WhatsappPrime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu walked into the United Nations and delivered a message that went far beyond another diplomatic speech:
Israel intends to win.
As delegations from several countries walked out, Netanyahu reminded the world of the warning he delivered from that same podium 14 years ago about Iran’s nuclear program. This time, he argued, Israel had acted rather than waited.
Netanyahu said Israel, together with the United States, had dealt devastating blows to Iran’s military and nuclear capabilities. He pointed to the broader transformation of the region as well: Hamas battered, Hezbollah pummeled and Israel surviving a seven-front war its enemies believed would overwhelm it.
But perhaps the most important part of the speech concerned the historical narrative surrounding Israel itself.
Netanyahu reminded the UN that before the Six-Day War Israel controlled neither Judea and Samaria nor Gaza nor the Golan Heights—and yet Israel’s enemies were still preparing for war against it. The conflict, he argued, therefore cannot simply be explained by what happened in 1967.
October 7 reinforced that lesson. Israel had completely withdrawn its soldiers and civilians from Gaza in 2005. Eighteen years later, Hamas led the invasion of southern Israel and carried out the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
Netanyahu also challenged the international obsession with so-called “settler violence,” while acknowledging and condemning vigilantism by Jewish extremists. He contrasted that phenomenon with the thousands of attempted terrorist attacks he said target Israelis in Judea and Samaria each year.
Then Netanyahu returned to something his brother Yoni told him shortly before the Six-Day War.
“We’re going to win. We have no other choice.”
That may ultimately be the defining lesson Israel learned after October 7.
For a small country surrounded by enemies who repeatedly test its willingness to defend itself, victory is not about prestige.
It is about survival.
