Netanyahu's UN Speech Cannot Conceal Israel's Diplomatic Ruin
On Thursday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will speak from a stage that is even more hostile to him than Israel's "fake news media" – a platform where Israel is viewed as a pariah state and its leader as a war criminal.
In Netanyahu's eyes, the list of the United Nations' "crimes" is endless: It recognized the plan to establish a Palestinian state, it ruled that the occupation is illegal, and refugee relief agency UNRWA employed Hamas operatives.
And it is there that Netanyahu loves to put on a show. But if, in the past, he had been the star, using gimmicks, felt-tip pens and placards on the American podium and had a schedule filled with meetings with global leaders and movers and shakers, this week, he will be regarded as a persona non grata – at best, a has-been.
The diplomatic and strategic collapse – there is no other way to describe the cliff which Netanyahu has pushed Israel over in the past three years – has not manifested only in the new civil, academic, cultural and economic rift with many of the world's nations and peoples. It might be that "antisemitic" Europe does not interest him. Israeli researchers unable to present their work at prestigious universities; Israeli tourists afraid to speak Hebrew; hundreds of thousands who have fled Israel (all leftists, of course); and economic sanctions – all these are petty trifles for Sparta's leader.
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But when the president of the United States avoids meeting with him and leading figures in the administration talk publicly about how Israeli and American interests do not align, it's impossible to ignore the scent of disdain lingering in the air.
Even worse, when the ultimate threat upon which he built his political career over the years, the Iranian nuclear threat, is put on ice, he can no longer claim to be safeguarding Israel's security. The most important strategic achievement credited to him – mobilizing the international community against Iran – ended up being a dumpster fire, mainly because the car he was selling, the collapse of the Tehran regime, proved to be a lemon, or "bullshit" as the CIA put it. Successfully assassinating the Iranian leadership did the opposite of what he had envisioned and planned.
The man who promised to "change the face of the Middle East," has indeed created a new Middle East, but one in which Israel has lost its primacy, influence and levers of power. Yes, Israel can still buy thousands of one-ton bombs, state-of-the-art fighter jets and advanced military technology, but the decision over how to use it is no longer in its hands. No UN address, no matter how polished and eloquent, can cover up the diplomatic erosion that places Israel in existential danger.
The UN is no longer the framework that shapes the global order or writes the rules of the game. It is being supplanted by regional, military and political coalitions and partnerships, which are compelled to establish alternatives where the international body has failed.
Israel can and should be a central component in these coalitions, but the temptation to stretch its boundaries with "Yellow Lines" in territory of neighbors like Syria and Lebanon, the backing of settler gangs that run riot in the West Bank and shoot at Palestinians, the foot-dragging in implementing President Donald Trump's Gaza plan and the diplomatic rifts with countries like Egypt and Jordan (which have signed peace treaties with Israel) have turned Israel into a threat rather than an ally.
Addressing the UN General Assembly, Netanyahu will try to speak to the world as though Israel still holds a leadership role. But global leadership is not measured by the ability to hold a microphone and pull rabbits out of a hat, rather by the number of countries ready to stand with you when the speech is over. At the end of Netanyahu's address, Israel will discover that the problem is no longer what the "international community" thinks of it, but the leader taking it to war.