He steps onto the stage of an Assembly that is openly contesting him, and turns it into a platform for his political agenda ahead of the October 27 elections: for Netanyahu, what matters is the vote of the religious far right and Trump. The UN, an increasingly empty box.
New York City, General Assembly Hall, UNHQ. It is just after two in the afternoon when Benjamin Netanyahu takes the podium of the General Assembly, which would, in theory, be the home of the international community. The protests begin immediately, and the hall starts emptying as “His Excellency the Prime Minister of Israel” is announced, a man subject to an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court over allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity. His presence amounts to a desecration, a blasphemy in a church; dozens of delegations leave the hall in the planned walkout. Meanwhile, the Israeli delegation keeps track of who leaves and who stays: a video shows Israel marking down the “traitors.”
From the galleries, however, come applause and chants of “Am Yisrael Chai” from supporters who came specifically for the occasion. Netanyahu reacts to the protest by attacking those who leave, calling them cowards; the close-ups reveal an angry stare. In his speech, he addresses those who remained, calling those who walked out “moral cowards.”
The genocide of Palestinian civilians, never mentioned except through Hamas, did not happen; on the contrary, according to Netanyahu, “our genocide” was prevented through permanent preventive war, presented as a necessary act of national survival, Israel as the only safe haven for Jews, a people whose persecution, he says, never ended after the Holocaust. “We will continue to win. Because we have no other choice,” he says.
In this epic struggle between good and evil, Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran stand on one side, while tiny Israel stands on the other, continuing to fight in order to exist but never being understood. And so Netanyahu complains about those who criticize him without knowing enough about the situation.
Colonization, he explains, does not exist. Instead, Israeli families living in the settlements are the “victims of thousands of attacks.” There are isolated groups of criminals, “a handful of juvenile delinquents,” around 150 people who throw stones, cut down olive trees and occasionally set fires, acts that the Shin Bet must deal with, but they do not represent the settlers, who are, instead, good people. Netanyahu speaks of Judea and Samaria as “the heart of the historic homeland of the Jewish people” and claims that land as the land of Israel.
“What a distortion. It’s an obsession”
He wants this obsession, this distortion of reality, to end: the settlers are not illegally occupying the land; they are law-abiding, “peaceful settlers, honorable people, law-abiding people,” living peacefully in Judea and Samaria — the occupied West Bank — and entitled to be there because, he says, that is the land of the Jews, the land of Israel.
A criminal lie that is music to the ears of the religious far-right electorate, in the settlements and beyond, which votes for Smotrich and Ben-Gvir but which Netanyahu wants to bring back under the Likud umbrella, his own, to prevent those votes from being dispersed. Netanyahu had in fact urged Smotrich and Ben-Gvir to unite their forces ahead of the election.
And then Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, immediately tweets: Netanyahu, winner.
After the serenade to the settlers, comes the ode to Trump. The only true friend of Israel
“In this battle against the barbarians, we’ve had no greater partner than President Trump.” Netanyahu does not simply thank Trump. He presents him as Israel’s main ally in the war against those he calls “barbarians,” and attributes to the joint action of the United States and Israel a mission that goes beyond defending the two countries: “to save civilisation.”
It is an important passage also because Trump, in his UN speech two days earlier, had devoted much of his address to Iran and made only one mention of Israel, without naming Netanyahu. For Netanyahu, by contrast, Trump is central to the narrative: America and Israel fighting together against Iran, to defend themselves and civilisation.
The clash of civilizations returns, as though we were in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, when America was attacked. “Just as Israel was attacked by Islamic extremism on October 7, 2023,” the Israeli prime minister explains, because, according to him, ISIS and Hamas are the same thing.
And here the speech takes an unsettling turn. The man who had invoked the risk of a new attack on the World Trade Center in a 1995 book, the man who, according to revelations by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, had been warned before October 7 about the possibility of a Hamas attack but did not intervene to prevent it, now invites everyone to consider that two one-ton missiles would be enough to wipe out the entire United Nations complex from which he is speaking: “It would obliterate the entire compound. In fact, two such missiles would obliterate the UN.”
Only minutes earlier, Netanyahu had shown the Assembly the device used in September 2024, when thousands of pagers exploded in Lebanon and Syria in an operation attributed to Israel against Hezbollah that killed and wounded thousands of people: “Remember the beepers? Hezbollah certainly remembers them.” Remember the beepers? Of course Hezbollah remembers them.
A gangster-like gesture, a way of reminding everyone that Israel can strike even inside everyday objects and that its destructive capacity knows no borders. The people of Gaza know it well; the journalists killed while reporting on the genocide know it; and above all, Palestinian children know it.
The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry concluded in 2025 that Israeli authorities and security forces had committed four of the five genocidal acts defined under the Genocide Convention; in June 2026, it reiterated that genocide and other grave crimes were continuing in Gaza.