Fighting for his political life back home, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel gave a pugnacious address at the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday, casting his nation as falsely accused of genocide and his people as indomitable fighters against terrorism and antisemitism.
At times pounding the lectern and raising his voice, Mr. Netanyahu took aim at Israel’s military enemies like Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas and their allied forces in Yemen and Iraq. But he also assailed Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York City, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey and Western European leaders he said had “chosen to succumb to the antisemitic mob.”
As the Israeli leader took the podium, many of the international diplomats filed out of the hall, as they have in the past, but his speech seemed tuned far more to a domestic audience than an international one.
Israel will hold a general election next month, and Mr. Netanyahu, trailing in the polls, is trying to rally support with a defiant message that international criticism of Israel is not only wrong, but also dishonest and immoral, and that the nation is besieged by immense threats that only he can vanquish.
On Thursday, he cast the war that he and President Trump launched against Iran seven months ago in the most dire, but also hyperbolic, terms, saying that Iran must be prevented from developing nuclear weapons.
“It’s one of the easiest decisions I’ve had to make as prime minister, because if we hadn’t done it, we’d all be dead,” he said of the attacks on Iran. He added, “Israel and America acted together, not only to protect ourselves, but to save civilization.”
Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, Mr. Netanyahu has warned for decades that Iran was close to developing nuclear weapons. But it was only in Mr. Trump’s current term that he managed to persuade a U.S. leader to join in military action to prevent it. The close relationship between the two men has cooled as the war has dragged on.
Mr. Netanyahu recounted the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack that officials said killed about 1,200 people in Israel and led to the taking of about 250 hostages to Gaza, violence, he said, that had been carried out “with fiendish glee, with sadistic joy.”
“We didn’t collapse,” he said. “We rose and fought like lions.”
In the ensuing Israeli military attacks in Gaza, more than 70,000 people were killed, officials said, and much of the enclave was reduced to rubble, leading to international accusations, including by a U.N. commission, that Israel was committing genocide. Mr. Netanyahu denounced that charge as “the greatest lie of the century” and claimed that Israel had “the most moral army in the world.”
He also lashed out at Mr. Mamdani, who has called on the federal government to execute an arrest warrant on Mr. Netanyahu from the International Criminal Court. Mr. Mamdani’s criticism of Israel has alienated some Jewish New Yorkers, though others — particularly young progressives — still support him. Mr. Netanyahu called Mr. Mamdani antisemitic, a label the mayor rejects.
“Mr. Mamdani, since you were elected mayor of this city, many Jews no longer feel safe in New York,” Mr. Netanyahu said.
Minutes before the speech, Mr. Mamdani released a wordless video that showed him planting an olive tree at Grace Mansion and eating dinner with Palestinian families from Gaza. “May peace be our future,” he said in a caption on X.
Mr. Netanyahu cast Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank, whose presence much of the world considers an illegal encroachment into land destined for a Palestinian state, as mostly peaceful neighbors and victims of Palestinian violence. He scoffed at the concept of settler violence against Palestinians, though it has been well documented.
Palestinians in the West Bank “shoot at pregnant women, they shoot entire families,” he said. “Of course, none of this is covered in the international press or in the social media, none of it. What they cover is a handful of young juvenile delinquents, about 150 in number, who go and throw stones, who chop down olive trees, occasionally they fire up, they lit some fires.”
The United Nations reported that 18 Palestinians were killed over the first seven months of this year in violence by extremist settlers, who are often heavily armed. Many more suffered injury and damaged property, the agency said, or were forced to abandon their homes.
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