In a 4,000-word speech at the United Nations General Assembly on Friday, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu justified his scorched-earth war in Gaza and, more recently, Lebanon. He also denounced the world body as being hostile towards his country as it faces a continuing existential threat.

Netanyahu cited a draft resolution calling for Israel’s expulsion from the UN and told the sponsoring nations to “check your fanaticism at the door.” He said the UN has singled out his country for criticism, “which continues to be a moral stain on the world body and has made this once-respected institution contemptible in the eyes of decent people everywhere.” The UN, he said, is “a house of darkness” and a “swamp of antisemitic bile” with “an automatic majority willing to demonize the Jewish state for anything.” He said in “this anti-Israel flat-earth society, any false charge, any outlandish allegation can muster a majority.”

The prime minister stated that, since 2014, the UN has passed 174 resolutions condemning Israel but only 73 against all other nations, adding, “What hypocrisy. What a double standard. What a joke.” He said that “until this antisemitic swamp is drained, the UN will be viewed by fair-minded people everywhere as nothing more than a contemptuous farce.”

It was an astonishing – but not unexpected – denunciation of the world body which played a critical role in the creation of the state of Israel.

Jews lived in the land later called Palestine for perhaps 1,000 years and non-Jews, including Arabs, lived there also for a millennium. More recently, the territory, occupied by Jews and Arabs, was ruled by the Ottoman Empire which was defeated in World War 1 and Palestine was handed to Britain as a “protectorate.”

Fierce resistance greeted that decision and Arabs and Jews waged war against the British and each other, demanding independence. Britain in 1947 handed Palestine back to the UN –recently created as successor to the League of Nations–which proposed partitioning the territory. That was unacceptable to the Palestinians, who, despite being the larger population – 1,269,000 Arabs compared to 608,000 Jews–were allotted less territory.

Amidst a civil war, the Jewish leader David Ben-Gurion unilaterally proclaimed Israel as an independent state on May 14, 1948, which President Harry Truman recognized 11 minutes later. The UN followed, adopting a resolution, 37-12, with nine abstentions, on May 11, 1949. Arabs refused to accept that reality – and that is the center of the dispute which has so far lasted 77 years, with the Palestinians still without their own country.

From the beginning, Israel has had to defend itself not only against the Palestinians but also their allies in neighboring Arab states and came perilously close to destruction. But it prevailed, with decisive help from the United States which, since 1948, has provided it with $158 billion in military aid; President Joe Biden continues to do so in the current war, most recently dispatching warships, planes and soldiers to the region to deter aggression by Iran, which Netanyahu deems Israel’s mortal enemy.

Meanwhile, UN-Israel relations have worsened down the years. The General Assembly, as Netanyahu noted, passed scores of resolutions condemning Israel’s actions against the Palestinians that it deemed violate UN principles. But Israel has largely ignored them with impunity because the U.S. has vetoed them 42 times in the Security Council – of a total of 83 times for all countries. Resolutions were directed especially at Israel’s occupation of Palestine and the creation of Jewish settlements in it.

During Israel’s creation, 700,00 Palestinians were expelled by Jewish paramilitaries and, later, its military. Now, three million Palestinians are forced to live in the 2,263-square-mile West Bank and another two million in the 139-square-mile Gaza Strip. Israel has also allowed 150 Jewish settlements to be built in the West Bank, along with 128 “outposts” or unofficial settlements. As a result, 700,000 Jews occupy more than 247,000 acres of Palestinian land and 50,000 homes and other structures were demolished.

Between September 2000 and February 2005, Israel built a 440-mile barrier inside the West Bank which Palestinians have dubbed the “Wall of Apartheid.” It did so after expropriating nine percent of Palestinian land, cutting off 25,000 Palestinians from the rest of the territory.

The International Court of Justice (ICJ), the main UN judicial arm, whose role incudes settling legal disputes between states, has ruled that “Israel is under an obligation to return the land, orchards, olive groves and the immovable properties seized … for the purposes of construction of the wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.”

And, as recently as two weeks ago, the General Assembly adopted a resolution demanding Israel “brings to an end without delay its unlawful presence” in the “Occupied Palestinian Territory.” The resolution, with 124 nations voting in favor, 14 against and 43 abstaining, calls on Israel “to comply with international law and withdraw its military forces, immediately cease all new settlement activity, evacuate all settlers from occupied land, and dismantle parts of the separation wall it constructed inside the occupied West Bank,” according to a UN press statement.

Netanyahu, in his speech, called attention to Hamas’ invasion last Oct. 7 in graphic terms, saying the invaders “burst into Israel in pickup trucks and on motorcycles, and they committed unimaginable atrocities. They savagely murdered 1,200 people. They raped and mutilated women. They beheaded men. They burned babies alive. They burned entire families alive–babies, children, parents, grandparents, in scenes reminiscent of the Nazi Holocaust. Hamas kidnapped 251 people from dozens of different countries, dragging them into the dungeons of Gaza.”

Such acts must be condemned unequivocally but Netanyahu did not ac- knowledge the consequences of his “measured military operations” for Palestinians who had nothing to do with the Hamas invasion. More than 40,000 have been killed in the Gaza Strip, where Hamas is based, and 92,000 injured, CNN reported, citing the Gaza health ministry while acknowledging it could not independently verify those numbers. Most of the dead were reported to be women and children and entire families have been killed.

Netanyahu, instead, cited the suffering which Jews have had to endured down the centuries of exile in various countries. “After generations in which our people were slaughtered, remorselessly butchered, and no one raised a finger in our defense, we now have a state. We now have a brave army, an army of incomparable courage, and we are defending ourselves.”

But it is against the background of more than 50 years of occupation that Hamas’ atrocities must be judged, though not excused. It should be a matter of great sadness that the government of a people who have suffered are now being viewed as inflicting suffering on others on a scale that has been denounced in many parts of the world – and not because of hatred for Jews.

Michael Lynk, the UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights of Palestinians since the occupation, stated in a 2022 report that “apartheid is being practiced by Israel in the occupied Palestinian territory.” He used the word that describes the racist policies of the “white” minority regime which ruled majority “black” South Africa for more than 40 years. Lynk also spoke of “a deeply discriminatory dual legal and political system that privileges the 700,000 Israeli Jewish settlers living in the 300 illegal Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.”

Nor did Netanyahu acknowledge at the UN that, as prime minister, he was ultimately responsible for the security breach which facilitated the Hamas invasion. And he did not mention that he has a personal interest in prolonging the conflict. He faces charges of breach of trust, accepting bribes and fraud and will likely be arrested if he resigns or his government collapses, which will happen if he defies the demands of the hardline politicians. A few of them, ignoring their own history, have been calling for genocide against the Palestinians.