of speech.” He said he would leave the device with the president of the General Assembly so it could be given to the Iranian delegation “when they inevitably defect,” allowing its members to tell their stories freely on social media.

Netanyahu then turned his attention to the protesters outside the U.N., accusing them of ignoring Iran’s repression and persecution of Christians in the Middle East. He questioned why protesters had not organized against the Iranian government or demonstrated over the treatment of Christians, calling them “phony human-rights protesters.”

He argued that Christianity had declined in much of the Middle East under persecution but was growing in Israel, and he invoked Bethlehem as an example of what he described as the decline of the region’s Christian population.

Outside the U.N., protesters had gathered with banners calling for an end to the Gaza war, while members of Jewish Voice for Peace accused the UN of hosting what they described as a war criminal. Several demonstrators were detained, including actor Susan Sarandon.

Netanyahu then returned once more to Iran, telling the Iranian people that the government would eventually fall.

“The power of the people will overcome the people in power,” he said. “One day, and it may not be far away, the Iranian people will be free,” Netanyahu added. “Their murderous regime will be toppled by its lies, by its corruption, by its cruelty.”

He closed with an extended reflection on Jewish history, saying the story of the Jewish people stretches back more than 3,000 years and emphasizing its continued language, religious traditions and historical connection to the land of Israel.

Netanyahu cited Jewish values including belief in one God, the sanctity of life, the rule of law and a pursuit of peace and justice. He quoted American writer Mark Twain at length about Jewish survival and then argued that the tyrannies that had attempted to destroy the Jewish people had repeatedly failed.

“Over the centuries, the tyrannies that tried to destroy us failed time and again,” Netanyahu said. “God willing, they’ll continue to fail.”

Netanyahu ended by returning to the central idea that had run through the speech from the story of his brother to the wars in Gaza and Iran: that Israel had no alternative but to continue defending itself.

“If we muster our courage, if we steel our resolve, we will continue to win,” he said before delivering the final line. “We have no other choice.”

Netanyahu’s appearance came as Israel headed toward a parliamentary election on October 27. He was making a brief visit to New York before returning to the campaign.

In this sweeping, self-aggrandizing address, Netanyahu attacked Qatar and Turkey as sponsors of hatred, blasted Western European leaders for “weakness” and “appeasement,” targeted New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani as a silencer of truth, dismissed protesters as phonies, and claimed total victory over Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah while vastly overestimating the decisive results of Israel’s wars.

The speech dripped with the conviction that only he and Israel stood between civilization and annihilation, promising more conflict at every turn. While the performance appeared dispatched from reality, the threats of continued war and the refusal to accept any boundary or criticism must be taken with deadly seriousness.

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