Full text: Netanyahu’s address at the U.N. General Assembly

The following is a transcript of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address during the 81st U.N. General Assembly in New York City, on Sept. 24, released by the prime minister’s office. It has been lightly edited for style.

“Mr. President,

Before I begin, just a quick announcement:

If there are any other moral cowards who haven’t yet left this hall—please do so now. Thank you very much.

Ladies and gentlemen,

Fourteen years ago, I stood on this podium, and I drew a red line.

I vowed to prevent Iran’s murderous dictatorship from developing atomic bombs, nuclear weapons aimed at destroying Israel, nuclear weapons that could threaten the entire world.

That’s exactly what we did.

Now let me say something that might surprise you.

Devastating Iran’s nuclear facilities was hard. It was very hard to do. But for me, it was one of the easiest decisions I’ve ever had to make as prime minister. Because if we hadn’t done it, we’d all be dead.

Now, you want to hear the ultimate irony?

In defending itself, Israel is also defending many of the countries whose delegates just left this hall!

In fact, I want you to know that many of their leaders even thank us privately for taking out Iran’s nukes.

It’s hard to imagine more mind-blowing hypocrisy, but that’s exactly what it is.

This isn’t the first time we were faced with the threat of annihilation.

On June 5, 1967, Israel was surrounded by enemies who openly swore to destroy us.

We weren’t then in Judea Samaria, the heart of the historic homeland of the Jewish people. We weren’t in Gaza. We weren’t on the Golan Heights.

And Mr. al-Sharaa, you should know the Jews have been on the Golan Heights since the days of Moses. You can read it in the Bible.

At that time, on the eve of the Six-Day War in 1967, we weren’t in any of these places. We were on a tiny sliver of land—we still are—that is equal to about one third of one percent of the landmass of the entire Arab world.

Yet they accuse Israel of colonialism. Some colonialism.

And who’s accusing us? Among them are people in Britain and in France. For God’s sake, they invented the term. Their colonies braced the entire globe.

Colonialism…Give us a break… Another lie.

Yet at the time, on this tiny patch of Earth, no West Bank, no Gaza, no Golan Heights, just the very survival of this one and only Jewish state, because this is what this conflict is about. It’s not about territories; it’s about a Jewish state at any boundaries. And yet, at the time, we were threatened with annihilation by three Arab armies that were about to invade us.

You know what Israelis were doing at the time? They were digging mass graves in preparation of thousands and thousands of casualties. In preparation to bury our dead.

At the time, I was an Israeli high school student in Philadelphia.

Five days before the war broke out, I flew back to Israel.

I found a country in total blackout.

Israel braced for impact.

I flew back to see my brother Jonathan, Yoni.

He was a 21-year-old paratroop officer. And like the rest of the army, his unit was already mobilized. I went to find him. I was told the paratroops are in camps in the orchards, the orange groves around Ramle. So I went there, and I asked some soldiers, “Do you know where Yoni Netanyahu is?” “No.” Then one guy said, “Oh, you mean the young guy? Yeah, he’s in the next grove.”

So I went there, and suddenly, at the end of a long row of trees, I saw my brother.

He was absolutely shocked to see me.

“Bibi,” he said, “what are you doing here?”

We ran, we hugged each other.

Over a cup of makeshift military coffee, I asked him the question that was on my mind, the question that was on everybody’s mind.

“So, Yoni,” I said, “what’s going to happen?”

He paused. And then he said something I’ll never forget.

“We’re going to win,” he said. “We have no other choice.”

I remember those words as if it was yesterday.

We’re going to win. We have no other choice.

And then we did.

Nine years later, Palestinian terrorists hijacked a passenger plane headed for Israel. They took it to Entebbe, Uganda.

Like the Nazis, the terrorists selected the Jewish passengers—men, women, children, babies. They threatened to kill them all if Israel did not release Palestinian terrorists.

And then, on July 4, 1976, the bicentennial of the United States, in one of the most dramatic rescue missions in modern times, Yoni led his brave soldiers to the heart of Africa.

