The Speech Bibi Netanyahu Should Have Given at the UN

This week, I heard Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu address the General Assembly at the United Nations. While many praised the speech as strong and “just what was needed,” I left feeling deeply frustrated and saddened. What I witnessed was the Jew on trial, forced to fend off accusations against Israel. I walked out deeply pained because I know that historically my people have found themselves on trial; my people, who are so incredibly talented and intelligent, were once again unable to deliver a truly effective speech. If I had been Netanyahu’s speechwriter, what would I have written? Guided by the intuition that the focus should be less about us and more about them, what follows is my attempt to craft a new narrative.

Mr. President, ladies and gentlemen, you expect me to give a speech about myself, or rather, about my country. You expect me to educate you about Israel, to counter the libels thrown at the Jewish state with facts. You expect me to say: “We cannot possibly be guilty of X because of Y and Z.” So let’s do something different. I will not speak about me or my country. I will speak about you, and your countries.

Let’s begin with this institution and the kangaroo court it has become. The United Nations, once envisioned as an assembly of nations committed to protecting human rights for all, has devolved into an antizionist forum. I will show you exactly how this antizionism institution operates and what it has become.

First, we must recognize a basic principle: Jew-hatred is obsessive. Follow this analogy: if I looked at your shooting target, I would see that all of you aim at the same bull’s-eye: Israel, the only Jewish country. You are fixated on it. But understand: your obsession with Israel is not unique. You stand in a long historical line of those consumed by anti-Jewish hatred. Moreover, you believe that this aim is justified because antizionism is a virtuous hate.

But understand: your obsession with Israel is not unique. You stand in a long historical line of those consumed by anti-Jewish hatred. Moreover, you believe that this is justified because anti-Zionism is a virtuous hate.

But you do not fool me. You may have much of the international media fooled, but not me, and not many other luminaires and thought leaders. You have chosen to deploy libels, both ancient and modern, against Jews and Israel: the blood libel, the genocide libel, the colonizer libel, and more, to sharpen your aim. You do this deliberately to demonize us.

We know how this works: repeat the libels long enough and people become ready to exterminate another people. Yes, your goal is genocidal. That is, in fact, the defining hallmark of all anti-Jewish hate movements. Indeed, the Jew-hater does not seek to colonize Jews, enslave Jews, or even exile Jews. The goal, historically and now, is extermination. And worse, you convince yourselves that you are participating in a righteous cause. Why? Because the libels expertly cast Jews as vile and demonic—the singular obstacle to “fixing the world.” Sound familiar? We have seen this before in 1941. How do you think so much of Europe’s population became ready and willing to exterminate Jews during the years of the Holocaust? Through libels. Circulate them long enough and you program people to believe that Jews truly pose a threat to the “purity” of race. Circulate the libel of genocide and colonization long enough and people will become willing and ready to destroy Israel.

More about you: you have been writing stories about yourselves and about us. Stories, in which we are the worst villains, and you are the victims, oppressed by us. You construct us, over and over again, as the mega villain. In the era of anti-Judaism, during the Middle Ages, our supposed villainy took the form of the deicide libel and the blood libel. In the era of antisemitism, it was the accusation that we defiled the purity of race. And today, in the era of antizionism, you have cast us once again in the role of the villain who violates human rights. You do this because, and here is where it gets really ugly: constructing us as your villains gives you a permission slip to do onto us what you accuse us of committing.

