In person and defiant, Israel’s prime minister named the terrorists, the victims and their enablers. Barred from New York, the Palestinian Authority leader warned of “another Nakba”
The hall began emptying before Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said a word. As he walked to the podium of the UN General Assembly on Thursday, dozens of delegates rose and filed toward the exits, leaving whole sections of the chamber bare. Arab and Muslim delegations led the procession, and diplomats from several African and European countries followed them out. In the gallery above, Israel’s supporters answered with a chant that echoed through the hall: Am Yisrael Chai, “the people of Israel live.”
Netanyahu waited for the doors to close. “Mr. President,” he began. “Before I begin, just a quick announcement: If there are any other moral cowards who haven’t yet left this hall, please do so now. Thank you very much.”
The American delegation stayed in its seats and applauded. Earlier that day, the same Assembly had heard from Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas, who could not enter the hall at all. The State Department had denied him a visa for the second year in a row over the PA’s payments to terrorists, so Abbas spoke from a video screen. Between the two speeches, the Assembly heard two opposite accounts of the same land.
How can two leaders stand before the same Assembly on the same day and tell such different stories about the same land?
The Walkout
Israel saw the walkout coming. In the days before the speech, Ambassador Danny Danon predicted “another show,” a repeat of last year’s mass exit when Netanyahu took the podium. “It became very trendy to do politics by blaming Israel,” Danon said.
The delegates who left had spent the week cheering their own leaders. Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan accused Israel of a “genocidal mindset.” Qatar’s emir called the war in Gaza “genocide in every sense of the word.” Jordan’s King Abdullah called the Jewish state a “regional threat.” None of them chose to stay for Israel’s answer.
Netanyahu gave it anyway, starting with the empty seats. Fourteen years ago, on the same stage, he drew a red line across a cartoon bomb and vowed to stop Iran from building nuclear weapons. “That’s exactly what we did,” he said. “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. Because if we hadn’t done it, we’d all be dead.”
“Now, you want to hear the ultimate irony?” he continued. “In defending itself, Israel is also defending many of the countries whose delegates just left this hall! In fact, I want you to know that many of their leaders even thank us privately for taking out Iran’s nukes. It’s hard to imagine more mind-blowing hypocrisy.”
Later in the speech he turned to the protesters gathered across First Avenue, where the crowd included the actors Susan Sarandon and Elliot Page, and to the diplomats who had left. “Where were you when the Iranian tyrants butchered and maimed tens of thousands of unarmed Iranian civilians?” he asked. “Did you protest outside the Iranian mission to the U.N.? Did you speak out, for that matter, for Christians persecuted in Iran and throughout the Middle East? No, you didn’t do that. Because you’re phony human-rights protesters.”
“We Have No Other Choice”
Netanyahu built the speech around a memory from June 1967. Israel was then confined to what he called “a tiny sliver of land,” equal to “about one third of one percent of the landmass of the entire Arab world,” and three Arab armies were preparing to invade. “You know what Israelis were doing at the time? They were digging mass graves,” he said. The Jewish state had no presence in Judea, Samaria, Gaza or the Golan. The war was about Israel’s existence, as the conflict still is today. “It’s not about territories; it’s about a Jewish state at any boundaries,” he said.
Netanyahu singled out the accusers who call Israel a colonial power, among them Britain and France. “For God’s sake, they invented the term. Their colonies braced the entire globe,” he said. “Colonialism… Give us a break… Another lie.”
He also had a message for Syria’s President Ahmed al-Sharaa, who had joked two days earlier that Trump should “give New Jersey to the Israelis” in place of the Golan Heights. “Mr. al-Sharaa, you should know the Jews have been on the Golan Heights since the days of Moses,” Netanyahu said. “You can read it in the Bible.”
Then he told the story of his brother. Five days before the war, the young Benjamin Netanyahu, then a high school student in Philadelphia, flew home to a country in total blackout and went looking for Yoni, a 21-year-old paratroop officer. He found him among the orange groves near Ramle. “Bibi, what are you doing here?” Yoni asked. Over “a cup of makeshift military coffee,” the younger brother asked what was going to happen.
“We’re going to win,” Yoni said. “We have no other choice.”
Nine years later, Yoni led the raid on Entebbe. “Miraculously, they rescued 103 Jewish hostages and brought them all home, every single one of them,” Netanyahu said. “My brother, the commander of the storming party, was the only soldier killed in this mission.” He thanked Uganda for recently erecting a statue of Yoni where he fell. Yoni’s answer became the refrain of the speech, repeated until its final line.