Miraculously, they rescued 103 Jewish hostages and brought them all home, every single one of them.

My brother, the commander of the storming party, was the only soldier killed in this mission.

I want to thank Uganda again for recently erecting a statue of Yoni in the place where he fell.

My friends,

Yoni’s words are as true today as they were more than half a century ago.

We’re going to win. We have no other choice.

At no time was this demonstrated more clearly than on Oct. 7, 2023—the darkest day in Israel’s history.

On that horrific day, thousands of Palestinian terrorists stormed into Israel from Gaza.

I want you to know there wasn’t a single Israeli in Gaza at the time. Not a civilian, not a soldier. Not one!

It didn’t matter one bit.

The Hamas terrorists committed the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.

They went house to house, shooting Israeli civilians point-blank. They did so with fiendish glee. With sadistic joy, they live-streamed as they murdered.

And who did they murder? The very Israelis—their neighbors—who gave them jobs, who picked up Palestinian children at the Gaza border and drove them to Israeli hospitals for cancer treatment, and then brought them back.

Can you imagine such monstrosity?

These Hamas monsters, they slaughtered Holocaust survivors. They burned babies alive in front of their parents. They beheaded our men. They brutally raped our women, and then they murdered them.

Altogether, they slaughtered 1,200 Israelis that day.

I want to give you an idea of what this means for a country of 10 million. Proportionately, this is equal to 40,000 innocent Americans slaughtered in less than 24 hours. That’s 16 times 9/11. Sixteen 9/11s that occurred not very far from here.

On that darkest of days, our enemies expected us to collapse.

Well, we didn’t collapse. Instead, we rose and fought like lions.

For the past three years, our heroic soldiers have fought day in and day out in a seven-front war!

Do you know any other country the size of New Jersey capable of fighting a seven-front war? And for three years?

Seven fronts: Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Iran, militias in Iraq, militias in Syria, Palestinian terrorists in Judea Samaria. They all ganged up on us to wipe us off the face of the Earth.

They failed.

Because instead of collapsing, we delivered crippling blows to all of them.

With our great American friends, we crushed Iran’s army, navy, air force and nuclear facilities.

Israel hammered Hamas. We pummeled Hezbollah.

Remember the beepers? Well, I can tell you this: Hezbollah certainly remembers them.

Guess what happened to the bulk of Hezbollah’s vast arsenal of 150,000 ballistic missiles and rockets, all aimed at our civilians?

They’re gone.

Hezbollah’s leaders—dead. Their spirit—broken.

The arch-terrorists, the worst mass murderers on Earth, not only killing Israelis, killing Americans, killing Brits, killing citizens of dozens of countries—Khamenei, Dief, Sinwar, Haniyeh and Nasrallah—and thousands of other terrorists who sought to destroy us—they’re all gone too.

The remaining terrorists desperately try to regroup. Every day they try to murder our people.

And in particular, they try to murder our people in our historic homeland, in Judea. By the way, that’s where the word Jew comes from. Judea—that’s our land. They try to murder us, thousands of attempts per year on families, peaceful families driving along the roads. They shoot at pregnant women; they shoot entire families.

Of course, none of this is covered in the international press or on social media. None of it. What they cover is a handful of juvenile delinquents, about 150 in number, who throw stones, who chop down olive trees. Occasionally, they light some fires. I can’t stand that. I won’t stand for vigilantism. We’re a country of law. So we put our Shin Bet on them. But that’s what they call settler violence. And the number of casualties a year? Maybe two or three. In the total time this has been discussed, maybe two or three dead. Compared to the thousands of terrorist attacks against the peaceful settlers, honorable people, law-abiding people. What a distortion. It’s an obsession. I hear this discussion here? Leaders of countries seriously talk about that. And they say it with such importance. “We can’t stand settler violence.” You don’t know what you’re talking about.

