Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addresses the 79th United Nations General Assembly at UN headquarters in New York.
Credit: Reuters Photo
When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel arrived in New York City for the United Nations General Assembly, he seemed to be entering a lion's den.
Speaker after speaker at the annual gathering of world leaders had portrayed Israel as a global villain. Police arrested dozens of pro-Palestinian demonstrators who called Netanyahu a war criminal. His public rebuttal of a Biden administration plan to pause the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah raised tensions between the two governments.
But Netanyahu bulldozed his way through his visit, castigating Israel's critics and the United Nations itself, offering no diplomatic concessions, and ordering an airstrike in Beirut that may have killed Israel's long-hunted archnemesis, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.
The strike landed even as Netanyahu delivered defiant remarks to a UN General Assembly hall -- largely emptied after dozens of diplomats walked out in protest -- in which he triumphantly declared of Israel's multiple conflicts: "We are winning."
It is an assessment some US officials say could reflect short-term truth while skirting past the risk of a larger conflict that could be devastating for all involved.
Hours later, senior Israeli officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive military operation, expressed remarkable confidence about their military and sabotage campaign against Hezbollah. Their blows against the group over the past two weeks and Nasrallah's possible death could be a turning point, they said, in their ongoing struggle with Iran, which arms and funds Hezbollah, Hamas and other proxy forces in what the officials portrayed as a plan to destroy Israel.
"It seemed to me a prime minister who's got the wind at his back," said Michael Makovsky, president and CEO of the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, a think tank with close ties to Netanyahu's conservative government.
Given Israel's recent successes against Hezbollah, Makovsky said, Netanyahu "can feel like, for the first time, we're really turning things around on the Iranians."
"I think the Israelis have been surprised at how successful they've been versus Hezbollah," Makovsky said. He added that Israel was also satisfied with the severe damage it has inflicted on Hamas in the Gaza Strip, despite its failure to win the release of the remaining Israeli hostages seized Oct. 7 and international condemnation of its military campaign.
Even as they insisted that Israel faced an existential threat from Iran's proxy forces, Israeli officials downplayed the threat of Iranian retaliation for Friday's airstrike in Lebanon. When Iran last mounted a direct attack on Israel, in mid-April, Israel and the United States successfully intercepted hundreds of Iranian projectiles. Some analysts said it was an embarrassment for Iran, one compounded a week later by an Israeli counterstrike on one of Iran's premier air defense systems.
And amid tensions with Biden officials who believe that Israel has incurred too much risk in its attacks on Hezbollah, the Israelis warned that little would encourage their enemies more than even a hint of daylight between the two allies.
Projecting strength has become a signature for Netanyahu, whose speech to the UN made no apologies after what he called "lies and slanders leveled at my country by many of the speakers at this podium" during the course of the week. Despite calls for de-escalation, he warned Israel's enemies, including Iran, "If you strike us, we will strike you."
And he assailed the UN itself as a "swamp of antisemitic bile" that offers a forum for foreign leaders who "stand with evil against good" in support of Israel's enemies.
Even Netanyahu's very presence in New York was disruptive. Thousands of pro-Palestinian demonstrators swarmed Manhattan landmarks before his arrival Thursday, protesting Israel's campaign against Hamas in Gaza at venues like the New York Public Library and Grand Central Station. Police reported dozens of arrests.
Netanyahu's defiant posture in New York left his critics more exasperated than ever.
"The threats Israel faces are serious, but Netanyahu's continued warmongering approach is only putting millions of Israelis, Palestinians and Lebanese civilians at risk as the whole region is on the brink of an all-out war," Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of the liberal Israel advocacy group J Street, said in a statement after the Israeli leader's speech.
US officials avoided openly criticizing Israel's strike but repeated calls to avoid further escalation of the conflict, even as some Israeli officials spoke of a potential Israeli ground offensive to clear out Hezbollah positions near its northern border.
"The question is not does Israel have a right to deal with existential threats to its security and enemies across its borders with the avowed intent to destroy Israel -- of course it does," Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken told reporters at a news conference Friday in New York City. "But the question is, what is the best way to achieve its objectives?"
Blinken said diplomacy was a better choice than force. But Netanyahu showed little interest in negotiated solutions during his visit. His UN address did not even mention a US-led plan unveiled Wednesday that calls for an immediate 21-day cease-fire to pause months of fighting between Israel and Hezbollah.
Nor did Netanyahu meet with Blinken in New York.
The new cease-fire initiative, developed with French officials and supported by several other nations, was presented with fanfare Wednesday in the hope of pausing a grinding conflict that US officials fear could lead to a wider war that draws in Iran and the United States.
But Netanyahu quickly appeared to reject the cease-fire plan upon his arrival in New York, vowing to keep attacking Hezbollah with "full force" and saying Israel would "not stop until we achieve all our goals."
The remarks infuriated US officials who said they believed Netanyahu had given them his support for the proposal.
Netanyahu's office soon issued a statement to "clarify," asserting that Israel shares the proposal's goal of "enabling people along our northern border to return safely and securely to their homes." How that might be achieved -- through force or diplomacy -- was not specified, however.
Fears of a cross-border assault like the one Hamas mounted Oct. 7 have driven some 60,000 Israelis from their homes since Hezbollah began firing rockets into Israel in solidarity with Hamas last fall, and analysts say Netanyahu enjoys strong public support for forceful efforts to reestablish security in the area. On Friday, Blinken called that "a legitimate and important objective."
A senior Israeli official said that a genuine misunderstanding was to blame for the confusion around Israel's position on the cease-fire plan. But it was just one of many instances where Netanyahu's public remarks have seemed to undercut what US officials insisted were private assurances about the Israeli leader's commitment to diplomacy.
US officials have tried for months to forge an agreement under which Hezbollah would withdraw the forces it has positioned along Lebanon's southern border, in defiance of a United Nations resolution meant to create a buffer zone there.
US officials also say a cease-fire halting the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza could quickly defuse the Lebanon crisis. Nasrallah has said that Hezbollah would halt its attacks on Israel when there is a cease-fire in Gaza.
But talks to resolve that conflict have been stalled for months, with each side blaming the other.
On Friday, Netanyahu blamed Hamas for the impasse, saying the Palestinian militant group should "surrender, lay down its arms, and release all the hostages."
"But if they don't, we will fight until we achieve victory -- total victory," he added. "There is no substitute for it."