Benjamin Netanyahu came to the United Nations General Assembly on September 27th to tell the delegates—or, at least, those who hadn’t walked out on him—that his cause is righteous. As he did a year ago, he evoked the Book of Deuteronomy, from the Torah, saying, “We face the same timeless choice that Moses put before the people of Israel thousands of years ago, as we were about to enter the Promised Land.” That choice was whether to “bequeath to future generations a blessing or a curse.” Then he pulled out two illustrated maps, one labelled “The Blessing,” depicting Israel at peace with its Arab neighbors, including Saudi Arabia, and the other “The Curse,” depicting Iran forming what he called an “arc of terror” with Syria and Iraq. Our “common civilization” faces a choice, Netanyahu said, and, like Moses’s speech, much of his address was devoted to warning about those who chose the side of the curse, whose forces he promised to defeat.
Indeed, while Netanyahu was in New York, he green-lighted the assassination of a key Iranian proxy, Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, who (along with other key Hezbollah leaders) died in his bunker headquarters, in Beirut’s Dahiya district. Iran retaliated on October 1st, with a barrage of a hundred and eighty ballistic missiles, most of which—with U.S. and European help—were intercepted, but for which, Netanyahu said, Iran “will pay.” The previous night, the I.D.F.’s ground troops had entered Lebanon.
Netanyahu’s story at the U.N. constituted a preëmptive defense for why—a year after the atrocities of October 7th—he was turning toward the northern front, against Hezbollah, and has meanwhile refused to conclude a ceasefire agreement in Gaza that would bring the remaining hostages home. His intended audience was clearly not the General Assembly but the Israeli electorate and Vice-President Kamala Harris facing her electorate, both of whom he seems intent on forcing into a choice so apparently apocalyptic that they dare not appear cavalier about Israel’s right to continue waging war. (Presumably, Donald Trump does not need any such prodding.) Iran’s menace is “unremitting,” Netanyahu said. Its proxies are “savage” terrorist organizations and, like the Iranian government, seek Israel’s annihilation. In placing launchers, rockets, and military stores in civilian areas and targeting Israeli residential buildings, they are committing war crimes. Israel, about to finish off Hamas, the Prime Minister claimed, must turn to Hezbollah, which has fired eight thousand rockets and antitank missiles into Israeli towns and settlements along the Lebanese border, displacing some sixty thousand citizens. “Israel’s soldiers have fought back with incredible courage and with heroic sacrifice,” Netanyahu said. If Hamas stays in power, “it will regroup, rearm, and attack Israel again and again and again, as it has vowed to do. So Hamas has got to go.” As for Hezbollah, “enough is enough.”
Like many of Netanyahu’s speeches, this was (like his maps) a sly rendering, with some claims that were true, or true enough, but deceptive for the facts and nuances left out. Iran and its proxies remain a pernicious threat. Normalization with Saudi Arabia does seem plausible. And the Israeli government has to insure that its citizens can safely return to their homes. Yet the blessing that Netanyahu sketches cannot be secured only by “heroic sacrifice.” It requires a U.S.-led diplomatic track, beginning with a ceasefire-for-hostages deal that Netanyahu has refused to conclude since last January. In the words of the former Mossad head Tamir Pardo (writing in Haaretz with the former diplomat Nimrod Novik), Netanyahu “has deliberately chosen to draw away from integration into the ‘blessing’ bloc and to sentence us to constant conflict with the ‘curses.’ ” Indeed, despite “the astonishing successes of Israel’s military and intelligence forces,” he has failed to pursue “any strategic doctrine that would enable their translation into sweeping positive changes both close to home and farther away.”
Netanyahu and his coalition allies in the Knesset claim that they have resisted a ceasefire because they cannot secure conditions in Gaza that would prevent Hamas from regrouping. As a consequence, they must apply continued “military pressure” to bring Hamas to free the hostages and to also accept, in effect, a permanent I.D.F. presence in Gaza. They claim that the Hamas leader, Yahya Sinwar, is hoping to incite a regional war in which Iran would be mobilized, and so ultimately regain power in Gaza—that he is the recalcitrant negotiator. But the ceasefire-for-hostages deal, while transacted with Hamas, does not see Hamas as the real counterparty. On the contrary, it is meant to lay the foundation for the very diplomatic outcome that Netanyahu depicts in his Blessing map; a coalition of Israel and U.S.-supported Arab states whose aim is to both confront Iranian regional power and displace Hamas.