But we see you. We have unmasked not only your tactics, but also who you truly are. So, who are you? First, let’s walk briefly through a few dark corridors of history:

• In 1543, Martin Luther wrote On the Jews and Their Lies, channeling his frustrations at Jews who resisted his reforms.
• In 1879, Wilhelm Marr, who coined the term “antisemitism,” published The Victory of Jewry over Germandom, projecting his frustrations about the failed democratic reforms onto Jews.
• In 1913, Joseph Stalin wrote Marxism and the National Question, denying Jews nationhood as he vented his anger at socialist factions he viewed as vague and opportunistic.
• In 1925, Adolf Hitler wrote Mein Kampf, channeling his personal bitterness over Germany’s diminished status after World War I onto the Jews.
• In 1948, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, published The Causes of the Palestine Catastrophe, weaving libels of a “global Jewish conspiracy” into his blame for the Muslim defeat in Palestine.
• Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, filled essays and pamphlets with blood libels, venting his frustration over Muslim weakness under colonialism.
• In 1963, Soviet author Trofim Kichko published Judaism Without Embellishment, targeting “Zionists,” i.e., Jews, because of Soviet insecurities in the Cold War.

You get the point. The pattern is clear: these authors were frustrated with themselves yet obsessed over the Jew. And that is exactly what is happening here today. You have misidentified Israel as your target, when in fact your frustrations lie within your own countries and your own failures.

Poor France, poor England, your demographic crises shape your politics. To remain relevant to your voters, you join the targeting of Israel. Poor Canada, you have a growing radical Muslim population and to appease them, you join Western Europe. You are deeply frustrated and dare I say, deeply afraid. I feel for you. I really do: you are, indeed, in a very troubling position. 

Muslim-majority and Arab states: you walk into these halls only to walk out when Israel is mentioned, because you dare not face your own people’s suffering. Let’s recall a few truths: In Afghanistan, girls are banned from secondary education. Over 70 Taliban decrees have stripped women of the right to learn and to work in most sectors. In Iran, women are subordinate under law, their rights conditional on “Islamic criteria.” Stoning for adultery remains in the Penal Code, and, predictably, it is women, not men, who are stoned. Stoning for adultery is codified in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria, Sudan, Somalia, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. But only women get stoned because you know, men never commit adultery, right?

Let’s go over to China: since 2017, between 1–2 million Uyghurs have been imprisoned in so-called “Vocational Education and Training Centers.” The Uyghur situation is one of the most urgent human-rights crises of our time. And I am not even mentioning your draconian laws limiting people’s freedoms to speak or to have as many children as they want.

Let’s go over to the African continent, where, according to the 2018 Global Slavery Index, 9.2 million Africans live in modern slavery today. And yet here at the UN stands The Ark of Return, a marble memorial to the transatlantic slave trade, while slavery persists across the continent right now. Aren’t you ashamed? How do you ever even walk aby this memorial to slavery and not turn red?

Let’s go to South Africa, the country that dared to bring Israel to the ICC for “genocide” has one of the world’s highest homicide rates. Between April and June 2023 alone, police recorded an average of 68 murders per day. Violence against women and girls is described as “widespread, endemic” by Human Rights Watch.

I have not even listed all the countries who wrongly fix their aim on Israel. But the truth is simple: your aim is misplaced. You are not truly frustrated with Israel. You are frustrated with yourselves, with your own dysfunction, with conditions you feel powerless to fix. And so what do you do? You turn to Israel because that is what you historically know to do: deploy libels against Jews and the Jewish country.

Your chicanery is masterful, though. And here, I am speaking to the Muslim countries. You send females to represent you on the floor of the General Assembly after I have just defined the destitute condition women face in your countries. This, in itself, is a masterstroke of staging for Western audiences. These very nations are among the most oppressive to and for women. Yet, the image they curate for the world is a tableau of female representation: an inversion of reality, calculated to conceal rather than reveal.

So sorry to disappoint but today, you expected to hear about my people and my country. Instead, I exposed you to the world and to the deceitful idea that your cause is virtuous. So no, we will not live in the antizionist stories you construct about us—stories that end with our destruction.

Mr. President, ladies and gentlemen, join me today in rejecting the pattern to unleash your very real and serious frustrations on Israel and the Jewish people. Do right by your charter, by the statues that surround this complex, begging you to remember not to fall for the greatest trap in human history: Jew-hatred.

Thank you.

Naya Lekht is currently the Education Editor for White Rose Magazine and a Research Fellow for the Institute for Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy.