The Speech I Wish Netanyahu Would Have Given to the UN

The world has far more to gain from working with Israel than from hating it. That was the case I wanted the Israeli prime minister to make.

photo: UN Photo/Loey Felipe

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On Thursday at the United Nations General Assembly, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke eloquently, while correctly attacking accusations that Israel is committing “genocide” in Gaza.

But his address was also bombastic, combative, and short on vision. It was a “me against the world” speech that offered defiance without a corresponding sense of possibility.

Netanyahu had every reason to challenge the accusations against our country. An Israeli prime minister should not stand before an international audience as though Jewish self-defense requires a permission slip. Nor should he pretend that every government lecturing Israel about morality has earned the authority to deliver the lecture.

But I wanted to hear an argument bigger than our enemies. I wanted the prime minister to explain what the world gains from the Jewish People, what it gains from the Jewish state, and what it throws away when it decides that excluding us is more important than improving its own future — because the Jewish contribution to civilization is not something we need to whisper about.

Across the societies in which Jews have made their lives, they have contributed as physicians, merchants, scientists, teachers, writers, musicians, entrepreneurs, and public servants. They have built institutions, expanded knowledge, created employment, and enriched cultures. Often, they accomplished these things while navigating restrictions their neighbors never had to consider.

And when societies gave Jews greater freedom to participate, those societies gained more of what Jews had to offer. The beneficiaries were never only Jewish.

That is a history worth telling from the podium of the United Nations, especially to an assembly in which some representatives appear more comfortable discussing the supposed dangers of Jewish power than the demonstrable benefits of Jewish participation.

I would have begun with Persia.

In 539 BCE, Cyrus conquered Babylon and permitted Jewish exiles to return to Jerusalem and restore their religious life. Jewish memory preserved a Persian ruler as a liberator. His imperial order could accommodate Jewish identity and the Jewish attachment to our ancestral homeland.

Imagine an Israeli prime minister looking into the cameras and telling the Iranian people: Before your rulers taught you to chant against us, our people remembered one of your rulers with gratitude. Before they made hostility toward Israel a national mission, there was a different chapter in our relationship.

That history belongs to Iranians, too. Their government has no right to imprison their imagination inside an endless confrontation with the Jewish state.

Cyrus understood something that the region’s aspiring strongmen might consider: Another people’s identity does not diminish your own. Recognizing Jewish belonging did not make Persia less Persian. A civilization confident in itself could make room for a people with its own history, faith, and national aspirations.

Then I would have taken the assembly to Iraq.

Jews had lived in that land since the Babylonian exile, long before the modern Iraqi state existed. They became participants in its commerce, public life, literature, and music. Sassoon Eskell served as an early finance minister. Jewish families helped build the country they considered home, alongside their Muslim and Christian neighbors.

These were people contributing to Iraq’s future. Then their Jewishness became grounds for questioning whether they belonged in it.

The Farhud (pogrom) in 1941 brought murder and devastation to Baghdad’s Jews. Subsequent persecution and insecurity helped destroy the foundations of a community that had endured for millennia. By 1951, approximately 124,000 of Iraq’s 135,000 Jews had immigrated to Israel.

Consider the enormity of that loss. A country lost neighbors who knew its language, understood its institutions, loved its music, and possessed generations of accumulated experience. It lost the businesses their children would have established, the patients they would have treated, and the ideas they would have developed. You can seize a family’s house. You cannot confiscate the contributions its grandchildren would have made.

Iraq’s subsequent disasters had many causes, but the destruction of its Jewish community was itself a disaster for Iraq. A society had driven away part of its own human inheritance and mistaken the damage for an assertion of national identity.

Many of those Jews went to Israel. The country that was supposed to be the source of the problem became the home in which they rebuilt their lives. What Iraq rejected, Israel received.

Europe offers another lesson in the staggering foolishness of deciding that Jewish talent is a national contaminant. Nazi Germany expelled Jewish scholars and scientists from institutions they had helped distinguish. Laboratories and universities were subjected to racial ideology. People who had contributed to German intellectual life were stripped of their positions because the regime preferred an acceptable ancestry to an exceptional mind.

America benefited from some of those who escaped. Its doors were far too narrow, and its own antisemitism was real. Yet the refugees who reached American institutions strengthened the country that received them. Research on German Jewish refugee chemists has documented substantial increases in American invention in their fields, including through the younger scientists they trained.

The benefit did not end with the arrival of a scientist. It continued through students, colleagues, discoveries, and institutions. Knowledge multiplied. Opportunity passed from one generation to another. This is how a country gains from welcoming people who have something to contribute. It gains what they build and what they enable others to build.

