Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called out his and Israel’s enemies as he addressed the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday, labeling New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani an antisemite.
Netanyahu spoke at a time when his country has been increasingly isolated and vilified on the international stage following three years of war against Iran and its proxies.
Many diplomats staged a walkout as Netanyahu rose to speak, while some of his supporters chanted, “Am Yisrael Chai!” (The people of Israel live.)
Watching them from the podium, Netanyahu asked, “If there are any other moral cowards who haven’t yet left this hall, please do so now, thank you very much.” He almost seemed to be smiling as he surveyed the men and women streaming out the door.
Netanyahu flew to New York on Thursday for a brief visit that also included a number of meetings with heads of state, but absent from his itinerary was President Donald Trump. The U.S. leader spoke at the U.N. on Tuesday and was in Washington when Netanyahu arrived, though he made time to meet with Mamdani while in New York.
Outside U.N. headquarters in Manhattan, hundreds of demonstrators took to the streets to rally against Netanyahu and his policies.
The tone for the Israeli premier’s visit was set prior to his arrival, with Mamdani calling Netanyahu a war criminal. During his mayoral campaign, he had threatened to arrest the prime minister but conceded over the summer that, as mayor of New York, he had no authority to do so.
Mamdani made no such threats against other leaders attending the General Assembly, including the Iranian president, whose country has been at war with the United States for most of the year.
Tensions have also been high between Mamdani and Israel’s Consul General to New York Ofir Akunis, who has likened the mayor’s policies to those of Nazi Germany and warned that his anti-Israel rhetoric was endangering Jews in the city.
During his address, Netanyahu also called out a number of countries and leaders who have criticized the Jewish state or acted against it, such as Qatar and Turkey.
Unlike past years, however, Netanyahu did not present a bold vision of the future or speak of a new Middle East. Even his talk of Iran and the danger of its nuclear program, which typically dominates his UN speeches, lacked a clear path forward.
Instead the Israeli leader focused particularly on Mamdani, calling him an “antisemitic mayor.” Chastizing him, he said, “Shame on you. Shame on you for distorting the facts. Shame on you for inverting the victim and aggressor. Shame on you for spitting in the face of truth.”
Netanyahu followed Akunis’ lead in saying that, since Mamdani was elected, “many Jews no longer feel safe in New York.”
Netanyahu said that Mamdani counts as friends people like the streamer Hasan Piker, who believes America deserved 9/11, and that he had hosted a Palestinian journalist who filmed a Hamas terrorist beating and torturing Israeli hostages.
The New York mayor has falsely accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza and “tried to stop me from coming here,” Netanyahu stated. “You tried to silence me. Well, you can’t silence me. You can’t silence the truth. And here’s the simple truth. Israel didn’t commit genocide. Israel prevented genocide.”
Netanyahu said the real genocidal group was Mamdani’s “Hamas buddies,” who would have killed every last Jew during its Oct. 7, 2023, attack against Israel. Palestinians killed 1,200 people in the invasion and seized 251 as hostages, bringing them into Gaza.
Prior to Netanyahu’s speech, Mamdani posted on X a video of himself and Palestinians from Gaza planting an olive sapling on the porch of his home, stating, “May peace be our future.”
In a statement to the media after the speech, Mamdani recalled that the International Criminal Court had issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu for his actions against the Palestinians.
“As he has done time and again, Prime Minister Netanyahu used his speech to repeat baseless lies meant to sanitize his genocide of Palestinians. Yet no lie can change the fact that he remains the subject of an International Criminal Court arrest warrant alleging war crimes and crimes against humanity,” Mamdani said.
In the U.N. plenum, Netanyahu said Israel took extensive measures to protect civilian lives in Gaza during the war that followed the attack, including providing food and vaccines, and asked why Israel would do that if it had genocidal intentions.
Accusing Israel of genocide, Netanyahu said, is “the greatest lie of the 21st century,” declaring that in Gaza, “Israel didn’t commit genocide. Israel prevented genocide.”
Hamas, he said, “used Palestinian civilians as human shields,” stationing themselves in hospitals, schools and mosques while stealing food from Gaza civilians.
“Hamas did everything possible to keep Palestinian civilians in harm’s way, often at gunpoint. Israel did everything possible to get them out of harm’s way,” Netanyahu said.
“Is this genocide? Of course not. It’s the opposite of genocide,” Netanyahu said.
Several countries, such as Qatar and Turkey, have spent billions “to spread lies about my country,” Netanyahu charged.
Qatar, which hosts Hamas leaders, has provided funding to U.S. universities and media outlets like Al Jazeera, he contended, so it could “brainwash young minds to hate Israel, hate America and hate the West.”
Turkey, he said, has become “a super-spreader of antisemitic lies” as its president suppresses his own people and illegally occupies northern Cyprus and transgresses against Greece.
“Now Erdogan wants to take over Syria,” which is not surprising since he also calls for Israel’s destruction and wants to be the “ruler of Jerusalem,” Netanyahu said. He declared that Erdogan would not be able to take over his country’s capital, stating, “This is our country, our city, our eternal capital.”
Netanyahu spoke of the absurdity of some of the charges against Israel, including that of “colonialism” leveled against the Jewish state by countries like Britain and France. “For God’s sake, they invented the term. Their colonies braced the entire globe,” he said.
Netanyahu also described how his country rose from one of the darkest days in its history, Oct. 7, 2023, to deliver crippling blows to its enemies on seven fronts. This included assassinating Iranian, Hezbollah and Hamas leaders, as well as injuring thousands of Hezbollah fighters by exploding their beepers.
Netanyahu, who is famous for gimmicks during his speeches, held up a beeper to show the audience what he was talking about.
Netanyahu said there is also an eighth front to the war: Israel’s “war for truth,” in which it has combated the media and those on social media, which among other things have overly focused on what they call “settler violence.”
Netanyahu called the focus on the issue “obsessive” and downplayed the phenomenon, which even his top army commanders have warned against, describing those attacking Palestinian civilians as “a handful of juvenile delinquents.”
Netanyahu said he “won’t stand for vigilantism” but said the impact of a small number of lawbreakers had been exaggerated when compared with Palestinian violence against Israel.
This week alone a father of six, Israeli-French citizen Netanel Shukron, had been killed by Palestinian terrorists and, in a separate incident, Neria Leiter, the son of Israel’s ambassador to the US, had been seriously injured.
When it came to Iran, Netanyahu lauded the US president for standing with Israel against the Islamic Republic. “We’ve had no greater partner than President Trump,” he said, who had understood decades ago the danger the Islamic Republic presented to the world.
Last year, the US and Israel had bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities. This year, the two armies launched a war against Iran in February that ended with the declaration of a 60-day ceasefire in April intended to lead to a diplomatic resolution. The war did not eliminate Iran’s nuclear program or destroy the Islamic Republic.
Although the negotiations fell apart, and the two sides have occasionally traded fire, all-out war has not resumed. In the meantime, Israel has been sidelined with Trump taking the lead on the issue of further war with Iran, and has been deliberating between diplomacy or military action.
The decision last year to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities, he said, was “one of the easiest decisions I’ve ever had to make.”
Preventing a nuclear Iran is a step that saves lives, Netanyahu said. He also gave a nod in the direction of Iran’s internal oppression by holding up a Starlink communications device, used to bypass surveillance and help the Iranian people communicate with the world.
The “tyrants of Iran,” he said, are “most afraid” of their own people.
To the UNGA president, he said, “I’m going to leave this device with you so you can give it to the Iranian delegation so when they inevitably defect, they too will be able to freely tell their story on social media.”
One day, he said, “and it may not be far away, the Iranian people will be free.”
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