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Dozens of delegates at the United Nations walked out of the hall when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu began his speech to the General Assembly meeting of world leaders on Thursday.
Describing them as "moral cowards," he asked for anybody else who felt that way to leave before he began to talk.
In his address, Netanyahu insisted Israel had taken "innumerable steps" to protect Palestinians, and said Israeli action was "the opposite of genocide."
He accused the city's mayor, Zohran Mamdani, of being antisemitic, saying: "To all those spreading lies about my country and its brave soldiers, whether they sit in this hall, or in the antisemitic office of the mayor of New York, I say this: Shame on you.
Ben Kentish speaks to Hannah Weisfeld, Executive Director and founder of Yachad, a British Jewish organisation whose primary mission is to empower British Jews to support a political resolution to the Israeli Palestinian conflict.
#benkentish #netanyahu #unitednations #israel #palestine #politics #news #lbc
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We start though tonight with what I can only really describe as the latest diatribe delivered
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by Benjamin Netanyahu at the United Nations General Assembly tonight. In a highly anticipated
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speech that he used to accuse Britain and France of hypocrisy, insist that Israel's army is
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despite all the criticism, the most moral in the world, formed once more over Donald Trump
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and called the elected mayor of New York an anti-Semite. Wonder what you think of him
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What is your view on this man and this leader? And how do you think history will judge him
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Because if the polls in Israel are right, the election that's set to take place weeks from now could see him ousted as prime minister
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How do you respond as a British person or someone in Britain to that charge of hypocrisy
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This is Netanyahu having a quite barbed pop, I would say, at the people of both Britain and of France
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The eve of the Six Day War in 1967, we weren't in any of these places
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We were in a tiny sliver of land. We still are. that is equal to about one-third of 1% of the land mass of the entire Arab world
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Yet they accuse Israel, tiny Israel, of colonialism. Some colonialism. And who's accusing us
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All among them are people in Britain and in France. For God's sakes, they invented the term
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They're colonies. Brace the entire globe Colonialism Give us a break Another lie So if you in Britain or France and you accuse Israel of colonising the West Bank you are a hypocrite
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There was that from Benjamin Netanyahu. And then there was this message for Israel's critics, including New York Mayor Zoramah Damany
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So to all those spreading these lies about my country and about our brave soldiers
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whether they sit in this hall or in the office of the anti-Semitic mayor of New York
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I say this. Shame on you. Shame on you for distorting the facts
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Shame on you for inverting victim and aggressor. Shame on you for spitting in the face of truth
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Mr. Mamdani, since you were elected mayor of this city, many Jews no longer feel safe in New York. They talk to me. They tell me
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This isn't the city we remember. It changed so quickly. Mr. Mamdani
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you try to stop me from coming here. You try to silence me. Well, you can't silence me
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You can't silence the truth. Let's bring into the conversation Hannah Weisfeld
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who's executive director and founder of Yehad, a British Jewish organisation that works to
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empower British Jews and supports a political resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
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Hannah, welcome to you. Let me ask a similar question, if I could, to you. What do you think
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Netanyahu's legacy will be? Well, thanks for having me on, Ben. It's a difficult question
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because on the one hand, everybody's expecting him to be out of power in a few months' time
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but on the other, there is actually not a significant chance we'll find ourselves with
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either a hung vote and a second election, or that he will find yet again another way to get himself
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back in. And so I'm not even sure that we are in the realm of legacy yet. But I would agree with
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your previous guests that ultimately he failed under his watch The worst security breach in Israel history took place And that is a breach he has never taken responsibility for and refuses to have a state commission of inquiry into
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And that really is his legacy, which is, you know, that he was the ruler who ruled on the basis of being Mr. Security
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and he failed the people when it came to security. And so I think that when you look at his speech in the UN
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the entire thing is about deflecting attention and laying blame on everybody else
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for the position he finds himself. So there's an argument that from a Zireli perspective he's been a failure
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I mean, some people on the messages are going far further than that, Hannah, and they're using terms like war criminal
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Would you echo that? Well, I think that he has allowed terrible things
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to be done under his watch and under his guise. I think the courts will judge if he's a war criminal
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but I think it's certainly the case that there are crimes being committed in Gaza
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and the West Bank. On his watch? On a daily basis. How much do you think, and I think you would say
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set it back, so how much do you think he's set back the cause of long-term peace in a two-state
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solution? Well, I think that's immeasurable really. The trust levels between Israelis and
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Palestinians are lower than I could ever possibly have imagined and that I could ever remember
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And so in that respect, I think he has set it back in the most significant way. And I think
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if you look at the Israeli electorate today, he says, like, it's a dirty word
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that people kind of laugh in your face. There is one exception to that
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which is that I think there is a growing understanding within the Israeli public
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And if you look at the polling, it shows this, that the status quo, which he has reigned over
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for the best part of two decades, has not brought them anything
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And in the right constellation, with the right people, and, you know, the right person in the White House
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the Israeli public would be probably delighted to see something else come in that would guarantee their safety and security
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And yet his supporters say they never been safer and more secure You know the threat from Hezbollah has been neutered the threat of Hamas massively diminished Iran nuclear ambitions have been set back years
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the West Bank is increasingly being treated as Israeli territory. To his supporters, he's made Israel safer than any previous prime minister has done
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But it's objectively nonsense. If you look at the situation on the ground
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the opening part of his speech I just found quite remarkable, in which he said, had we not attacked Iran, we'd all be dead
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as if Iran was about to bomb, you know, drop an enormous bomb
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on the United Nations compound and kill everyone. There was no proof that that was going to happen
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And actually, he went out to do regime change and he failed. And now, you know, Trump and Netanyahu, well, Trump is leading the kind of fight now
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but they're stuck in this long, protracted conflict that they can't get out of. And the Iranians have basically reigned supreme
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You know, they haven't really diminished them at all in the long term. Just very finally and briefly, again, same question I put to Lynette
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but that charge of hypocrisy that he's made tonight, as he has before
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against Britain and France for daring to comment on other countries' colonisation or colonialism
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What's your response to that? Well, I agree with your last guess, which is that it is the case that the UK
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you know, Britain, Great Britain, committed terrible crimes as an empire. And we can't shy away from that
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But this is 2026 and we have an entirely different rules based order
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You know, we are not running the British Empire anymore. And I think that, you know, to accuse the UK of being hypocritical
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when you look at the speech that Ed Miliband made a couple of weeks ago, in which he talks about the need to safeguard Israel
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you know, his respect and love for Israel as a country that had, you know
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saved his grandmother from the Nazis and a desire to see a diplomatic resolution
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that will safeguard Israelis and Palestinians. That's an entirely different thing from anybody who's calling for Israel's destruction
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Understood. Hannah, thank you as always. Hannah Weisfeld, Executive Director, founder of Yachad
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