TORONTO — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu opened his United Nations General Assembly speech Thursday by telling remaining delegates that any “moral cowards” who had not already walked out should leave now. He said Israel’s strike on Iran’s nuclear sites fulfilled a red line he drew from the same podium 14 years ago, and that destroying those facilities was “one of the easiest decisions” of his premiership because the alternative was “we’d all be dead.” Leaders of countries whose envoys walked out, he said, had thanked Israel privately.Netanyahu framed the conflict as a fight over whether a Jewish state may exist at any border, not over the West Bank, Gaza or the Golan Heights. He retold flying home from Philadelphia before the 1967 Six-Day War to find his brother Yoni in the orange groves, and Yoni’s line — “We’re going to win. We have no other choice” — which he tied to the 1976 Entebbe raid, Oct. 7, 2023, and the three-year, seven-front war that followed. He said Hamas murdered 1,200 Israelis that day, the proportional equivalent of 40,000 Americans, and that Israelis “fought like lions” instead of collapsing..Netanyahu thanked U.S. President Donald Trump as Israel’s “greatest partner,” saying American and Israeli pilots flew joint missions over Iran and that every remaining hostage had been brought home. He accused Qatar of decades of spending to “brainwash” campuses and media against Israel and the West, and called Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan a tyrant who hosts Hamas, denies the Armenian genocide and talks of ruling Jerusalem. He told French President Emmanuel Macron that “settler violence” talk ignores thousands of attacks on Israeli families, and named a French father of six shot in Judea and Samaria days earlier.Netanyahu said accusing Israel of genocide is “the greatest lie of the century,” citing West Point urban-warfare specialist Col. John Spencer’s claim that Israel has done more to prevent civilian deaths in urban war than any army in history.He turned on New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, saying Jews no longer feel safe in the city, that Mamdani tried to stop him speaking, and that Israel “prevented genocide.” He closed with a Starlink unit he said he would leave for the Iranian delegation “when they inevitably defect,”
