I wrote Netanyahu’s UN speech.
This is what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu probably won't say when he addresses the United Nations General Assembly on Friday, but should.
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Ladies and gentlemen, esteemed delegates:
To borrow a phrase from Indonesia’s President Prabowo Subianto, who addressed you on Tuesday, “Shalom.”
For thousands of years, my ancestors stood in exile, facing Jerusalem, and prayed that one day their children would return to our indigenous homeland. Eighty years ago, nearly half of our people were erased from the earth while much of the world looked away.
And yet, today, I stand before you not as a refugee or a supplicant, but as the prime minister of the reborn Jewish state — free, strong, and flourishing in its ancestral homeland.
This hall is full of contradictions: Dictators lecture about freedom, human rights abusers pander about humanitarianism, tyrants preach about justice, and terror sponsors condemn the right of self-defense.
But there is only one nation here that has returned to its homeland after two thousand years, built a democracy in unfruitful desert land, and transformed survival into innovation.
That nation is Israel.
And so let me begin with a simple truth: The world benefits from Israel far more than Israel benefits from the world.
Ours is a nation that grows 80 percent of its own fruits and vegetables. We have made the barren bloom, the sand flourish, and the impossible routine. Our cows are the most productive in the world. Our children are raised not only to survive, but to thrive in one of the most challenging environments on Earth — and still, we innovate, educate, and inspire.
Israel is consistently ranked among the happiest nations on earth — a tiny country surrounded by threats, yet filled with resilience, community, and joy. Meanwhile, many of your societies are drowning in epidemics of loneliness, depression, and mental health crises.
When we speak of indigeneity, understand this: No other people in this hall has ever returned to its homeland after two millennia of exile. Only the Jewish People have done this. Israel is not a colonial outpost; it is the oldest homecoming in recorded history. From Abraham walking these hills, to King David establishing Jerusalem, to Isaiah prophesying in the very valleys we still farm, our roots in this land are deeper than any of your borders or constitutions.
We are a people who understand balance. Israel is one of the rare countries that has succeeded in finding the delicate equilibrium between liberalism and traditional values. Our society safeguards freedom and democracy while remaining deeply rooted in family, faith, and community. Our children serve our country out of necessity, but also out of pride. Even our ultra-Orthodox youth dedicate a year of service in volunteerism.
What’s more, Israel boasts the highest number of university degrees per capita in the world, creating a workforce that is both competent and visionary. We are a modern nation, yet never unmoored from our ancient roots.
We are also unique in how we fight. Israel has never started any of the wars it has fought, yet each time we have fought, we have fought with moral clarity and discipline. We are perhaps the only nation in modern warfare that alerts the enemy before we strike, that drops leaflets and makes phone calls and sends text messages to warn civilians to flee areas used as terrorist strongholds. We facilitate humanitarian corridors and even feed our enemies. We have fought wars we never sought and never initiated, but we have done so with unmatched ethical standards.
That is because we know the difference between civility and barbarism. While Palestinian terror groups target our babies in their cribs, we treat Palestinians in our hospitals. Many of the same Israelis who lived along the Gaza border before October 7th would drive Palestinian neighbors to medical appointments inside Israel.
In countries like the UK and Australia, we have seen shocking cases of doctors and nurses declaring they would refuse to treat Jewish patients, dragging politics into the operating room where only life and healing should matter. In Israel, the opposite is true: Our doctors treat every human being who comes through their doors — Jew or Arab, Israeli or Palestinian, Syrian or Lebanese — with the same care and compassion. Because for us, medicine is not politics. It is humanity.
Even in our prisons, the truth is plain: Many Palestinian convicts would rather remain in an Israeli jail than be sent back to Gaza or the West Bank. They know that even behind bars in Israel they are treated with more dignity, better conditions, and greater rights than they would ever experience under their own leaders. That contrast speaks louder than any speech.
The same values that shape our justice system shape our progress. Our technology, our research, our medicine, and our agriculture are second to none. We are pioneers of water desalination, drip irrigation, medical breakthroughs, cybersecurity, and artificial intelligence. While many of your countries wrestle with economic instability, healthcare shortages, social fractures, and educational gaps, Israel surges forward. Our healthcare is universal and first rate. Our education is widely accessible. Our innovation is overflowing. Our families and communities are strong.
And when disaster strikes elsewhere, we do not look away. From earthquakes in Haiti to wildfires in Greece to floods in Africa, Israel is among the first to arrive with doctors, rescue teams, and engineers. We do not only build for ourselves; we help repair the world.
