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This is a guest essay by Vanessa Berg, who writes about Judaism and Israel.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
There is a strange tradition at the United Nations General Assembly.
A world leader approaches the green-marble podium, clears his throat, expresses his unwavering commitment to peace, international law and human dignity, and then discovers that every word in the English language except genocide, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and Israel has mysteriously disappeared.
This year’s General Assembly has been particularly impressive. Apparently, the dress code was dark suit, tasteful tie, and the most apocalyptic description of Israel one could squeeze into the allotted speaking time.
There were statements so demonstrably at odds with the record that they seem to have escaped from the podium before a staffer could whisper, “Sir, they have Google.”
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey went first and set an almost impossibly high bar for irony. Gaza, he announced, had become “the most inhumane and shameful concentration camp of our time.” Israel, he said, possessed a “genocidal mindset that can never get enough of killing.”
Then, almost without stopping to appreciate his own performance, Erdoğan called on the international community to recognize the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus and described Turkey as “an island of stability amid conflicts in its vicinity.” You have to admire the efficiency. Most politicians require two separate speeches to contradict themselves this elegantly.
Northern Cyprus exists because, following a Greek-junta-backed coup in 1974, Turkey intervened militarily and the island was effectively divided. The self-declared Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus is recognized by precisely one UN member state: Turkey. A substantial Turkish military presence has remained there for decades. Erdoğan had therefore managed to condemn territorial occupation while simultaneously asking the United Nations to legitimize the territorial arrangement created by his own country’s military intervention.
This is less “speaking truth to power” and more “please do not look at the Mediterranean while I am talking.”
Then came Jordan’s King Abdullah II, who accused Israel of forced displacement and warned that the Israeli government’s “expansionist appetite is now a regional threat.” He also presented the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative as essentially a magnificent peace proposal that Israel inexplicably refused, suggesting that the obstacle was simply an Israeli government unwilling to say “yes.”
That is a wonderfully streamlined version of Middle Eastern diplomatic history. It is the Netflix adaptation.
The actual Arab Peace Initiative offered Israel normalization with Arab states, which was significant, but it also required full withdrawal from territories captured in 1967, a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital and a refugee settlement tied to UN Resolution 194. Those were not decorative footnotes. They were among the central issues the parties had been fighting about for decades.
You may believe Israel should have accepted those terms. You may believe it should not have. But describing the initiative as an uncomplicated peace offer that Israel simply rejected is like describing a mortgage as “the bank offered me a free house, but for some reason there was paperwork.”
History also did not begin on June 5, 1967. After the 1948 war, Jordan controlled the West Bank and the Old City of Jerusalem and incorporated the West Bank into the kingdom in 1950. Jordan occupied the Old City, and the Jewish Quarter surrendered to the Arab Legion in May 1948, with its Jewish civilians evacuated — making lectures implying that territorial complications materialized suddenly when Israel arrived in 1967 rather historically adventurous.
The Jordanian-Israeli relationship becomes even more surreal when you descend from the UN podium to the plumbing. Under their 1994 peace treaty, Israel undertook to sell Jordan 50 million cubic meters of water annually at a subsidized price; subsequent arrangements expanded water cooperation. Such is Middle Eastern diplomacy: Condemn your neighbor as an expansionist regional menace before lunch, coordinate essential water supplies with him after lunch, and try to be home by dinner.
France’s Emmanuel Macron provided perhaps the cleanest factual blooper of the week when, while discussing the West Bank, he declared: “Hamas was never active in the West Bank.” His government later said he meant that Hamas does not govern the West Bank. That would certainly be a more defensible statement. Unfortunately, it is not the sentence that came out of his mouth.
Hamas being active in the West Bank is not an obscure allegation requiring access to Mossad archives. Hamas itself has said so. In August 2024, its al-Qassam Brigades claimed responsibility for a deadly shooting near Mehola in the Jordan Valley and specifically described the attackers as its “West Bank-based fighters.” Days later Reuters reported Hamas fighters clashing with Israeli forces in the West Bank; Hamas has repeatedly acknowledged members and operations there.
Macron managed to say Hamas had “never” been active in the West Bank in a building with Wi-Fi.
