Netanyahu to UN: Israel will keep fighting, ‘we have no other choice’

Netanyahu said Israel’s war over the past three years is part of a continuing struggle for the survival of the Jewish people and the Jewish state.

By Vered Weiss, World Israel News

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a sweeping defense of Israel’s nearly three-year war against Iran and its terrorist proxies at the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday, declaring that Israel has not merely survived a seven-front assault but inflicted devastating blows on the forces seeking its destruction.

Throughout the speech, Netanyahu returned to one central message: Israel fights because “we have no other choice.”

His address came amid a dramatic walkout by dozens of delegates as he took the podium, prompting Netanyahu to open by challenging any remaining opponents to leave as well.

“If there are any other moral cowards who haven’t yet left this hall, please do so now,” Netanyahu said.

Netanyahu began with Iran, recalling the famous red line he drew at the UN 14 years ago as he warned that Tehran was moving toward a nuclear weapon.

He said Israel had now fulfilled the promise he made from that same podium.

“Devastating Iran’s nuclear facilities was hard. It was very hard to do,” Netanyahu said. “But for me, it was one of the easiest decisions I’ve ever had to make as prime minister. Because if we hadn’t done it, we’d all be dead.”

Netanyahu noted the irony that Israel’s attack on Iran protected some of the same countries whose representatives walked out during his address, claiming that some of their leaders had privately thanked Israel for eliminating the Iranian nuclear threat.

He praised President Donald Trump as Israel’s most important partner in the fight, saying the United States and Israel had acted together against a threat not only to the Jewish state but to the wider Western world.

Netanyahu said American and Israeli pilots flew joint missions over Iran and credited the alliance with helping return the remaining Israeli hostages.

He also described the scale of the Iranian missile assault on Israel, saying Israelis had endured some 1,000 massive ballistic missiles aimed at the country’s cities and civilians.

Holding up the UN headquarters as an example, Netanyahu said even a single one-ton ballistic missile could devastate the complex, asking delegates to imagine 1,000 such weapons raining down on their own cities.

Netanyahu then reached back to the Six-Day War to challenge one of the central narratives used against Israel: that the Arab-Israeli conflict is fundamentally the result of Israel’s presence in Judea and Samaria, Gaza and the Golan Heights.

Before the 1967 war, he noted, Israel controlled none of those territories and was nevertheless surrounded by Arab armies threatening its destruction.

Israel then occupied only a tiny fraction of the landmass of the Arab world, he said.

Yet Israel is routinely accused of colonialism.

Netanyahu singled out Britain and France for criticism over that accusation, pointing to their own histories as colonial powers.

The underlying conflict, he argued, was never simply over Israel’s borders.

“It’s not about territories; it’s about a Jewish state at any boundaries,” Netanyahu said.

He also responded directly to Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa over the Golan Heights, invoking the Jewish people’s ancient connection to the area.

Netanyahu made the speech deeply personal by recounting a conversation with his older brother, Yoni Netanyahu, shortly before the 1967 Six-Day War.

Israelis at the time feared catastrophe. Mass graves were being prepared for the casualties many expected if Arab armies invaded.

Netanyahu, then a high school student in Philadelphia, returned to Israel and found Yoni, a 21-year-old paratrooper whose unit had already mobilized.

He asked his brother what was going to happen.

“We’re going to win,” Yoni told him. “We have no other choice.”

Nine years later, Yoni Netanyahu commanded the legendary Israeli rescue operation at Entebbe, Uganda, freeing more than 100 Jewish and Israeli hostages held by Palestinian and allied terrorists.

Yoni was the only Israeli soldier killed during the raid.

Netanyahu said his brother’s words remain just as relevant half a century later.

“We’re going to win. We have no other choice.”

Netanyahu then turned to Oct. 7, 2023, which he called “the darkest day in Israel’s history.”

He emphasized that there was not a single Israeli soldier or civilian inside Gaza when Hamas invaded Israel.

The terrorists nevertheless stormed Israeli communities, murdering some 1,200 people and carrying out the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

Netanyahu noted that, relative to Israel’s population, the massacre would be equivalent to roughly 40,000 Americans being killed in a single day.

Israel’s enemies expected the country to collapse, he said.

Instead, Israel fought back.

For nearly three years, Netanyahu said, Israel has fought enemies on seven fronts: Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, Iran itself, Iranian-backed militias in Iraq and Syria, and Palestinian terrorists in Judea and Samaria.

“They all ganged up on us to wipe us off the face of the Earth,” Netanyahu said.

“They failed.”

Netanyahu pointed to the destruction inflicted on Iran’s military and nuclear infrastructure, the devastation of Hamas and Hezbollah, and the elimination of senior terrorist leaders.

At one point, he produced a pager from his pocket in an unmistakable reference to Israel’s extraordinary 2024 operation against Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon.

“Remember the beepers?” Netanyahu asked.

“Hezbollah certainly remembers them.”

He said much of Hezbollah’s massive arsenal of approximately 150,000 rockets and ballistic missiles had been destroyed, its senior leadership eliminated and its ability to threaten Israel severely damaged.

Netanyahu also sharply challenged the international focus on so-called settler violence in Judea and Samaria.

He condemned vigilantism by what he described as a small group of roughly 150 young Jewish offenders, saying Israel is a country governed by law and that the Shin Bet had been deployed against them.

But he contrasted the international attention given to those incidents with the thousands of Palestinian terrorist attacks and attempted attacks directed at Israelis.

As an example, Netanyahu cited the recent murder of French-Israeli father of six Netanel Shukrun, who was shot by a Hamas terrorist while visiting a spring with his 16-year-old son.