And listen, two days ago… I say this to my colleague Emmanuel Macron. Two days ago, three days ago, a French citizen, Netanel Shukrun, a father of six, was gunned down when he visited a spring with his 16-year-old son. And a Hamas terrorist in Judea and Samaria comes and fires point-blank at him. And the last words he uttered: “Flee, flee, son. Save yourself.”

That was three days ago. Two days ago, in Judea and Samaria, a reserves officer, a reserves soldier, Neria Leiter, was mowed down by a Palestinian terrorist. He is fighting for his life now in a Jerusalem hospital.

I visited the family right before I boarded the plane to come here.

Neria, a father of four, is the son of Yechiel Leiter, our brilliant ambassador to the United States.

Three years ago, Yechiel’s oldest son, Moshe, a father of six, was killed while clearing a booby-trapped building in Gaza.

Yechiel, my brother, your pain is immeasurable.

The entire people of Israel, and many outside of Israel, are praying for Neria’s life.

But despite the pain, despite the agony, we do not give in.

In a recent post before he was attacked, Neria wrote this: “We have no other country. It is a privilege to defend it.”

To Neria, and to all of the heroes of Israel, I pledge a sacred vow:

Your sacrifice will not be in vain. We will continue to defend our state. We will continue to win. Because we have no other choice.

In this battle against the barbarians, we’ve had no greater partner than President Trump.

I thank him for his bold leadership. He boldly confronted an enormous danger to America, Israel and the world.

Decades ago, he understood that if left unchallenged, the fanatic ayatollahs who chant “Death to America! Death to Israel!” would eventually carry out their mad fantasies.

So Israel and America acted together not only to protect ourselves, but to save civilization.

Brave American pilots alongside brave Israeli pilots flew joint missions over the skies of Iran.

America and Israel also worked together to bring back our remaining hostages.

We brought back every last one of them.

You ask, why are we winning?

Yoni said it simply. We have no other choice.

Throughout this long war, our goal never wavered: To win!

To win with unwavering resolve. To win with unrelenting courage. Because this is Israel.

One nation fighting for one future.

Left and right. Young and old. Religious and secular.

Do we have our differences?

Of course we do. Who doesn’t?

But in the critical moments, those moments that shape our destiny, we stand together, because what unites us is so much stronger: our history, our values, our courage.

The courage of our brave people who withstood 1,000 massive ballistic missiles that Iran rained down on our cities, on our civilians.

Ladies and gentlemen,

You’re sitting here, in the General Assembly Hall of the U.N. Do you know what one ton, just one, one-ton ballistic missile would do if it hit this place? It would obliterate the entire compound. In fact, two such missiles would obliterate the U.N.

So you can imagine, think about one thousand gigantic missiles falling from the skies on your cities, on your homes.

I salute the courage of the people of Israel. I salute the courage of our brave soldiers—Jews, Christian, Druze, Muslim. The most moral army in the world, the IDF.

For three years, they have been valiantly fighting a seven-front war.

But there is an eighth front to this war. It’s the war for truth.

It is waged in the world’s media, and most perniciously, in social media.

Several foreign countries have spent untold billions to spread lies about my country.

The first to do so was Qatar.

Decades ago, it started massively funding American universities and toxic media outlets like Al Jazeera. They did the same in Europe, by the way.

Their goal was clear. Brainwash young minds to hate Israel, hate America and hate the West.

This is the same Qatar that hosts the Hamas butchers of Oct. 7.

The latest country to become a super-spreader of antisemitic lies is Turkey. (Recep Tayyip) Erdoğan is a tyrant who also hosts the Hamas terror chiefs.

He has murdered thousands of Kurdish civilians. He denies the Armenian genocide. He jails journalists and opposition leaders. In fact, I think he holds the world record on this, and that’s a tough call. But I think he’s number one.

He illegally occupies Northern Cyprus, an EU member, and he regularly transgresses against Greece, a NATO member.

Now he wants to take over Syria.

That’s not surprising, because he calls for Israel’s destruction almost every single day. He says he’s going to be the ruler of Jerusalem.

