Exposing Netanyahu’s lies at the UN General Assembly
JVL Introduction
Benjamin Netanyahu made an election campaign speech at the UN General Assembly. Dozens of delegates left the Hall before he began to speak and hundreds participated in a Jewish Voice for Peace led protest outside. I then watched with trepidation and then something close to disbelief the whole speech. It was not only full “of sound and fury” but also replete with a litany of lies. I am very thankful that within hours, journalists at The New Arab fact checked and debunked eight of those lies.
Netanyahu continued to assert as facts things that have long been roundly debunked and again and again asserted that Israel does what it does because “we have no choice” and asked the world to “give us a break” from the criticisms. At one point, he referred to “peaceful settlers” and claimed that settler violence was “occasional” – and that Israel deals with is as it is a country of law.
Unsurprisingly he did not say a word about the lives of 73,000 Palestinians who have been murdered, the nearly 200,000 who have been injured, the nearly 2 million who have been displaced and are trying to live in tents. He did not even express regret at the deaths but we did get the sad story of the killing of a french West Bank settler who was peacefully visiting a spring. He went so far as to ask those present to imagine a bomb falling on them as had fallen on Israel: he obviously expects the world to ignore Israel dropping 2,000 ton bombs on Gaza and bombing of people in tents. Presumably failure to accept this version means that, as he accused Mayor Mamdani, we are antisemites.
This article was originally published by The New Arab on Fri 25 Sep 2026. Read the original here.
Fact-checking Netanyahu’s lies at the UNGA
The New Arab dissects eight of Netanyahu’s major claims at the UNGA, after 77 delegates left the hall as he began speaking.
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Netanyahu is impervious to facts – like Trump, he uses lies as and when he feels like it and his supporters, like Trump’s, believe whatever he says. It is unfortunate that no one has arrested him while he is in the US to be tried for war crimes.
77 countries left the hall boycotting Netanyahu’s speech. Yet the BBC spun the story from his and Israel’s point of view headlined as “Netanyahu defends Israeli military action as delegates walk out before UN speech” merely mentioning lower in the article text, ‘dozens of delegates walked out in protest’. Talk about white privilege – strange the BBC could not be exact and lead with the 77 multiple national identities in the headline, which is what Middle East Eye & other sources did. This is the damage that establishment Zionism is doing to our public sphere. Sources: For the BBC https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3y0z7kxlegdo – For Middle East Monitor https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20260924-77-delegations-leave-un-hall-before-netanyahu-speech-drawing-widespread-reaction/
The weirdest claim was that Israel wasn’t committing a genocide but has prevented one.
It was interesting that the JVL introduction to this piece spoke of 73,000 Palestinians being murdered. This kind of language is more productive than using the word ‘genocide’ even if you take the view that ‘if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck!’ Genocide has a very clear legal definition and it is a waste of time asking anyone associated with the UK government to call what the state of Israel is doing to the Palestinians a genocide. The definition is given in the Genocide Convention which can be found on Wikipaedia.
Calling this mass murder of Palestinians ‘genocide’ is essentially an expression of our feelings, but it will not end their suffering and it gives politicians too much ‘wriggle room’. Murder is murder, and they cannot squirm they way out of admitting that.