The Jewish contribution to America (and, really, the greater West) belongs proudly within that story. Jews helped strengthen the country’s scientific, commercial, and cultural life, alongside Americans of countless other backgrounds. America gave generations of Jews opportunities that other societies had withheld. Jewish Americans helped make those opportunities valuable for everyone.

Now return to Iran. In 1979, the revolutionary government executed Habib Elghanian, a prominent Jewish industrialist and community leader. His death terrified the country’s Jewish and business communities. Here was a man who had helped build Iranian industry, killed by the new order governing his country.

There is a terrible contrast between Persia’s memory of Cyrus and the Islamic Republic of Iran’s treatment of a Jewish builder. One chapter offered restoration. The other delivered a warning about the dangers of belonging.

Today, Iranians endure repression and profound economic hardship. They deserve a future larger than the ideological obsessions of their rulers. Imagine what Iranian and Israeli scientists, entrepreneurs, physicians, and engineers could accomplish if they were free to work together. Imagine how much energy could be released if confronting Israel ceased to be treated as an achievement in itself.

How many ordinary Iranians have been asked to sacrifice opportunities for a confrontation they did not choose? How many more generations are supposed to inherit it?

This is the invitation I wanted Netanyahu to place before the world. Look at the record of Jewish contribution. Then look at what the Jewish state is offering.

Israel’s partnerships already extend far beyond diplomatic ceremonies. Through MASHAV, its international development agency, Israel shares experience in agriculture, water management, medicine, education, entrepreneurship, and other fields. Established in 1958, just 10 years after modern independence, the agency made sharing practical knowledge part of the young country’s international role. A country still building itself was already working to help others build.

Countries that welcome Israeli expertise gain opportunities to improve harvests, manage scarce resources, develop businesses, and expand scientific cooperation. The value of those relationships reaches people who may never attend a diplomatic reception or think much about Middle Eastern politics. It reaches them through practical improvements in their lives.

So what, precisely, is accomplished by making those partnerships unacceptable?

A university that excludes Israeli researchers has produced an exclusion. It has not produced a discovery. A government that refuses cooperation has established the limits of its willingness to cooperate. It has not solved its people’s problems.

If your campaign succeeds in preventing a useful partnership, be honest about the result. Someone will go without an opportunity so that you can feel satisfied with your position.

Jewish dignity does not depend on usefulness. We do not owe anyone an invention in exchange for the right to exist. But when a movement presents Jewish participation as a problem, the record of Jewish contribution is a devastating answer.

I would have wanted Netanyahu to say:

“To every country willing to work with us, Israel offers a partnership. Bring your researchers, your students, your entrepreneurs, and your ambitions. Let us build projects that improve lives. Let us measure success in problems solved and opportunities created. You will find a people eager to contribute, because contributing is part of how we understand our place in the world.”

And then I would have wanted him to explain what Israelis have continued doing since October 7th — because that is where the argument becomes extraordinary.

After the murder of families in our homes, the slaughter at a music festival, and the taking of hostages, Israel faced a national trauma whose reach cannot be understood through casualty figures alone. In a country of Israel’s size, the distance between a headline and someone you know is painfully short. The grief entered families, workplaces, classrooms, and entire communities.

In the war that followed, Israel confronted threats across seven fronts. Our people were called upon to defend our country while sustaining the life inside it. The same society had to fight, mourn, care for its wounded, support displaced families, and keep functioning.

And Israelis kept going to work.

The significance of that deserves more than a passing compliment about resilience. People continued researching, treating patients, teaching, designing, founding companies, and maintaining international partnerships while carrying a burden that virtually every other country would struggle to comprehend.

The results are measurable. According to the Israel Innovation Authority’s 2026 report, Israeli technology companies raised approximately $14.6 billion in 2025, and high-tech exports reached approximately $85 billion. The report also documents serious pressures, including a decline in domestic research-and-development employment. The achievement is that creation continued despite those strains, with investors and partners continuing to commit to Israeli capabilities.

Behind those figures are people who had every reason to feel exhausted, frightened, or consumed by what our country had endured. We nevertheless kept making things the world wanted and needed.

That is the Israel I wanted the United Nations to hear about: a country that suffered a devastating assault on its life and continued investing in life. A people who carried grief into the working day and still found the strength to create something beyond it. Even after October 7th, even through a war spanning seven fronts, even while parts of the world demanded our isolation.

Imagine what these people could accomplish with more partners and fewer enemies. Imagine what the world could gain if more governments approached Israel with a proposal instead of another denunciation.

We are going to keep building. Jewish history gives us ample reason to believe that, and Israeli life since October 7th has demonstrated it again. The question before the world is whether it wants to build with us, or keep explaining to their own children why they refused.

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