A year ago Benjamin Netanyahu came to the United Nations touting the blessings of peace with the Arab world. He returns with the region on the brink of all-out war.
The Israeli prime minister lands in New York on Thursday after postponing his trip to oversee days of air-strikes against Hezbollah that have killed more than 600 people. A ground invasion could be next, despite efforts by the U.S. and other world powers to bring about a three-week cease-fire.
At the UN’s annual General Assembly, he’ll come face-to-face with the reality that hostility toward his government — and him personally — is at a years-long high. Several world leaders have taken the podium to castigate Israel’s military campaign in the Gaza Strip, with at least one, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, calling him out by name.
It’s a stark reminder of how the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas — and Israel’s subsequent military campaign in the Gaza Strip — roiled the region and made Netanyahu’s speech a year ago seem like a fantasy.
Then, he heralded the “blessings” of the Abraham Accords that brought diplomatic ties with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and others. Next, he said, was the possibility of what he called a “historic peace deal” with Saudi Arabia.
When he speaks on Friday, he’s certain to take a far different tone, defending his nation’s campaign in Gaza, where the death toll has now reached more than 41,000, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.
He’s also expected to say Israel had no choice but to bombard Hezbollah’s positions in Lebanon and prepare for a possible ground offensive.
On Thursday, his office denied local reports he had told the military ease its strikes on Lebanon to help the truce talks.
Instead, he instructed his generals “to continue the fighting with full force,” his office said. Some far-right members of Netanyahu’s ruling coalition have said a truce cannot be accepted because it will allow Hezbollah, which has suffered significant losses of weapons and seen key commanders killed this month, a chance to regroup.
“Netanyahu believes that when he addresses the chamber, he’s addressing the world — and that audience includes Israelis back home, his base among them,” Dan Gillerman, a former ambassador to the UN, said. “He will doubtless defend the war on Hamas — and now, Hezbollah — as necessary.”
Israel argues that it has a duty to defend itself in the wake of Oct. 7, when Hamas, labeled a terrorist group by the U.S. and the European Union, attacked from the Gaza Strip, killing 1,200 people and taking 250 hostages.
But the scale of Israel’s subsequent offensive in Gaza, and the toll on Palestinian civilians, has deepened Netanyahu’s isolation at the UN.
“I sincerely think that the countries that support Prime Minister Netanyahu’s rhetoric need to make a bigger effort so that this genocide stops,” Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva told reporters on the sidelines of the General Assembly.
It’s that sort of language that has led Israel, the U.S. and some others to accuse the UN of anti-Israel bias.
Israel remained very much in the spotlight hours before Netanyahu was set to arrive. On Wednesday night the UN Security Council held an emergency meeting to discuss the crisis in Lebanon, and is scheduled to meet on Gaza on Friday.
As the Lebanon session got underway, France announced its proposal, along with the U.S., for the 21-day cessation of hostilities. Beyond stopping an all-out Israel-Hezbollah war, it will be a way to restart stalled talks for a cease-fire in Gaza and ensure the release of the remaining hostages held by Hamas, people familiar with the matter said.
Focus on Iran
Netanyahu is likely to inveigh against Iran, which backs both Hezbollah and Hamas, again this year — and like he did when he gave a fiery speech to the U.S. Congress in July. The prime minister has often used the green-marbled rostrum at the UN to warn of war. In 2012, he drew a red line across a large cartoon bomb, a metaphor for how far Tehran was from potentially gaining nuclear weaponry.
Three years later, outraged by world powers’ nuclear-capping deal with Iran that he described as insufficient, Netanyahu opted for a long, silent and disapproving glare at the audience.
“We have an Israel problem in the UN,” U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield said this month. “There is an unfair amount of focus on Israel in the UN, and it is problematic.”
Despite all the controversy, Netanyahu is loath to stay away from the UN and inadvertently satisfy the campaign to isolate and exclude Israel.
“It is in Israel’s interest to show we are still acting, we are still meeting, we are still participating,” said Robbie Sabel, an international law professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