He also spoke about Neria Leiter, an IDF reservist and father of four who was critically wounded in a Palestinian car-ramming attack and was fighting for his life in a Jerusalem hospital.

Leiter is the son of Israeli Ambassador to the United States Yechiel Leiter, whose older son Moshe was killed fighting in Gaza.

Netanyahu said he visited the family shortly before leaving Israel for New York.

After describing Israel’s seven-front military war, Netanyahu said the Jewish state is fighting another battle.

“There is an eighth front to this war,” he said. “It’s the war for truth.”

That war, Netanyahu argued, is being fought across mainstream and social media, where he accused foreign governments of investing enormous sums to shape anti-Israel opinion.

He singled out Qatar, accusing Doha of pouring billions into American universities and media organizations including Al Jazeera in an effort to influence young people against Israel and the West, while at the same time hosting senior Hamas figures.

He then turned to Turkey, which he called the newest major source of anti-Israel propaganda.

Netanyahu launched a blistering attack on Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, accusing him of repressing journalists and political opponents, persecuting Kurds, denying the Armenian genocide, occupying northern Cyprus and supporting Hamas.

He also responded to Erdogan’s claims regarding Jerusalem.

“No, sir. You won’t,” Netanyahu said. “This is our country, our city, our eternal capital.”

Netanyahu devoted a major portion of his speech to rejecting accusations that Israel committed genocide in Gaza.

He argued that Hamas deliberately embedded its military infrastructure among Palestinian civilians, using hospitals, schools and mosques for terrorist purposes while seeking to prevent civilians from leaving combat zones.

Israel, by contrast, sent millions of text messages, made millions of phone calls and dropped millions of leaflets warning Gazans to evacuate dangerous areas, Netanyahu said.

He also cited Israel’s facilitation of polio vaccinations and the entry of massive quantities of food into Gaza.

“What genocidal regime gives a million polio vaccinations to the enemy’s population?” Netanyahu asked.

“Accusing Israel of genocide is the greatest lie of the century.”

Netanyahu also cited urban warfare expert John Spencer, who has argued that Israel took extraordinary measures to reduce civilian casualties during the Gaza war.

Netanyahu summed up his case in a direct declaration:

“Israel didn’t commit genocide. Israel prevented genocide.”

Netanyahu then turned his attention directly to New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, accusing him of contributing to an increasingly hostile atmosphere for Jews in the city.

Netanyahu accused Mamdani of associating with figures who had defended or supported extremists, repeatedly accusing Israel of genocide and attempting to prevent the Israeli prime minister from visiting New York.

“You tried to silence me,” Netanyahu said. “You can’t silence me. You can’t silence the truth.”

He connected the spread of anti-Israel rhetoric to a wider surge in antisemitism and violence against Jews in cities around the world.

Netanyahu listed attacks against Jews in New York and elsewhere before delivering one of the speech’s most pointed messages to the Jewish people.

“The days when Jews were defenseless victims marched to the slaughter, those days are over!” he declared.

“Today we have a state. Today we have an army. Today we have a people ready and willing to defend ourselves.”

He urged Jews around the world to “raise your head high,” remain proud and refuse to be intimidated.

Netanyahu also accused some Western European governments of retreating in the face of increasingly aggressive anti-Israel and antisemitic movements.

He said those governments had “chosen weakness” and “chosen appeasement,” warning that the same radical forces targeting Israel ultimately threaten Western countries as well.

He contrasted that response with Israel’s determination to defend itself while continuing to build a technologically advanced society.

Despite three years of war, Netanyahu said Israel remained at the forefront of developments in health, agriculture and artificial intelligence.

“Israel has never been stronger,” he declared.

Netanyahu concluded by returning to Iran, but this time addressed the Iranian people rather than their government.

He said Tehran’s rulers fear their own population more than they fear Israel.

Netanyahu then held up a Starlink communications terminal, saying the Iranian government feared technology that could allow its citizens to bypass censorship and communicate freely with the outside world.

In another theatrical moment, Netanyahu said he would leave the device with the president of the General Assembly to give to Iran’s delegation so that when Iranian diplomats “inevitably defect,” they could freely tell their stories on social media.

Netanyahu challenged anti-Israel demonstrators and the delegates who had walked out of his address to explain where they were when the Iranian government killed and wounded its own citizens.

He also accused self-described human rights activists of largely ignoring the persecution of Christians throughout the Middle East, contrasting it with Israel, where he said the Christian community continues to grow.

Then came one of Netanyahu’s most consequential predictions.

“One day, and it may not be far away, the Iranian people will be free,” he said.

“Their murderous regime will be toppled by its lies, by its corruption, by its cruelty.”

Netanyahu closed not with contemporary geopolitics but with Jewish history.

The Jewish people, he said, have spoken the same language and lived in the same land associated with David, Solomon, Isaiah and Jeremiah for more than 3,000 years.

He invoked the Jewish contribution to the ideas of one God, the sanctity of life, the rule of law, peace and justice, and recalled the famous observation by American writer Mark Twain about the Jewish people’s extraordinary survival through history.

Kingdoms and empires that once sought to destroy the Jews disappeared, Netanyahu said, while the Jewish people endured.

“Over the centuries, the tyrannies that tried to destroy us failed time and again,” he said.

“God willing, they’ll continue to fail.”

Netanyahu then invoked the biblical phrase “Netzach Yisrael lo yeshaker” — the eternity of Israel will not falter.

His final words returned to the refrain that had run through the entire address.

“We have no other choice.”