Battered in NY, buoyed in DC: Israel faces split-screen reality ahead of Netanyahu's UNGA trip

Few, if any, leaders have addressed that body as often. Few leaders, at least leaders of democratic states, have remained in power long enough to do so. On Sunday, two days after his address to the UN, Netanyahu will mark 18 full years as Israel’s prime minister.

Eighteen. Or more than 23% of Israel’s entire history.

And it is fair to say that at no time during this long reign, or at any other point when he has addressed the UN, has Israel’s standing in the world been more precarious. One would be hard pressed to find another moment in its history – with the exception perhaps of the earliest days of the state and the aftermath of the 1973 Yom Kippur War – when Israel’s international position has seemed so fraught.

He will be speaking at a time when one of the UN’s own commissions has just issued a report declaring that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Keep in mind, no similar UN report ever found Turkey guilty of genocide, despite the killing of some 1.5 million Armenians during World War I. In the UN’s logic, that was not genocide – but what Israel is doing in Gaza, is.

Forget for a moment that this report by the UN Human Rights Council’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including east Jerusalem and Israel, is obscenely flawed. Forget as well that all three members of the “investigating committee” – South Africa’s Navi Pillay, India’s Miloon Kothari, and Australia’s Chris Sidoti – are known for a deep anti-Israel animus. Forget as well that Hamas is barely mentioned.

Because in media outlets around the world, none of that matters. The headlines after the report was released this week were similar to this one on CNN: “UN commission says Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.” Or, as the headline to an op-ed in The Guardian put it, “Now the UN says Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, too. How can Western governments still refuse to act?”

In Israel, such UN reports – indeed, most of what the UN says about Israel and the Middle East – are dismissed as hopelessly biased and not worth taking seriously. Abroad, however, it is different. For many people, and in many capitals, the organization still has cachet.

So when a headline blares: “UN commission says Israel is committing genocide,” readers – many of whom will not read the article, and even if they do will not discover who wrote the report or on what evidence it was based – will walk away, having glanced at the headline, convinced that Israel is intentionally trying to wipe out the Palestinians of Gaza. Why? Because a UN commission says so, and the UN still carries gravitas.

Truth be told, it is not only the UN Commission. The International Association of Genocide Scholars weighed in a week earlier, declaring that Israel is guilty of genocide – though only a third of its members participated in a vote on the matter, some with questionable credentials and with membership granted simply by paying dues.

One assertion begets another, one report feeds off the last, until the repetition itself begins to give the charge weight. The lie gathers force through endless echo.

And that is the atmosphere Netanyahu will face when he strides into the UN next week: an atmosphere where the allegations against Israel keep climbing the moral ladder of infamy. First apartheid – but that wasn’t strong enough. Then ethnic cleansing – but that wasn’t damning enough. Now genocide – the mother of all crimes, the absolute worst. It is difficult to imagine what will follow, though something surely will. (Consider the loony conspiracy theory that gained some traction this week that Israel was behind the assassination of Charlie Kirk.)

This is the climate that has already led to arms embargoes by some Western countries, to the EU weighing trade sanctions – on top of those embargoes – and even to the possibility that Israel will be barred from the Eurovision Song Contest.

Netanyahu may have employed hyperbole this week when he said that Israel will need to be “super-Sparta” along with being Athens. But his warning that Israel is growing increasingly isolated – whether because Muslim minorities are influencing European governments, or because Qatari and Chinese bots are poisoning minds worldwide – is a correct diagnosis.

After diagnosing Israel’s growing isolation correctly, Netanyahu will now have to contend directly with its symptoms. At the UN next week, those symptoms will be on full display: hateful rhetoric, calumnious accusations, and governments lining up to recognize a Palestinian state.

So what will Netanyahu say? What can he say that he has not already said? For while this may be the most hostile General Assembly he has ever faced, it is not the first hostile General Assembly he has faced.

And that was last year – before a UN commission gave its imprimatur to the blood libel that Israel is deliberately massacring Palestinians in Gaza with the intent of wiping them out. That was before a new push began to expel Israel from the very body – the UN – in which it sits.

Yet year after year, Netanyahu goes. He goes himself – not an emissary, not a mid-level diplomat from Israel’s UN mission, not a deputy. He goes. Why?

Because for all its bias, the UN remains the world’s stage. It is where every leader speaks, where the cameras are rolling, and where silence would only allow Israel’s enemies to monopolize the record. Showing up – the prime minister himself, not a stand-in – is a declaration that Israel will not be cowed, nor erased, no matter how hostile the forum.

And while it may not always be this way, for now it is the reality Israel must live with: a world body tilted against it, yet too important to ignore. Israelis, like every people, want to be liked, even loved. But its leaders – echoing a tradition going back to Golda Meir’s dictum that survival is preferable to a good obituary – understand a cruel truth: to endure as a Jewish state in the Middle East sometimes means taking steps that will mean you will not be loved in swaths of the West.

Remember as well that Netanyahu’s audience is not only the world beyond Israel’s borders. He is also speaking, perhaps primarily speaking, directly to the Israeli public – a public that, after months of browbeating, likes to see its leader stand up to the international community, calling out its mind-spinning hypocrisy.

This chance to look those critics in the eye and push back hard is not one Netanyahu will squander, especially not with the country entering an election year.

But standing up to a hostile world is not the only image Israelis will see when the premier flies to the US next week. Just days after absorbing the ritualized denunciations at the UN, Netanyahu will experience a very different reality when he goes to Washington.

Next Friday he will be battered in New York; the following Monday he will be welcomed in Washington. On Friday, he will be vilified as the embodiment of evil; on Monday, he will be greeted warmly – again – by US President Donald Trump, and this despite reported disagreements over the wisdom of the recent strike on Hamas leaders in Doha.

It highlights the split-screen reality Israel faces: condemnation and isolation in the world’s largest multilateral forum, reassurance and validation from its most important ally and the world’s most powerful state. It shows that Israel is not as alone as the UN speeches and arms embargoes from Slovenia and Spain might suggest, that its isolation is not absolute, that the diplomatic walls closing in are not yet complete.

Even as Israel is vilified in the world’s most prominent multilateral forum, it is embraced in the most critical bilateral relationship it has – with Washington.

That embrace matters because, in the end, while the UN can isolate and censure, it is the United States that provides the diplomatic cover, the military aid, and the veto power in the Security Council that prevents that isolation from becoming absolute. Washington’s position could shift – history shows it sometimes does – but for now it has not. And for Israel, that matters more than anything said at the UN.