Seven Fronts
Netanyahu called October 7, 2023, “the darkest day in Israel’s history.” “I want you to know there wasn’t a single Israeli in Gaza at the time. Not a civilian, not a soldier. Not one!” he said. “It didn’t matter one bit.” The terrorists murdered the very neighbors “who picked up Palestinian children at the Gaza border and drove them to Israeli hospitals for cancer treatment.” “They slaughtered Holocaust survivors. They burned babies alive in front of their parents. They beheaded our men. They brutally raped our women, and then they murdered them.” Proportionately, he said, the 1,200 dead equaled “40,000 innocent Americans slaughtered in less than 24 hours. That’s 16 times 9/11.”
“Well, we didn’t collapse,” he said. “Instead, we rose and fought like lions.” He listed the seven fronts: Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Iran, the militias of Iraq and Syria, and Palestinian terrorists in Judea and Samaria. “Do you know any other country the size of New Jersey capable of fighting a seven-front war? And for three years?”
“Remember the beepers?” he asked, recalling the operation that crippled Hezbollah’s command. “Well, I can tell you this: Hezbollah certainly remembers them.” Hezbollah’s arsenal of 150,000 missiles and rockets is mostly gone, he said, along with its leaders. “Their spirit—broken.” He read the roll of the dead: “Khamenei, Deif, Sinwar, Haniyeh and Nasrallah—and thousands of other terrorists who sought to destroy us—they’re all gone too.”
Netanyahu spoke just days before the anniversary. The massacre of October 7, 2023, fell on Shemini Atzeret, the Eighth Day of Assembly, which in Israel is also Simchat Torah, the Rejoicing of the Torah. On that festival, Jews dance in circles holding the Torah scrolls and celebrate completing the annual cycle of reading. Hamas chose that morning to invade. By the Hebrew calendar, the third anniversary falls on Saturday, October 3, when Jews around the world will again take the scrolls into their arms and dance. In many synagogues, the dancing will be accompanied by the names of those murdered three years ago.
“Flee, Son. Save Yourself”
Netanyahu turned to Judea, “by the way, that’s where the word Jew comes from,” where he said terrorists make “thousands of attempts per year” on Jewish families driving the roads. The world ignores them and fixates on “a handful of juvenile delinquents, about 150 in number,” he said, whom Israel’s security services pursue. “I won’t stand for vigilantism. We’re a country of law,” he said. “But that’s what they call settler violence.” To the leaders who lecture Israel about it, he said: “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He addressed his next words directly to French President Emmanuel Macron, who had claimed from the same podium that Hamas “has never been active” in the region. “A French citizen, Netanel Shukrun, a father of six, was gunned down when he visited a spring with his 16-year-old son,” Netanyahu said. “A Hamas terrorist in Judea and Samaria comes and fires point-blank at him. And the last words he uttered: ‘Flee, flee, son. Save yourself.'”
Then he spoke of Neria Leiter, the reservist mowed down by a terrorist at a checkpoint the day before Netanyahu flew to New York. “I visited the family right before I boarded the plane to come here,” he said. “Neria, a father of four, is the son of Yechiel Leiter, our brilliant ambassador to the United States. Three years ago, Yechiel’s oldest son, Moshe, a father of six, was killed while clearing a booby-trapped building in Gaza.”
He turned toward the ambassador. “Yechiel, my brother, your pain is immeasurable. The entire people of Israel, and many outside of Israel, are praying for Neria’s life.”
He then read the words Neria posted shortly before he was attacked: “We have no other country. It is a privilege to defend it.” Netanyahu made a vow to Neria and to “all of the heroes of Israel.” “Your sacrifice will not be in vain. We will continue to defend our state. We will continue to win. Because we have no other choice.”
“No Greater Partner”
Netanyahu thanked the ally who stood with Israel through the war. “In this battle against the barbarians, we’ve had no greater partner than President Trump,” he said, crediting him with understanding decades ago that the ayatollahs chanting “Death to America! Death to Israel!” would one day act on their words. “Brave American pilots alongside brave Israeli pilots flew joint missions over the skies of Iran,” he said. Together the two countries brought home the hostages. “We brought back every last one of them.” Two days earlier, Trump had mentioned Israel exactly once in his own 38-minute address to the same body.