No, Sir. You won’t. This is our country, our city, our eternal capital.

Tyrants the world over seek to threaten us; they seek to undermine our resolve with their campaign of lies.

But ultimately, as on the military battlefield, the Jewish People will prevail.

It will take time. It will take time to vanquish the lies. It will take time for the world to acknowledge what is so plain to see. That Hamas used Palestinian civilians as human shields. That it used hospitals, schools and mosques as terrorist command posts. That it stole much of the food we let into Gaza.

While Hamas did everything possible to keep Palestinian civilians in harm’s way, often at gunpoint, Israel did everything possible to get them out of harm’s way.

We sent millions of text messages warning civilians to leave combat areas.

We made millions of phone calls.

We dropped millions of leaflets.

I want to ask you some questions. What genocidal regime gives a million polio vaccinations to the enemy’s population? What genocidal regime enables the distribution of two million tons of food into Gaza? That’s a ton for every person.

Accusing Israel of genocide is the greatest lie of the century.

If you want to know how big a lie, if you want to know how absurd this is, listen to Col. John Spencer. He’s head of Urban Warfare studies at West Point. He’s considered the world’s foremost expert on urban warfare.

I think he’s with us today.

Col. Spencer has studied every urban war from antiquity to modern times, from ancient Greece to Mosul to Gaza.

Here is what Col. Spencer says: “Israel has done more to prevent civilian casualties in war than any other military in history.”

We’ve taken innumerable steps to protect the civilian population. Is this genocide? Of course not. It’s the opposite of genocide.

So to all those spreading these lies about my country and about our brave soldiers, whether they sit in this hall or in the office of the antisemitic mayor of New York City, I say this:

Shame on you.

Shame on you for distorting the facts.

Shame on you for inverting victim and aggressor.

Shame on you for spitting in the face of truth.

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. This isn’t the city we remember. It changed so quickly.

It’s no wonder.

You praised criminals convicted of supporting Hamas.

You count as friends people like Hassan Piker, who said America deserved 9/11.

“America deserved 9/11.” Some friends you have.

You invite into your home a Palestinian journalist who filmed Hamas terrorists beating and torturing Israeli hostages, and later admitted that he refused to publish the videos in order to protect—you guessed it—the terrorists!

Your wife liked a post praising the Oct. 7 massacre.

She liked another post saying Tel Aviv shouldn’t exist.

You refused to condemn any of that.

You falsely and repeatedly accuse Israel of genocide.

Mr. Mamdani, you tried to stop me from coming here; you tried to silence me. You can’t silence me. You can’t silence the truth.

And here’s the simple truth.

Israel didn’t commit genocide. Israel prevented genocide.

And that’s exactly what Mr. Mamdani’s Hamas buddies would have done to us had we not stopped them. They would have killed every last one of us.

The lies you and other antisemites spread about the Jews and the Jewish state have real consequences.

In New York, Jews are threatened on the way to synagogue. Jews have been stabbed in the streets. Jews are demonized. They’re targeted simply for being Jews.

Jews have been murdered in Sydney, Manchester, Montreal, Boulder, Colo.

They’ve been attacked in Los Angeles, London, Paris, Berlin, Washington, D.C.

The antisemites of the world want to terrify our people.

I have news for them.

The days when Jews were defenseless victims marched to the slaughter, those days are over!

Today we have a state. Today we have an army. Today we have a people ready and willing to defend ourselves.

So today I have one message for Jews around the world: Raise your head high. Be proud. Be confident. Don’t be intimidated. Stand up.

And for everyone else who wants to defend truth and justice, join us in standing up to the barbarians who threaten our common civilization.

But I have to be candid with you. Not everyone is standing up. We saw that. Because unlike Israel, there are some, and most recently, especially in Western Europe, who have chosen not to stand up.

The leaders of these countries have chosen to succumb to the antisemitic mobs.

They have chosen weakness. They have chosen appeasement.