The deal, however, is preconditioned on a diplomatic process that would produce a “pathway to a Palestinian state.” No Arab country, nor the U.S., would agree to be an Israeli contractor for permanent occupation of Palestinian territories. A deal would begin with the rehabilitation of Gaza under the supervision of a new Palestinian administration “organically linked to the Palestine Authority,” as the former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and the former P.A. Foreign Minister Nasser al-Qudwa (who is a nephew of Yasir Arafat) wrote in the Washington Post; this administration would come in with the grudging consent of Hamas, perhaps, but would ultimately become its rival and alternative in Gaza. (On October 3rd, Israel’s Channel 12 newscast reported that already in Gaza “there is an emerging agreement” between Hamas and the P.A. that the latter “will take the reins in all matters having to do with civil administration.”) The views of the Palestinians in Gaza have not been static, either. According to a new poll by Khalil Shikaki’s Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, some fifty-seven per cent now believe that Hamas’s decision to launch the October 7th attack was “incorrect,” while thirty-nine per cent say that it was “correct.” Those numbers were essentially reversed when the war began.
And here’s the obstacle for Netanyahu and his partners in the Knesset: the “pathway” would preëmpt his notion of “Greater Israel,” which entails Israel’s annexation of the West Bank and the redoubling of Jewish settlements there. (Some of his allies speak of resettling Gaza as well, though it is not part of Biblical Israel.) Netanyahu’s U.N. speech, in fact, gave his game away. “Fuelled by Iran,” he said, “Palestinian terrorists in Judea and Samaria perpetrated scores of attacks there and throughout Israel.” And throughout Israel. Netanyahu’s cartography, as Thomas L. Friedman noted in the Times, does not show a border between the river and the sea. The entire land, in Netanyahu’s view, is Israel. He never speaks of the West Bank, though he does dismiss Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the P.A.—which has recognized Israel and coöperates with its security forces—as hostile.
The failure to agree to a ceasefire and a diplomatic track is presumably why the Saudi U.N. delegation was among those that did not stay in the hall for Netanyahu’s speech. It is also why, in early September, after Hamas cadres brutally murdered six hostages in tunnels in Rafah, hundreds of thousands of Israelis in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and other cities erupted in protest against not only Hamas but also Netanyahu’s government. The demonstrators knew that messianist forces in the government have been hindering any diplomacy that might disrupt their annexationist aims. In the West Bank, meanwhile, Jewish settlers have been attacking Palestinians, supported by the same right-wing extremists. “Some 700 Palestinians and 14 Israelis have been killed since 7 October 2023—the highest number on both sides in more than two decades,” the U.N. Secretary-General said in a recent statement. “The construction of new settlements, land-grabs, demolitions and settler violence all continue.”
Netanyahu, needless to say, elided other terrible facts in his speech before the General Assembly. Hamas’s reliance on human shields constitutes a war crime, but the I.D.F. has killed more than forty-one thousand Palestinians, many of them noncombatants, including (according to Oxfam’s current figures) more than eleven thousand children and six thousand women. Ten thousand more civilians may be buried in the rubble. By January of this year, Air Force bombing had wrecked some seventy per cent of the civilian population’s housing stock. There is, for survivors, dislocation, hunger, and disease. Moreover, it is now clear that, especially in the war’s first months, the Air Force sought out Hamas operatives with A.I.-driven targeting systems that led, inevitably, to excessive attacks on civilian residences. Israelis take it for granted that the I.D.F. keeps them alive, but, in this context, it is hard to see how Israeli forces have not themselves committed war crimes.
Israeli troops are now fighting to rid Hezbollah cadres and infrastructure from the area between the Lebanese border and the Litani River, about eighteen miles north; on Tuesday, Netanyahu appeared to confirm in a video that a bombing raid in Beirut had killed Hassan Nasrallah’s apparent heir, Hashem Safieddine. The I.D.F. claims not only to have decimated the Hezbollah leadership but also to have killed hundreds of Hezbollah fighters. But, as in Gaza, massive air attacks on Hezbollah’s strongholds in Beirut, and on a Palestinian refugee camp, have produced civilian misery. More than two thousand have died and some ten thousand have been injured, many of them noncombatants. More than 1.2 million civilians have been displaced.
