Jews don’t owe a hostile world any apologies
By defying an antisemitic United Nations, Netanyahu wasn’t harming Israel or endangering Jews. No matter what you think about him, in that moment, he stood up for the truth.
By Jonathan S. Tobin
JNS
Sep 28, 2025
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addresses the U.N. General Assembly in New York City, Sept. 26, 2025.
The images coming from the U.N. General Assembly on the morning of Sept. 26 told us all we needed to know about the current state of world opinion. When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu went to the podium to speak, many of the delegates joined a walkout designed to demonstrate the Jewish state’s isolation on the international stage.
Israeli officials claimed only 77 out of the 199 member states boycotted the opening of the morning session of UNGA, where Netanyahu was the first scheduled speaker, or left once he started to speak. They also noted that some may not have bothered to be there for the start of another long day of U.N. speechifying, which is part of the annual festival of bloviating in which all member states have the right to give an address.
Empty seats at the UNGA
That spin notwithstanding, the images that a global audience for one of the most anticipated moments of the General Assembly saw on their television sets, computer screens and mobile phones proved telling. There’s no denying that Netanyahu seemed to be speaking to a mostly empty auditorium.
Those images illustrated something the prime minister and the people of Israel already knew. As the Jewish state continues to fight for its life against genocidal terrorists and the Islamist governments that back them, most of the international community stands against it. As most of the coverage of the event from legacy outlets like The New York Times indicated, Netanyahu was being given the pariah treatment.
At that moment, the GA seemed to be mirroring the surge of Jew-hatred that has swept across the globe since Oct. 7, 2023. Judging Israel by double standards applied to no other country—and demonizing and denying Jewish rights—has been normalized in the worlds of politics, diplomacy and even popular culture. Everyone, even the satirists who write for the animated sitcom “South Park,” seems to be blaming Netanyahu and treating Israel as if it were a criminal state for its response to a terroristic slaughter from neighboring invaders.
With even the Trump administration pressuring him to end the war against Hamas and to acquiesce to an outcome that could lead to the survival of the terrorists, Netanyahu—and all of Israel—appears to be facing the sort of ostracism that encourages its enemies to believe that its destruction is only a matter of time.
Rather than pleading for tolerance or understanding, Netanyahu exuded defiance and confidence. As difficult as the diplomatic situation may be—his plane had to avoid flying over the airspace of hostile European countries to get to the United States out of concern about being arrested, as JNS’s Alex Traiman reported—the Israeli prime minister wasn’t giving an inch to his country’s foes or even those who claim to be its friends who have swallowed Hamas propaganda.
And that was the most important thing about his speech, as well as the rest of his visit. Here in the United States, he will have to fend off American pressure to end the war without first securing Hamas’s complete defeat, let alone allowing the creation of a Palestinian terror state, as most of the international community is demanding.
Sending the right message
By showing that Jerusalem won’t give in to pressure to make suicidal concessions, regardless of how much of the world is against it, Netanyahu sent exactly the right message to an antisemitic United Nations and Jews in the Diaspora. He modeled exactly the sort of pride and willingness to stand firm in his convictions, if that’s what it takes to survive. That kind of brave stance is needed more than ever at a time when Jew-hatred has again become acceptable in the public square.
That is true regardless of what you think about a leader who has remained in power far longer than any other Israeli premier, and who has a legion of detractors both at home and abroad. Above and beyond the debate about what strategies and tactics Israel should be employing on the diplomatic battlefield or the one in the Gaza Strip, by refusing to kowtow to the false narrative about the conflict, Netanyahu showed that he has exactly the sort of moral strength and conviction needed for the Jewish state to navigate through this perilous moment in history.
Rather than beginning his speech with a defense of Israel’s conduct in Gaza, he began with a recitation of the victories his nation had achieved in its fight against Iran and its terrorist proxies. He talked about altering the balance of power in the Middle East and, at least, for the immediate future, removing the threat of Tehran getting a nuclear weapon.
He demanded that the world remember the 48 hostages still being held captive by Hamas—20 of them deemed to be alive—and reminded the international community that the war could have ended at any moment in the last two years had the terrorists released them and laid down their arms.
Only after doing that did he go on to give a cogent explanation for why Israel is right and the rest of the world is wrong about what has happened in Gaza.
The blood libels about Israel committing “genocide” against Palestinian Arabs there or creating a famine haven’t just been mainstreamed by much of the media establishment, which has been captured by ideologues who think that Israel has no right to exist and is always in the wrong, no matter what it or its enemies actually do. Those lies have become unchallenged conventional wisdom among those who follow liberal fashion, which they believe is based on facts rather than Hamas-fostered propaganda.