Netanyahu paid tribute to the Israeli people, “left and right, young and old, religious and secular,” who endured 1,000 Iranian ballistic missiles. He told the delegates that a single one-ton missile would obliterate their compound. “Think about one thousand gigantic missiles falling from the skies on your cities, on your homes,” he said.
The Eighth Front
“There is an eighth front to this war,” Netanyahu said. “It’s the war for truth.” The first country to wage it, he said, was Qatar, which spent decades “massively funding American universities and toxic media outlets like Al Jazeera” to “brainwash young minds to hate Israel, hate America and hate the West.” “This is the same Qatar that hosts the Hamas butchers of Oct. 7,” he said.
The newest “super-spreader of antisemitic lies,” he said, is Turkey. “Erdoğan is a tyrant who also hosts the Hamas terror chiefs. He has murdered thousands of Kurdish civilians. He denies the Armenian genocide. He jails journalists and opposition leaders. In fact, I think he holds the world record on this.” Erdogan occupies northern Cyprus, harasses Greece, wants to take over Syria and “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.”
He took apart the genocide charge. Israel sent “millions of text messages,” made “millions of phone calls” and dropped “millions of leaflets” to move civilians out of harm’s way, while Hamas kept them in it, “often at gunpoint.” “What genocidal regime gives a million polio vaccinations to the enemy’s population? What genocidal regime enables the distribution of two million tons of food into Gaza? That’s a ton for every person.” “Accusing Israel of genocide is the greatest lie of the century,” he said. He quoted Col. John Spencer, the head of urban warfare studies at West Point, who was in the hall: “Israel has done more to prevent civilian casualties in war than any other military in history.”
“Shame on You”
Then Netanyahu turned his fire on the man who had promised to arrest him. “To all those spreading these lies about my country and about our brave soldiers, whether they sit in this hall or in the office of the antisemitic mayor of New York City, I say this: Shame on you,” he said. “Shame on you for distorting the facts. Shame on you for inverting victim and aggressor. Shame on you for spitting in the face of truth.”
“Mr. Mamdani, since you were elected mayor of this city, many Jews no longer feel safe in New York,” he said. “They tell me, this isn’t the city we remember.” He laid out his charges. “You praised criminals convicted of supporting Hamas. You count as friends people like Hassan Piker, who said America deserved 9/11.” He accused the mayor of welcoming into his home a Palestinian journalist who filmed Hamas terrorists torturing Israeli hostages and “refused to publish the videos in order to protect—you guessed it—the terrorists!” He said the mayor’s wife “liked a post praising the Oct. 7 massacre” and another saying “Tel Aviv shouldn’t exist.” “You refused to condemn any of that,” he said.
“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. “Israel didn’t commit genocide. Israel prevented genocide. And that’s exactly what Mr. Mamdani’s Hamas buddies would have done to us had we not stopped them. They would have killed every last one of us.”
He listed the cities where Jews have been murdered or attacked: 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 declared. “Today we have a state. Today we have an army.” To Jews everywhere, he said: “Raise your head high. Be proud. Be confident. Don’t be intimidated. Stand up.”
He warned the governments of Western Europe that they “have chosen weakness” and “have chosen appeasement,” and put a choice before them: “The brotherhood of democracies or the Muslim Brotherhood?”
Mamdani responded within hours, saying Netanyahu “used his speech to repeat baseless lies meant to sanitize his genocide of Palestinians.”
A Starlink for Tehran, a Warning About Bethlehem
“We are not afraid,” Netanyahu said, “but I’ll tell you who is afraid. The Tyrants of Tehran.” He held up a Starlink satellite terminal, the device that lets Iranians get around the regime’s internet blackouts. “Mr. President, I’m going to leave this device with you so you can give it to the Iranian delegation,” he said, “so when they inevitably defect, they too will be able to freely tell their story on social media.”
He spoke of the Christians of the Middle East, whose numbers are “plummeting everywhere,” he said, except in Israel, where the community is “growing, thriving, succeeding.” He pointed to Bethlehem. “When it was controlled by us, it was 80-90% Christian, and we gave it to the Palestinian Authority. And today it’s 80-90% Muslim. Everyone, the Christians were shoved out. Did you protest that? Nothing. Nada.”