There was an especially awful irony that the comment came two days after an Israeli was murdered in a West Bank shooting. Hamas praised that attack, though importantly it did not claim responsibility, so it would be inaccurate to use that particular murder as proof of Hamas authorship. Fortunately for anyone interested in facts, we do not need to. Hamas’ own previous statements already demolished Macron’s “never.”
Antonio Guterres may have delivered the week’s most revealing performance of selective memory. Gaza, he declared, had suffered “a scale of killing and destruction unlike anything I have witnessed in all my years as Secretary-General.”
Unlike anything he has witnessed? Guterres became Secretary-General in 2017. During the broader Syria war, the UN estimated 306,887 civilians were killed between 2011 and 2021. In Yemen, a UN study estimated the war had caused 377,000 deaths by the end of 2021, including direct and indirect deaths. And in Sudan, researchers estimated more than 61,000 deaths in Khartoum State alone during the first 14 months of the war, with the national toll believed to be substantially undercounted.
Guterres apparently remembers every Israeli bulldozer but has misplaced entire wars. That is not impartiality. It is selective outrage wearing a UN badge.
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian was considerably more generous because he gave fact-checkers something measurable. Iran, he told the General Assembly, had responded to its enemies, “but we did not hit civilian populations.”
Nevermind that Iranian cluster-munition missiles striking Israel during this year’s fighting were well-documented. One cluster missile killed an elderly couple near Tel Aviv and damaged a major train station. Another strike hit a residential building in Tel Aviv, where civilians were evacuated with injuries. Other footage documented damaged homes, vehicles, and residential neighborhoods.
Pezeshkian also portrayed Iran as the victim of terrorism and complained that “they kill, we are sanctioned,” an extraordinary bit of political minimalism in which decades of Iranian regional hegemonic policy apparently vanished backstage while the president was walking to the microphone. Presenting Iran solely as a hapless bystander is the geopolitical equivalent of arriving halfway through “The Godfather” and wondering why everyone is being so mean to the Corleones.
Qatar’s Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani then delivered the full sampler platter: genocide, apartheid, settler terrorism, and desecration of Al-Aqsa. He declared that what happened in Gaza was “genocide in every sense of the word” and accused Israel of responding to criticism by throwing around accusations of antisemitism.
That is quite a closing argument from a country that simultaneously advertises itself as the region’s “trusted mediator and peace facilitator.” Apparently mediation now means sitting between two parties, putting on a referee’s shirt, and then spending 10 minutes explaining why one team is genocidal, apartheid, terroristic, and desecrating holy sites. Qatar has somehow reinvented neutrality as prosecution with complimentary refreshments.
Spain’s Pedro Sánchez decided to bypass all of this irritating legal ambiguity altogether. Spain, he announced, was “unequivocally condemning the genocide that Netanyahu continues to perpetrate in Gaza.”
The more revealing question with Sánchez is not merely what he says about Israel, but why Israel seems to become most useful whenever his government is drowning in problems at home. Critics of Sánchez have explicitly accused him of using his increasingly confrontational foreign policy as a distraction from domestic scandals.
The timing certainly gives them material. Just days before his UN appearance, his wife, Begoña Gómez, was ordered to stand trial on influence-peddling and embezzlement charges; in July, his brother David was convicted of administrative misconduct and banned from public office for nine years; and Sánchez’s Socialist Party and inner circle have been engulfed by a string of corruption investigations.
Israel is an extraordinarily convenient subject: Every minute Spain spends debating Netanyahu is a minute it is not debating Sánchez. If La Moncloa (the official residence and workplace of Spain’s prime minister) had a smoke detector, it apparently wouldn’t beep when the building caught fire. It would start shouting “Gaza!”
And then there was Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who announced that UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese “must not be silenced for telling the truth.” Apparently the position of UN Special Rapporteur has quietly been upgraded to Oracle of Delphi.
Perhaps next year the United Nations can install a small light beside the microphone. Green means “documented fact.” Yellow means “political argument.” Red means “big, fat lie.” And if someone says Hamas has never operated in the West Bank, the microphone simply shuts off and opens Google.
It would not solve the Middle East, but it might improve the General Debate.
No one can take this corrupt organisation seriously.
The useful idiots, speaking against Israel are wicked clowns.
Dreadful corruption and lies. Why is the UN still active?