Benjamin Netanyahu walked to the podium at the United Nations on Thursday evening and more than 100 delegates walked out. He opened by inviting the rest to follow them.
The walkout
Roughly 77 countries emptied their seats as he took the stage. Arab and Muslim delegations almost entirely, along with several African and a few European ones. The US delegation stayed.
He did not pretend not to notice.
If there are any other moral cowards who haven’t yet left this hall, please do so now.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, UN General Assembly, September 24
He then delivered the speech to a room with large empty blocks in it.
What he said
The message was that the wars continue. Israel, he said, will press ahead until victory, and must finish the job in Gaza.
On the decision to attack Iran:
It was one of the easiest decisions I’ve ever had to make as prime minister.
Benjamin Netanyahu
He thanked Donald Trump for acting against Iran. He held up a pager, reminding the hall of September 17, 2024, when Israel remotely detonated thousands of pagers distributed to Hezbollah in Lebanon.
He framed the scale of October 7, 2023, when Hamas killed about 1,200 people in Israel, in American terms, calling it proportionately equal to 40,000 Americans killed in under 24 hours.
And he made a point of the country’s size.
Do you know any other country the size of New Jersey capable of fighting a seven-front war?
Benjamin Netanyahu
To countries that recognized a Palestinian state, he said their decision was praised by the most savage terrorists on Earth, and that it would be a mark of shame on all of them.
He came for the mayor of New York
This is the part that lands closest to home, and it is the promise he made before he arrived.
Netanyahu posted a video on Tuesday saying he would tell the truth about Zohran Mamdani from the General Assembly floor. He did.
Mr. Mamdani, since you were elected mayor of this city, many Jews no longer feel safe in New York. Israel didn’t commit genocide, Israel prevented genocide.
Benjamin Netanyahu, addressing the mayor of New York from the UN podium
Mamdani had called him a war criminal on CNN on Monday and asked the International Criminal Court to enforce its arrest warrant. He had already answered the video in one line, saying what the prime minister said in it is not true.
The contrast a day earlier
Mahmoud Abbas addressed the same body by video, because the Palestinian delegation was denied US entry visas for the second year running. He got a long round of applause.
Two speeches, one hall. One man got an ovation on a screen. The other got an exodus in person.
The BeezLoop Take
The moral cowards line will be quoted for a long time and it is worth separating from the substance, because it is the most effective thing he said. A mass walkout is designed to deny a speaker an audience. Naming it from the podium converts the insult into a stage. He turned an empty room into the point.
The Mamdani attack is a different matter. A head of government used the United Nations General Assembly to tell the mayor of the host city that Jews are unsafe because he was elected. That is an extraordinary thing to say from that podium, and it comes with no incident, no date, no police statistic. Netanyahu has now made this accusation twice in three days, in a video and in a speech, and has not once produced the underlying facts. An accusation that specific either has evidence behind it or it is a smear, and the burden is on the man making it.
The seven-front line is the most honest thing in the speech and nobody will treat it that way. He said it as a boast. Read it as a description. A country the size of New Jersey is fighting on seven fronts, three years in, with 77 delegations leaving the room rather than hear about it. Whatever anyone thinks of the war’s justification, a war that produces that much isolation is not obviously being won.
The October 7 comparison deserves to be taken seriously rather than waved off. Twelve hundred people in a country of ten million is genuinely proportionate to tens of thousands of Americans, and any honest account of this war has to start with what happened that day. It also does not answer what has happened since, and Netanyahu’s speech did not try to. Finish the job was the argument, and the job was not defined.
What happened in that hall is a measurement, not a verdict. Seventy-seven countries walking out does not make Israel wrong and an ovation does not make Abbas right. But a government whose closest remaining ally is the one delegation that stayed seated is in a position its own supporters should find alarming, and calling the people who left cowards does not change the arithmetic.
The question
If the prime minister of Israel says Jews in New York are unsafe because of who they elected mayor, what evidence should he have to show? And when 77 delegations leave rather than listen, is that a failure of the room or of the argument?
Also this week: Trump told the same body he might annihilate Iran, and the US and China moved their tariff deadline to January.
Sources: Foreign Policy · CBC News · Fox News · RTE · CNN live coverage
