It takes a lot to make UN delegates walk out from an address to the General Assembly. But this was precisely what Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, managed to achieve in his September 26 speech. His address began by attempting to show his country as a guardian of law and civilisation, fighting a lonely, unsupported war against fiendish barbarians. “Last year I stood at this podium and I showed this map. It shows the curse of Iran’s terror axis.” Such an axis threatened “the peace of the entire world. It threatened the stability of our region and the very existence of my country, Israel. They were meant also to threaten the United States and blackmail nations everywhere.”
The speech then moved into a triumphant register. Hezbollah had been cowed. The Houthis had been “hammered”. The “bulk of Hamas’s terror machine” had been “crushed”. The armaments of Bashir al-Assad had been destroyed, Iran’s Shiite militias in Iraq deterred. “And most importantly, and above everything else that I could say to you or that we did in this past year, in this past decade, we devastated Iran’s atomic weapons and ballistic missile programs.” Israel’s assassination program – the slaying of Iranian nuclear scientists, the killing of Hamas and Hezbollah leaders, the slaughter of half of the Houthi leadership – were also points of celebration. Regarding Hamas, Netanyahu offered the following: “The final remnants of Hamas are holed up in Gaza City. They vow to repeat the atrocities of 7 October again and again. That is why Israeli must finish the job.”
Anyone familiar with Netanyahu’s streaky command of Disney cartography or predictive assessments on the military power of other states already knows the strained performance here. Vital to his argument is delegitimizing the cause of Palestinian statehood, treating it as an annex of a foreign power and a foreign movement. He goes on to link with little effort Iran’s “massive nuclear weapons program and massive ballistic program” to the late Yahya Sinwar’s “dispatched” terrorists of Hamas as they made their way into Israel on October 7, 2023, to Hezbollah’s missiles and rockets in Lebanon, to Syria’s now deposed Assad regime, which “hosted Iran’s forces, tightening the noose of death around our throats.” For good measure, the Houthis in Yemen were also thrown in.
This shoddy reasoning shares the strain of paranoia US strategists demonstrated with feverish intensity during the Cold War. There was a stubborn refusal, at least till the Nixon administration, to see Communist insurgencies as the product of indigenous conditions rather than directed movements from Moscow and Peking. Assistance and aid to North Vietnam, for instance, was misconstrued as command and control.
Similarly, Netanyahu sees radical Islam as a monolithic bloc of obscurantism that has absorbed the Palestinian cause. Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis all shout “Death to America”. All had “murdered Americans and Europeans in cold blood.” Israel’s enemies were enemies of the West. “They want to drag the modern world back to the past… to a dark age of violence, fanaticism, and terror.” With demagogic purpose, he also pointed to “the radical Islamist surge” in the societies of Israel’s allies. Thank Israel, he declared, for having the capacity to supply the intelligence of five Central Intelligence Agencies, for doing, to quote German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, “the dirty work for all of us.”
The Israeli PM represents a country whose magistrates and representatives sneer and mock international law, treasuring an exceptionalism that have given it an increasingly roguish character. He is contemptuous of accusations that the IDF is not minimising harm to civilians, claiming that the ratio of non-combatant to combatant casualties is “less than two to one”, one much “lower than NATO’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq”. This is an astonishing view, given that Israel’s own military data, as revealed by The Guardian, +972 magazine and Local Call, shows that 83 percent of those killed in Gaza have been civilians.
Besides, even where civilians were killed, they only did so under coercion from Hamas. The oft repeated claim was made that the organisation “implants itself in mosques, schools, hospitals, apartment buildings and tries to force these civilians not to leave, to stay in harm’s way”. This is a convenient spread, justifying the destruction of critical infrastructure and the essential features of a functioning society. Unfortunately, evidence from the IDF on many of these claims has been skimpy.
The allegations of genocide, firmed up by the findings of an independent UN commission of inquiry, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, and numerous human rights groups including Israel’s own B’Tselem, were also swatted away as blood libels. Those wishing to commit genocide would never “plead with the civilian population it is supposedly targeting to get out of harm’s way.” The Nazis were never good enough to tell Jews to “kindly leave”.
As for the starvation policy, this was yet another lie. “There’s one ton of aid for every man, woman and child in Gaza” with each person receiving 3,000 calories per day. “Some starvation policy!” It takes some gumption to embrace such mendacity and self-imposed delusion, denying the militarisation of the aid model in the Strip, with necessaries drip-fed through a limited number of delivery points defended by private contractors and trigger-happy IDF personnel.
Regarding the latest round of countries recognising Palestinian statehood, Netanyahu could only hector. “Murdering jews pays off.” The forces of antisemitism had been rewarded by France, Britain, Australia and Canada, along with other states. “Your disgraceful decision will encourage terrorism against Jews and against innocent people everywhere.”
On the issue of the two-state solution, the argument was slyly inverted. Israel did believe in the formula. It was those nasty, ungrateful Palestinians who never did. They were “given territory” only to then attack Israel in “totally unprovoked” circumstances. Absurdly, Netanyahu even called Gaza a proto-Palestinian state, a gift from the Jewish state. Never mind that it became the world’s largest open air prison, its residents the convenient lab rats of Israeli surveillance, technology and military experimentation.
As long as Palestinians exist in Gaza and the West Bank, they are unsettling reminders of the colonial project, the thefts, the dispossessions, the habitual violence. As long as they have political representatives of any stripe, or any voice uttered through any form – literature, media, the podium, and even the gun – they are exercising the very same rights to self-determination that saw the creation of Israel. It is those rights that Netanyahu showed such withering contempt for in this indignant address.
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com