And still, here at the United Nations, Israel is slandered. The antisemitism that courses through these halls — whether explicit or dressed up as “anti-Zionism” — can be explained in one simple word: jealousy.
That’s right, many of you are deeply jealous of Israel, the Jewish state.
The Jews, against all odds, emerged from the ashes of an industrial-scale genocide that murdered nearly half our people in just six years, and within just a few generations built one of the most successful and important nations of the modern world.
Sure, we have had our challenges: integrating Arabs into Israeli society, inflation, internal politics, the relationship between religion and state — yet we have endured, we have excelled, and we have inspired. And that, more than anything else, fuels the resentment that hides behind the UN’s relentless scathing and endless resolutions.
But don’t just hear it from me; listen to the testimony of those outside our borders. As one Jordanian ex-Muslim put it: “We (Arabs) have 22 countries, over 400 million people, and nearly 14 million square kilometers of land. Yet we have convinced the world that our dignity hinges on carving out a 23rd country by mutilating the only Jewish state on earth, a state that occupies less than 0.2 percent of the surrounding landmass.”1
Or, take it from Dr. Mudar Zahran, the head of the vast Palestinian community in Jordan (approximately 3 million Palestinians living in Jordan). A few years ago, Zahran told the European Union Parliament:
“We, the Palestinian Jordanian people, the Palestinians are the ‘chosen people’ of the European Parliament. People in the European Parliament love the Palestinians, they care for them, they dream about us in their sleep.”
“How beautiful they care about how we are oppressed by the ‘evil Zionist Israelis’ — while, in fact, those ‘evil Zionist Israelis’ are the ones giving us jobs when Lebanon bans us from all forms of jobs, when the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, which occupied 78 percent of our homeland, prevents us from all kind of jobs. The King of Jordan could come and present here and talk about peace and human rights, while Israeli politicians could get arrested for arriving at your airports.”
“At the same time, we see not a single European Member of Parliament, not a single European politician, speaking about the oppression of the Palestinians at the hands of the Hashemite Kingdom or the Palestinian authorities. On the other hand, your money, your tax Euros are financing the Palestinian police force which oppresses us, tortures us, and puts us in disappearance.”
“This happens while you guys are obviously caring for us in good intentions, but your judgment is very cloudy. Unfortunately, most of you are seeking to destroy the very and only source of income and stability that we have, which is the Israeli Jewish state. That state has offered us every hope there is in the last 70 years.”
These men are not wrong.
My colleague Yoav Gallant also put it plainly: “The British Mandate ended 77 years ago. You should focus on the Islamist surge in the UK, not on Israel.” Just this week, a video surfaced from London: Muslims blasting prayers over loudspeakers in the streets, an elderly English woman protesting, “This is a Christian country, I don’t want to hear about your Quran.” For her words, she was promptly arrested, while the crowd mocked her in Arabic. Her look said everything: She already felt like a guest on her own island.
Compare that to Israel, where our Arab citizens are, by and large, proud to be Israeli. They serve in our parliament, our judiciary, our hospitals, our military. They are not fleeing to Arab states; they are staying here, with us, because they know that the Jewish state, of all places, is the best place to be an Arab across all of North Africa and the Middle East. Their lives testify to a truth much of the world ignores: The struggle we face is not between Jews and Arabs, but between civilization and barbarism, between freedom and fanaticism.
Israel truly understands the Islamist threat that is now engulfing the West and threatening the very foundations of our shared civilization. For decades, we have faced it on our borders, in our streets, and in our skies. We know what it looks like, how it recruits, how it hides, and how it strikes. And we know this: It will not stop with us.
Those who have stood at this podium to proclaim their recognition of a so-called “Palestinian state” know full well that our conflict has nothing to do with borders or land. If it did, it would have ended long ago. This conflict is about antisemitism disguised as “anti-Zionism,” perpetuated by an extremist ideology and fundamentalist interpretation of Islam that encourages the berating, subjugation, and killing of non-believers. It is an ideology that despises freedom, loathes progress, and rejects coexistence.
When you clothe that ideology in the language of statehood, you are not promoting peace; you are legitimizing fanaticism. And when you lecture Israel for defending itself against it, you are not standing for justice; you are surrendering to barbarism.
Israel is one of the few countries on earth that successfully fights Islamist terrorism, by far the greatest and most pernicious strand of terrorism our world has faced since World War II. Terrorists fear Israel more than they fear the United States. And they should. Because we will never surrender to terrorists — whether they hide in tunnels beneath Gaza, in Tehran safehouses, or in Qatar. Israel will find them, confront them, and defeat them.
