Netanyahu challenges half-empty UN General Assembly: Accusing Israel of genocide is the ‘biggest lie of the century’

Two images clearly showed the growing international isolation and criticism facing Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. Inside the UN headquarters, the conservative Israeli prime minister was met Thursday with jeers and the departure of many delegations before he began his address. The half-empty General Assembly was a powerful metaphor. “If there are any other moral cowards who haven’t left this hall, please do so now,” he said defiantly, while members of his delegation shouted: “Am Israel Jai” (“The people of Israel live,” in Hebrew). Outside the building, police detained about 100 demonstrators, among them actress Susan Sarandon and Democratic congressional candidate Darializa Ávila Chevalier, who were protesting the presence of a head of state accused of committing genocide in Gaza.

That very accusation produced one of the tensest moments of an aggressive, threatening speech in which Netanyahu made clear he will not back down one iota. The idea that his country — born from the unparalleled trauma of the Nazi extermination of more than six million Jews in Europe during World War II — is now committing genocide is, he said, “the biggest lie of the century.”

Netanyahu went further. Not only did he deny that crime; he also insists that Israel has merely defended itself to avoid becoming the victims of a genocide. “And that’s exactly what Mr. [Zohran] Mamdani’s Hamas buddies would have done to us had we not stopped them,” he said. Those accusations, he added, have led to a growing persecution of Jews around the world. “Jews have been stabbed in the streets,” he said.

Separate from Netanyahu’s opinion, a growing number of experts and the largest professional association of scholars on the subject — the International Association of Genocide Scholars — consider that the country has committed genocide by acting with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, the Palestinian population. The conservative politician is not being investigated for that crime by the International Criminal Court, but for war crimes and crimes against humanity. However, there is an open case alleging genocide against Israel at the International Court of Justice (the UN’s top court) following a complaint by South Africa that has been joined by other states.

The Israeli prime minister spoke to the General Assembly aware that his political future is at stake next month. Polls for Israel’s election on October 27 show the two blocs — pro- and anti-Netanyahu — are neck and neck. In one month, Israel’s longest-serving political survivor could remain at the helm or be forced into retirement, from where he could potentially face various legal proceedings.

In that context he delivered a combative, hardline message built around one idea: Israel has no option but to respond with full force if it wants to survive. “We’re going to win. We have no other choice,” he repeated. He believes that impression was clearer than ever after October 7, 2023, which he called “the darkest day in Israel’s history,” when Hamas “committed the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.”

Enemies dead and spirit broken

Netanyahu boasted that a country the size of the state of New Jersey is capable of fighting a war on seven fronts (Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Iran, Yemen’s Houthis and the Shiite militias of Iraq and Syria). He took pride in the results so far: “They’re gone. Hezbollah’s leaders — dead. Their spirit — broken. The arch-terrorists, the worst mass murderers on Earth [...] and thousands of other terrorists who sought to destroy us — they’re all gone too.”

For that reason, Netanyahu sees accusations from abroad as attacks on Israel or on the Jewish people in general. The violence by settlers in the West Bank, which a growing number of Western countries, led by the United Kingdom, are beginning to take seriously by imposing sanctions on Israel, are for him a trifle. He described them as “a handful of juvenile criminals,” around 150, who sometimes “start fires” and who have caused “maybe two or three deaths” so far this year. Netanyahu compared that to the “thousands of attacks” by Palestinians against “peaceful” and “honorable” settlers.

“The antisemites of the world want to terrify our people,” he said. In this worldview, in which much of the planet is against them, Netanyahu thanked one country, the United States, and one man, Donald Trump, his closest ally, with whom he launched the war in Iran last February: “Decades ago, he understood that if left unchallenged, the fanatic ayatollahs who chant ‘Death to America! Death to Israel!’ would eventually carry out their mad fantasies. So Israel and America acted together not only to protect ourselves, but to save civilization.” The counterexample to Trump, he said, is Zohran Mamdani, whom he accused of rampant antisemitism: “So 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. 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.”

Abbas: ‘A malicious colonial scheme’

Netanyahu spoke just hours after the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, but Abbas did not do so from New York; he had to settle for sending a video address. The U.S. government denied him a visa to enter the country, arguing he had not fulfilled his obligations to seek peace, a decision that runs counter to UN norms.

In his address, Abbas accused Israel of pursuing a policy of “racial discrimination, ethnic cleansing, and terrorism” against Palestinians, aimed at forcing them to leave and seizing their land. “What is taking place in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem are not isolated incidents, but rather a malicious colonial scheme aimed at making the lives of Palestinians more difficult in their homeland and forcing them to leave it. […] We warn you today: do not allow another Nakba [the displacement or flight of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians between 1947 and 1949], to occur,” he urged the international community.

The Palestinian leader’s criticism was not limited to Israel; he also called for a moral reckoning from countries he believes are washing their hands of his people’s tragedy: “How long will some countries continue to remain silent about Israel, or continue supplying it with weapons that it uses against our people? The world has witnessed the enormous cost in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. What, then, is the international community waiting for before it acts to protect the Palestinian people? […] and implement a two-state solution on a basis of international legitimacy?” Abbas asked.