For from the top of the rocks I see him, and from the hills I behold him: lo, the people shall dwell alone, and shall not be reckoned among the nations." (Numbers 23:9)
This week, the Prime Minister of Israel will land in New York, deliver a speech to the world body founded to prevent another Holocaust, and leave within hours, because the mayor of the host city has threatened to have him arrested.
As the UN General Assembly's 2026 General Debate opens, Benjamin Netanyahu has cut his trip to the United States down to little more than a flight in and a flight out. There will reportedly be no meeting with President Trump, "scheduling difficulties," officials say, though everyone in the room knows what that phrase is covering for. He has canceled a planned meeting with Elon Musk. And hanging over all of it is New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has spent months publicly urging Washington to enforce an ICC arrest warrant against Netanyahu the moment he sets foot in the mayor's city, a democratically elected head of a democratic government, treated as a fugitive by the very city hosting the one week a year when world leaders are supposed to be able to speak freely.
Here is what is actually happening at Turtle Bay this week. The UN General Assembly convenes at a moment when Iran, the regime whose nuclear program and proxy network Israel and the United States spent 2026 dismantling by force, is sending Washington conditions through Qatar to end the war it started and lost. Trump is expected to make Iran the center of his own address. This should be Israel's moment of vindication on the world stage: the threat it warned about for two decades, degraded, and the UN's own members forced to reckon with it. Instead, the story leading into UNGA is whether Israel's prime minister can safely attend at all, and whether the mayor of the world's most important city will treat an international tribunal's political warrant as grounds for arresting him.
The International Criminal Court issued its warrant against Netanyahu in the middle of a defensive war against a terrorist organization that used its own civilians as shields, a war Israel had, under any honest reading of international law, the right to fight. No warrant has been issued for Hamas's surviving leadership with anything like the urgency or the media attention. No mayor of a Western capital has offered to personally see to their arrest. The asymmetry is the point. It tells you that for a significant and growing slice of the international political class, including, now, elected officials in the United States itself, the crime was not the war. The crime was that Israel is the one fighting it.
So let's say plainly what the UN's own choreography this year confirms. An institution that cannot bring itself to expel or even seriously sanction regimes that stone women, execute gay teenagers, and fund terror across three continents has no standing to lecture the one country in its region that holds elections, has a free press, and answers to independent courts. A mayor who wants to arrest Israel's prime minister has nothing to say about the men who, this same month, murdered a father of six on the eve of Yom Kippur.
Netanyahu should go to New York, deliver the speech, and leave with his head high, exactly as planned, not because the reception will be warm, but because Israel does not owe the UN its silence, and it certainly does not owe Zohran Mamdani an empty chair. Every year the chamber empties out during an Israeli prime minister's remarks, and every year that walkout is presented to the public as proof of Israel's isolation. Read it instead for what it is: proof that the truth being spoken from that podium is one most of the room cannot bear to hear. Israel does not need the General Assembly's approval to defend itself, to bury its dead, or to exist. It has survived being outvoted at the UN for eighty years. It will survive this week too.
GOD BLESS ISRAEL.
إرسال تعليق