As usual, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech at the United Nations General Assembly last Thursday was an impressive piece of rhetoric, but less of an accurate historical rendering.
It is said that this speech was directed at Netanyahu’s political base in Israel toward the approaching elections, and to a lesser extent, at the delegations of a minority of UN member states who sat in the UN General Assembly plenum while the speech was being delivered.
Since I do not belong to Netanyahu’s base and am not part of a delegation of a foreign state, this speech was certainly not intended for me.
Nevertheless, I would like to react to an aspect of the speech that I fully support, another one that I totally disagree with, and a third that left me “bewitched, bothered, and bewildered.”
The part of the speech with which I agree is that dealing with the issue of genocide of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, which Israel has not committed, which it never planned to commit, but of which it is being accused.
The most Israel can be accused of is that some members of the current coalition don’t have any feelings of remorse about the large number of Palestinian civilians killed in the past three years (around 50,000) because they believe that there are no innocent Palestinians in Gaza.
In addition, Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu stated in November 2023 that throwing an atomic bomb on the Gaza Strip is an option.
While it is a shocking statement, it is a fact that the US threw an atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945, which killed 70,000-80,000 persons immediately – the same number as the total number of Palestinians killed by Israel in the Gaza Strip since October 2023 – and no one ever accused the US of committing genocide in Japan.
Netanyahu stated in his speech that a country that delivered “a million polio shots” and allowed the delivery of international food aid amounting to “a ton per person” to the Gaza Strip cannot be accused of genocide.
Nevertheless, the truth is that in earlier stages of the war, Israel sought to cut off all foreign aid, water, and electricity to the Gaza Strip, and was dissuaded from this intention by the US and the international community. But this in itself does not amount to genocide.
The issue Netanyahu spoke about with which I differ concerns the alleged existence of “Jewish settler terror” against random Palestinian communities in the West Bank.
In his speech, Netanyahu stated that “I won’t stand for vigilantism. We’re a country of law. So, we put our Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) on [those who act violently against Palestinians]. But that’s what [foreign leaders and the foreign media] call settler violence.
“And the number of casualties a year? Maybe two or three… compared to the thousands of terrorist attacks against the peaceful [Jewish] settlers, honorable people, law-abiding people. What a distortion. It’s an obsession…
“Leaders of countries seriously talk about that. And they say it with such importance: ‘We can’t stand settler violence.’ You don’t know what you’re talking about!”
As he has done in the past, Netanyahu claimed in his speech that all this talk about violence relates to 150 juvenile delinquents from outside Judea and Samaria, who “throw stones,” “chop down olive trees,” and occasionally “light fires.”
The truth is that there are many more than 150 Jewish culprits involved, and they are not all “juvenile delinquents” from outside Judea and Samaria.
They engage in destroying or burning Palestinian property and agricultural fields, stealing or killing livestock herds, and frightening civilians into leaving their homes and property. They have also maimed or caused the deaths of many more than just “two or three” Palestinians.
Worse still, they are occasionally accompanied by uniformed men and are rarely stopped, reprimanded, or taken into custody.
On November 22, 2024, Defense Minister Israel Katz actually stopped Jews being placed under administrative detention in Judea and Samaria, which makes dealing with these lawbreakers, whether by the Shin Bet or anyone else, an almost impossible task.
Besides, the current Shin Bet head, David Zini, has gone on record as saying that “there are no Jewish terrorists.”
Netanyahu's concluding message
Netanyahu's message that left me bewitched, bothered, and bewildered was that it is Israel, not the Palestinians, that is constantly under threat of annihilation by its enemies – whether the Islamic Republic of Iran, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Hamas, Hezbollah, and others who repeatedly declare their intentions.
Netanyahu described the situation before the outbreak of the 1967 Six Day War. “We weren’t then in Judea and Samaria, the heart of the historic homeland of the Jewish people. We weren’t in Gaza. We weren’t on the Golan Heights… We were on a tiny sliver of land… that is equal to about one third of one percent of the landmass of the entire Arab world…
“Yet they accused Israel of colonialism. Some colonialism. And who’s accusing us? Among them are people in Britain and in France. For God’s sake, they invented the term. Their colonies braced [sic] the entire globe. Colonialism? Give us a break!
“Yet, at the time… we were threatened with annihilation by three Arab armies that were about to invade us. You know what Israelis were doing at the time? They were digging mass graves in preparation for thousands of casualties. In preparation to bury our dead.”
At the time of the Six Day War, Netanyahu was not yet 18 and still in high school in Philadelphia. Five days before the outbreak of the war, he flew to Israel to seek out his brother Yoni, a 21-year-old paratrooper officer at the time.
According to Netanyahu, the first question he asked Yoni when they met was: “What’s going to happen?” To which Yoni answered: “We’re going to win – we have no other choice.” Whether or not this is what happened doesn’t really matter. This alleged answer has always been conventional wisdom in Israel – so why was Yoni Netanyahu mentioned?
Yoni’s death 11 years later, during the successful Israeli military operation he led to release 105 Israeli and Jewish hostages, who were hijacked in an Air France flight to Entebbe in Uganda by Palestinian and German terrorists, who threatened to kill them all unless numerous Palestinian terrorists (most of them from Israel) were released and ransom money paid, was also mentioned by Netanyahu in his speech.
He took the opportunity to thank the Ugandan government for placing a statue of Yoni at the spot where he had been killed. Another red herring.
Netanyahu’s conclusion: “Over the centuries, the tyrannies that tried to destroy us failed time and again. God willing, they’ll continue to fail. If we muster our courage, if we steel our resolve, we will continue to win. And the reason is simple: we have no other choice.”
In the past, Netanyahu predicted that since Israel is becoming internationally isolated, it will have to turn into a super-Sparta. Never has he suggested that Israel should seek non-military means – especially diplomacy – to extricate itself from this isolation, for which he himself is largely responsible. Give us a break…
The writer has written journalistic and academic articles, as well as several books, on international relations, Zionism, Israeli politics, and parliamentarism. From 1994 to 2010, she worked at the Knesset Library and the Knesset Research and Information Center.