We cannot evade the sad truth before us.

Many in the free world are afraid to defend freedom.

I ask them: what will this future, what will this behavior, what will the world hold for you?

The brotherhood of democracies or the Muslim Brotherhood?

How long will it take for you to see that these fanatic jihadists are choking your waterways, your energy supply, your economic lifeline?

I can assure you, ladies and gentlemen, we in Israel do not wait for others to wake up from their moral slumber.

We forge ahead. We seize the future. We pioneer incredible developments in health, agriculture, artificial intelligence—”superior intelligence”. And we bring these amazing innovations to all of humanity.

Israel has never been stronger.

We are not afraid, but I’ll tell you who is afraid.

The Tyrants of Tehran. That’s who.

You know what they’re most afraid of? Their own people.

The brave Iranian people who have sacrificed so much for so long.

The Iranian regime is especially afraid when their people have this. This is a communications device, Starlink, that allows people to access truth, to exercise choice and to exercise freedom of thought and freedom of speech.

That’s why the Iranian regime spends billions of dollars censoring the Internet.

Mr. President, I’m going to leave this device with you so you can give it to the Iranian delegation so when they inevitably defect, they too will be able to freely tell their story on social media.

To the protesters outside, to the hypocritical delegates who left this hall, I ask:

Where were you when the Iranian tyrants butchered and maimed tens of thousands of unarmed Iranian civilians? When they butchered and maimed thousands of their own people? Where were you?

Did you organize mass rallies? Hunger strikes?

Did you protest outside the Iranian mission to the U.N.?

Did you speak out, for that matter, for Christians persecuted in Iran and throughout the Middle East?

No, you didn’t do that. Because you’re phony human-rights protesters.

On Christians, you know that their numbers are plummeting everywhere in the Middle East where they’re being persecuted and hounded, except one place: my country, Israel, where the Christian community is growing, thriving, succeeding.

In fact, you didn’t protest when we left Bethlehem. When it was controlled by us, it was 80-90% Christian, and we gave it to the Palestinian Authority. And today it’s 80-90% Muslim. Everyone, the Christians were shoved out. Did you protest that? Did you speak about that? Nothing. Nada.

And you said nothing about Iran just now. You said nothing about Iran.

But I want to give you the good news.

Despite your silence, despite your hypocrisy, it’s only a matter of time that in Iran something incredible will happen. The power of the people will overcome the people in power.

I want you to listen to my words carefully: One day, and it may not be far away, the Iranian people will be free. Their murderous regime will be toppled by its lies, by its corruption, by its cruelty.

This evil regime will fall, and we will all celebrate that day.

Ladies and gentlemen,

The story of my people, the Jewish people, goes back over 3,000 years.

We speak the same language today that we spoke then.

We live in the same land in which our ancestors lived then: David, Solomon, Isaiah and Jeremiah. That’s our land.

The land of Israel.

Our prophets, our purpose and our people are unique in history.

Our values have inspired humanity for millennia.

The belief in one God. The sanctity of life. The rule of law. Our eternal quest for peace. Our eternal quest for justice.

It is these sacred values that propelled us throughout the ages. It is these sacred values that helped us beat the odds of history.

The great American writer, Mark Twain, said it best 125 years ago. He said it well before the rebirth of the modern Jewish State, well before the great victories of Israel’s soldiers.

Here’s what he said: “The Jew had made a marvelous fight in this world, in all the ages, and has done it with his hands tied behind his back…

The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away… other peoples have sprung up and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out, and they sit in twilight…

The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his spirits, no slowing of his energies…”

Ladies and gentlemen,

Over the centuries, the tyrannies that tried to destroy us failed time and again.

God willing, they’ll continue to fail.

If we muster our courage, if we steel our resolve, we will continue to win.

As the Bible says, netzach Yisrael lo yeshaker, the eternity of Israel will not falter.

And the reason is simple.

We have no other choice.

Thank you all.

Chag Sameach le’Am Yisrael.”