Because make no mistake: In an Islamist world, there would be no “United Nations.” There would be no assembly hall where men and women debate ideas, no charters, no resolutions, no human rights councils. There would only be submission to a single, rigid ideology. The diversity of nations, cultures, and faiths that makes this body possible would be crushed beneath the weight of uniform tyranny.
So when you applaud those who empower Islamist movements, you are applauding the forces that would erase this very institution from existence. If Israel falls, it will not be replaced by peace, but by a darkness in which the very notion of “nations united” could never survive.
And what of this institution? The UN has passed more resolutions condemning Israel than condemning Iran, North Korea, and Syria combined. What does that say about us Israelis? Nothing. What does it say about you? Everything. This assembly, which ought to stand as a beacon of justice, has too often become a theater of hypocrisy, emptiness, and incompetence.
You call yourselves the “United Nations,” but there is nothing united about you. Dictators sit alongside democrats, terror sponsors sit alongside their victims, and human rights abusers sit in judgment of those who defend freedom. This hall, more often than not, does not unite the nations of the world; it divides them, distorts them, and drags them down.
The founders of this body dreamed it would prevent the scourge of war and safeguard the dignity of all people. Instead, it has become a playhouse where the persecutors outvote the persecuted. The “united” in the name “United Nations” has become a farce — unless, of course, you’re united in your baseless hostility toward Israel.
And let me tell you about my very journey here. On Wednesday night, when I boarded Israel’s official aircraft — the Wing of Zion — to fly here to New York, we took a longer, more costly, less efficient route. Why? Because several European countries might have refused to let Israel’s prime minister fly through their airspace. Think about that. The leader of the one and only Jewish state, the only democracy in the Middle East, rerouted in the skies like a criminal fugitive — not because of any crime, but because these same governments are too timid, too compromised, or too corrupted to let me pass overhead.
This is not about airspace; this is about moral collapse. These are the same nations that lecture Israel about “justice” and “international law” while rolling out red carpets for the tyrants of Tehran, and while shaking hands with dictators who stone women, hang homosexuals, and fund terrorists. They are members of the so-called International Criminal Court — an institution so twisted it dares to equate Israeli soldiers defending civilians with Hamas mass murderers, but cannot find the courage to indict Assad, who gassed his own people, or Khamenei, who arms terror across the globe.
What does it say about this “international community” that the flight path of Israel’s elected leader must bend around their hypocrisy? It says that the nations are not united. They are fragmented, corrupted, and intimidated by the very forces that seek to dismantle Western civilization.
But despite this, Israel continues to endure. Because our strength has never come from your approval. It has come from our people, our faith, our ingenuity, and our unbreakable connection to our land.
And so I say again: We do not need the world as much as the world needs us.
The Arab regimes put money in your pockets to buy your silence and bribe you against your own interests. They trade in oil, in influence, and in fear. As the great chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov said last year:
“If you look around the Middle East and conclude the biggest human rights problem is tiny, multi-cultural, democratic Israel, worthy of dozens of UN condemnations while the murderous, anti-women, anti-freedom dictatorships around it are not, you are at best a useful idiot.”
On the other hand, Israel offers you something entirely different: innovation that powers your economies, medicine that saves your lives, agricultural breakthroughs that feed your people, and security cooperation that keeps global terrorism at bay. While others drag you backward, we pull the world forward.
Those who wage jihad against Israel and their patrons do not merely oppose the Jewish state; they oppose modernity itself. They do not want science, they do not want progress, they do not want coexistence, they do not want multiculturalism, they do not want equality, and they do not want freedom. They want to return humanity to the Dark Ages, purging anyone who tries to stand in their way.
And Israel proudly stands in their way.
We will continue to build, to heal, to innovate, to unapologetically defend ourselves, and to be what we have always been: am olam — an eternal people.
Dan Burmawi on Substack
Wow! What a speech, I feel much better. I imagine most of those hypocritical countries would have left the room before it. I Stand with Israel. I am proud of Israel. Forever!
“Just this week, a video surfaced from London: Muslims blasting prayers over loudspeakers in the streets, an elderly English woman protesting, “This is a Christian country, I don’t want to hear about your Quran.” For her words, she was promptly arrested, while the crowd mocked her in Arabic. Her look said everything: She already felt like a guest on her own island.”
A guest? More like a dhimmi.
Know your place, infidel!