“The power of the people will overcome the people in power,” Netanyahu said of Iran. “One day, and it may not be far away, the Iranian people will be free. Their murderous regime will be toppled by its lies, by its corruption, by its cruelty. This evil regime will fall, and we will all celebrate that day.”
Abbas: “Another Nakba”
Abbas’s speech offered a very different account. The 90-year-old PA chairman appeared on screen after the United States refused him entry, citing the PA’s “failure to reform” and its “providing stipends to terrorists and glorifying violence.” Abbas insisted that the PA had “fulfilled our obligations, carried out a comprehensive national reform programme, and upheld our commitment to international law.”
“Do not allow another Nakba to occur,” Abbas said, using the Arabic word for “catastrophe” that Palestinians apply to Israel’s founding. “What is taking place in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem are not isolated incidents, but rather a malicious colonial scheme.” He described Jews living in Judea and Samaria as “terrorist gangs protected by the Israeli occupation forces.” He urged faster implementation of the next phase of Trump’s Gaza plan and announced PA legislative elections for November 28, the first in 20 years. Abbas was elected in 2005 to a four-year term.
The two speeches could hardly have differed more. Netanyahu stood in the hall and named the dead, Netanel Shukrun and Moshe Leiter, and the wounded, Neria Leiter. He named the terrorists: Deif, Sinwar, Haniyeh, Nasrallah. Abbas spoke from a screen because his government still pays the families of terrorists. None of the reports of his address record him mentioning the hostages or condemning the massacre of October 7. Abbas called the Jewish presence in the land a “colonial scheme.” Netanyahu answered with three thousand years of history.
“The Eternity of Israel Will Not Falter”
“The story of my people, the Jewish people, goes back over 3,000 years,” Netanyahu said. “We speak the same language today that we spoke then. We live in the same land in which our ancestors lived then: David, Solomon, Isaiah and Jeremiah. That’s our land. The land of Israel.”
He read from Mark Twain’s essay “Concerning the Jews”: “The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away… The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his spirits, no slowing of his energies.”
The Bible supports his rebuke to al-Sharaa. Before the children of Israel crossed the Jordan, Moses himself designated a city of refuge in the Golan:
“Bezer in the wilderness, in the table-land, for the Reubenites; and Ramoth in Gilead, for the Gadites; and Golan in Bashan, for the Manassites” (Deuteronomy 4:43).
Syria’s president jokes about New Jersey. The tribe of Manasseh held the Golan more than 3,000 years ago.
Netanyahu’s final words came from the Bible: Netzach Yisrael lo yeshaker, “the eternity of Israel will not falter.” The verse comes from one of the Bible’s sternest scenes. King Saul had been commanded to wipe out Amalek, the nation that attacked Israel without provocation after the Exodus and preyed on the weak and the stragglers. Saul spared Amalek’s king. The prophet Samuel told him that God had torn the kingdom from him, and added:
“And also the Glory of Israel will not lie nor repent; for He is not a man, that He should repent” (1 Samuel 15:29).
Netzach Yisrael, the Glory or Eternity of Israel, is God Himself. His promise to Israel stands forever, and so does His judgment on Israel’s enemies. The king who showed mercy to Amalek lost his throne. The nation endured.
“If we muster our courage, if we steel our resolve, we will continue to win,” Netanyahu said. “And the reason is simple. We have no other choice.” Then he closed with two words to his people, Chag Sameach, a happy holiday, and flew home in time for Sukkot.
The holiday he wished his people carries its own answer to the walkout. For the seven days of Sukkot, the Temple offerings included seventy bulls, one for each of the nations of the world. Israel prayed for the same peoples whose delegates now walk out on its prime minister. On the eighth day, Shemini Atzeret, the offering shrinks to a single bull, for Israel alone. The Sages compared it to a king who, after a week of banquets for all his guests, turns to his beloved and says: “It is difficult for Me to part from you. Stay with Me one more day” (Rashi on Leviticus 23:36).
Three years ago, Hamas turned that day of intimacy between God and Israel into the darkest day in the nation’s history. Next Saturday, Israel will dance with the Torah again. Netanyahu left behind a hall full of empty chairs and a Starlink terminal waiting for the Iranian delegation. On the screen, a 90-year-old leader barred from America warned of catastrophe. At the podium, a man who lost his brother to terror, fresh from the bedside of a soldier whose own brother fell in Gaza, told the nations that Israel will win because it has no other choice. The nations walked out. On Shemini Atzeret, God asks Israel to stay.
