Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli prime minister speaking at the United Nations General Assembly. — AFP/File
It takes a lot to make UN delegates walk out from an address to the General Assembly. But this was precisely what Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, managed to achieve in his September 26 speech. His address began by attempting to show his country as a guardian of law and civilisation, fighting a lonely, unsupported war against fiendish barbarians. “Last year I stood at this podium and I showed this map. It shows the curse of Iran’s terror axis.” Such an axis threatened “the peace of the entire world. It threatened the stability of our region and the very existence of my country, Israel. They were meant also to threaten the United States and blackmail nations everywhere.”
The speech then moved into a triumphant register. Hezbollah had been cowed. The Houthis had been “hammered”. The “bulk of Hamas’s terror machine” had been “crushed”. The armaments of Bashir al-Assad had been destroyed, Iran’s Shiite militias in Iraq deterred. “And most importantly, and above everything else that I could say to you or that we did in this past year, in this past decade, we devastated Iran’s atomic weapons and ballistic missile programs.” Israel’s assassination program – the slaying of Iranian nuclear scientists, the killing of Hamas and Hezbollah leaders, the slaughter of half of the Houthi leadership – were also points of celebration. Regarding Hamas, Netanyahu offered the following: “The final remnants of Hamas are holed up in Gaza City. They vow to repeat the atrocities of 7 October again and again. That is why Israeli must finish the job.”
Anyone familiar with Netanyahu’s streaky command of Disney cartography or predictive assessments on the military power of other states already knows the strained performance here. Vital to his argument is delegitimizing the cause of Palestinian statehood, treating it as an annex of a foreign power and a foreign movement. He goes on to link with little effort Iran’s “massive nuclear weapons program and massive ballistic program” to the late Yahya Sinwar’s “dispatched” terrorists of Hamas as they made their way into Israel on October 7, 2023, to Hezbollah’s missiles and rockets in Lebanon, to Syria’s now deposed Assad regime, which “hosted Iran’s forces, tightening the noose of death around our throats.” For good measure, the Houthis in Yemen were also thrown in.
This shoddy reasoning shares the strain of paranoia US strategists demonstrated with feverish intensity during the Cold War. There was a stubborn refusal, at least till the Nixon administration, to see Communist insurgencies as the product of indigenous conditions rather than directed movements from Moscow and Peking. Assistance and aid to North Vietnam, for instance, was misconstrued as command and control.
Similarly, Netanyahu sees radical Islam as a monolithic bloc of obscurantism that has absorbed the Palestinian cause. Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis all shout “Death to America”. All had “murdered Americans and Europeans in cold blood.” Israel’s enemies were enemies of the West. “They want to drag the modern world back to the past… to a dark age of violence, fanaticism, and terror.” With demagogic purpose, he also pointed to “the radical Islamist surge” in the societies of Israel’s allies. Thank Israel, he declared, for having the capacity to supply the intelligence of five Central Intelligence Agencies, for doing, to quote German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, “the dirty work for all of us.”
Excerpted: ‘Attempts to Delegitimize: Netanyahu at the UN General Assembly’.
Courtesy: Counterpunch.org