Netanyahu takes the U.N. stage facing global isolation and a fight for his political future

TEL AVIV — Even as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pleads his country’s case to the world at the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday, his target audience will likely be closer to home: Israeli voters ahead of next month’s crucial elections.

Netanyahu arrived in New York Thursday for what appears to be a whirlwind trip that will highlight the growing isolation of the U.S. ally over its assault on the Gaza Strip.

With only a handful of diplomatic meetings on the sidelines of the assembly and President Donald Trump’s focus firmly on his summit with China’s Xi Jinping, the prime minister looks set to return to Israel shortly after his address to be back in time for the major Jewish Sukkot holiday on Friday evening.

“I am leaving tonight for New York in order to defend, from the U.N. podium, Israel and IDF soldiers,” the prime minister said in a video Wednesday night before he left. “You hear the terrible lies that are being spread there.”

Netanyahu is likely to address an almost empty chamber as delegates observe an annual tradition of walking out in protest over the conduct of Israel’s war in the Gaza Strip. But that spectacle will likely play well among the premier’s domestic supporters, for whom he has styled himself as a defiant truth-teller standing up for Israel on the global stage.

While much of the world has condemned Israel for the huge loss of civilian life and continuing humanitarian tragedy in Gaza, Netanyahu’s primary domestic challenge comes from an Israeli right-wing who accuses him of not being tough enough in the country’s multi-front war on Iran and its proxy groups.

“The main reason that brings him to the UN General Assembly this time is the opportunity to talk, using the UN microphone, to his voters in Israel, in his polished English, in a speech that of course will be accompanied by exaggerated descriptions of his great achievements,” wrote Efraim Ganor, a political, a strategic affairs expert, wrote in the right-leaning Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv.

The few hints that Netanyahu has given about the subject of his speech have focused on populist, patriotic causes.

In a video posted to social media on Tuesday, Netanyahu took aim at a popular target: New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who had pledged to arrest him for crimes against humanity before later acknowledging that he lacked the jurisdiction to do so.

Appearing to adopt the posture of a professional wrestler and looking straight into the camera, Netanyahu accused the mayor of supporting Hamas — which Mamdani has strenuously denied — and fomenting riots against New York Jews. He added that he would “tell the truth about you” and “tell the truth about our heroic soldiers.”

Asked about his comments, Mamdani told a news conference Tuesday that the Israeli military had killed an 11-year-old boy in a zone deemed safe in Gaza, “so that is what I have to say to his video.”

Netanyahu’s mention of Israel soldiers appears to be a reference to “NAZA,” a documentary made by two Israeli filmmakers in which 24 anonymous Israelis, described as military and intelligence officials, talk about the cynical process by which the country’s military evaluated the need for civilian deaths during the Gaza war.

A popular target that has riled Israeli leaders ahead of the elections, “NAZA” has earned plaudits abroad but condemnation at home.

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Politicians have stumbled over themselves to publicly condemn the documentary in the harshest terms, with some demanding a criminal investigation into the duo and even stripping them of Israeli citizenship.

In another hint on Wednesday night, Netanyahu, who has a history of peppering his general assembly speeches with props, gags and gimmicks, said his speech would include “surprises.”

Last year, he told the audience that his speech was being broadcast into Gaza through massive loudspeakers and streamed to mobile phones so that Israeli hostages trapped in Gaza could hear him speak.

He also wore an oversized QR code on his jacket, encouraging audiences to activate the code to visit a website with a video showing Hamas’s attacks on Israel in October 2023 that killed about 1,200 people and sparked the latest round of fighting. Israel’s subsequent war in Gaza killed more than 75,000 people, according to Palestinian health official

In the years before that, Netanyahu brandished regional maps to make his points. Two years ago, he displayed two maps that showed the “blessing” of Israel’s influence contrasted with the “curse” of Iran’s expanding power.

And in 2012, more than a decade before the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran in what they said was an attempt to keep the Islamic Republic from getting a nuclear weapon, Netanyahu held up a cartoon image of an Iranian nuclear weapon with a “red line” for its maximum enrichment level.