This became obvious within days of the orgy of mass murder, rape, murder, torture, kidnapping and wanton destruction that was inflicted on Israel on Oct. 7. The terrorists who committed those crimes and those who cheered for them have been able, with the help of a biased press, to portray themselves as victims, rather than perpetrators of war crimes, whose goal is both Jewish genocide and the destruction of the one Jewish state on the planet.
This has created a narrative about Israel that has cowed many who might otherwise be either supportive of Israel or normally unwilling to join the crowd denouncing it to echo the talking points of the pro-Hamas mobs on college campuses that claim the Jewish state is a uniquely evil entity.
A biased media
The mainstream media has become a reflection of a U.N. mentality that has long focused its crosshairs on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict while ignoring disasters and human rights abuses in so many other areas. It has aimed its disdain and punishment on the tiny Jewish state, as opposed to the far larger Arab world. After all, it was the Palestinian terrorists who started the post-Oct. 7 war—and it is they who are responsible for the suffering it has caused their own people.
But in an ideological environment in which a generation of young people has been indoctrinated in toxic leftist theories that falsely teach that Israel is a “white” oppressor and “apartheid” state, the truth about Oct. 7, Hamas’s actions and the way the political culture of the Palestinians has compelled them to turn down every opportunity for peace doesn’t matter.
Yet many supporters of Israel, both Jewish and non-Jewish, are so intimidated by this false narrative about Israel that they’ve lost the ability or will to stand up and deny the misinformation so many have swallowed.
At a moment in which Jews recoil from the resurgence of antisemitism that few of them anticipated or are prepared to resist, the inclination to distance themselves from Israel and Netanyahu seems to be irresistible. But as any rational or coherent reading of history would teach us, that sort of weakness only encourages the Jew-haters, whether on the mainstream left or on the margins of the political right.
Those who accept the premise that the problem is Israel’s efforts to defend itself or Netanyahu’s desire to cling to power are making the same mistake that countless generations of Jews have made in the past. Antisemitism today is, in this respect, no different from the attacks on Jews that were commonplace in the past. As Netanyahu rightly noted, the decades after World War II and the Holocaust, during which Jew-hatred was confined to extremists, were a brief holiday from history. Then, as now, antisemitism is always about the antisemites; it does not stem from the actions of the Jews.
The only way to answer those who attack Israel is by not accepting their premise or apologizing for its actions. Those who falsely judge Israel or think it should respond to existential threats and the worst mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust by essentially taking it as their due aren’t just wrong. They are part of a culture in which killing Jews is now considered acceptable. And they must be defied.
Israel owes the world no apologies
Opposing a Palestinian state isn’t, as Netanyahu correctly observed, a marginal point of view in Israel. It’s part of a consensus that stretches from the moderate left to the right. That is because the overwhelming majority of Israelis know that what happened on Oct. 7 was the result of there being a Palestinian state, which is what Gaza was on Oct. 6, rather than the absence of one.
What Netanyahu was doing in Turtle Bay this week was telling us that Jews who fight successfully for their lives owe the world no apologies for choosing life.
That’s a difficult lesson for Diaspora Jews. Many aren’t accustomed to being victims of Jew-hatred or positively viewing Jewish identity other than as something rooted in universalist values. However, if they hope for their prosperous communities to resist efforts to break and isolate them, then channeling the spirit of defiance that Netanyahu modeled is the only path forward.
A spirit of blind partisanship has become commonplace in Israel and America—one that has caused many on the left to denounce Netanyahu or think that a surrender to Hamas would be terrible, but worth it if it brought him down. What they should be doing at this moment is uniting behind Netanyahu’s insistence on the end of Hamas, as well as ensuring that never again should the Palestinians, their enablers and their allies be put in a position to endanger Israelis.
Friends of Israel, both Jewish and non-Jewish, are doing just that. But as opinion polls and the tenor of public discourse about the Middle East indicate, many Americans have been influenced by a biased media, leftist ideology and traditional tropes of antisemitism being spread by the likes of former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and the even more hateful political commentator Candace Owens.
We don’t know what will happen next in Gaza or whether the Trump administration can resolve the cognitive dissonance that defines its current policies, backing Israel’s quest for Hamas’s destruction while also letting the funders of Islamist terror that rule Qatar lead it around by the nose.
We do know that Israel cannot allow itself to be pressured into letting Hamas win the war it started on Oct. 7. The only way to ensure that won’t happen is if Netanyahu remains defiant, even if it means standing alone. And no matter how much it may cost individuals who dissent from mainstream culture and opinion, at this moment, those who care about Israel and Jewish survival must stand with him.
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