Hezbollah is responsible for far more bloodshed in Syria, where it has propped up Bashar al-Assad, than in Israel, and many Arabs would join Israelis in wanting to see it disarmed. Still, Nasrallah, before his death, had openly claimed that Hezbollah would stop firing on Israel if a ceasefire were achieved in Gaza, which seemed likely to open the door to a diplomatic settlement. Ehud Olmert, who was Prime Minister during the 2006 war with Lebanon, told me, back in February, that he believed that a revision to U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701—which ended that war and arranged for a peacekeeping force, UNIFIL, to patrol areas south of the Litani, which Hezbollah evacuated—might have served as a stable arrangement. (The revision would see Israel ceding to Lebanon a small territory, the Shebaa Farms, captured from Syria but claimed by Lebanon; Hezbollah could present this as a diplomatic victory.) If Hezbollah would agree to pull back from the Litani again, with augmented U.N. inspection, Olmert told me more recently, then “1701 envisions a reasonable compromise” that would also “allow Israelis to return to their homes and also stop the fighting.”
Olmert is assuming that, eventually, there will have to be a diplomatic agreement; shocking air attacks may produce, initially, an aura of “deterrence” but also more enduring hatred. And the new leaders of Hezbollah, holding thousands of rockets and missiles in reserve, cannot be kept out of the equation; more than a hundred and thirty penetrated Israeli airspace on Monday, with some landing in Haifa, injuring ten. “In 1992, when Israel assassinated Sayyed Abbas Musawi, the then leader of Hezbollah, American and Israeli newspaper headlines claimed that his assassination marked the beginning of the end for Hezbollah,” Seyed Hossein Mousavian, a former Iranian Ambassador to Germany—who, in 2004, was the spokesperson for the Iranian negotiating team on nuclear enrichment—told me. “However, fourteen years later, in the 2006 war, Israel was, in effect, stalemated, and the world was shocked by Hezbollah’s new power. The assassination of Hassan Nasrallah, [the Hamas political leader Ismail] Haniyeh, and other commanders of Hezbollah and Hamas will spark the rise of a new generation of resistance, even more powerful and determined than today.” Many of Hezbollah’s jihadist forces, Mousavian said, lost family members in previous conflicts.
Mousavian is currently a visiting scholar at Princeton and no friend of the current Iranian regime. (By 2005, he had come into conflict with hard-liners led by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and cannot now return without risking prison.) Yet he sees a diplomatic opportunity for Iran here, too. “The new Iranian President, Masoud Pezeshkian, came to the U.N. three days before Netanyahu, and spoke of a ‘new era,’ ” Mousavian said, “with Iran playing ‘an effective and constructive role in the evolving global order.’ ” Pezeshkian’s is not the only voice; Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is gathering political and economic power. Nevertheless, “relations with Israel go through Washington,” Mousavian said, and Pezeshkian’s offer should be tested. “The U.S. should open a broad dialogue, in which bilateral and regional issues are all on the table—including a renewed nuclear deal, a denuclearized Persian Gulf, ceasefire between Israel and Iran, a regional conventional-arms arrangement, and the security of the Persian Gulf.” He added, “I believe that Iran would respect a Palestinian decision, and if the Palestinians are on a pathway”—to a two-state solution—“then Iran would not impede or disturb it.”
Perhaps Netanyahu’s most disquieting elision in his U.N. speech, in this season of atonement, is that Moses’s admonition to choose blessings over curses was aimed specifically at the Children of Israel. The paramount sin, according to Moses, was idol worship, to “go after other Gods to worship them.” In contemporary Israel, the idol, ironically, is the promised land itself. Netanyahu’s strategy, if that’s the word for it, is de-facto annexation under an umbrella of deterrence. But, absent diplomatic agreements and regional alliances, deterrence seems bound to become a permanent curse. Then, as Moses warned, “the Lord will cause you to be defeated before your enemies. You will come at them from one direction but flee from them in seven, and you will become a thing of horror to all the kingdoms on earth.” ♦
