Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu took the podium on Thursday at the United Nations (UN) General Assembly in New York, speaking at the UN headquarters just a day after Palestinian Authority (PA) Chairman Mahmoud Abbas announced he was no longer bound by the 1994 Oslo Accords from the same platform.
He began his speech by saying: “After three days of listening to world leaders praising the deal with Iran, I begin my speech by saying, ladies and gentlemen, check your enthusiasm at the door. This deal doesn’t make peace more likely. By fueling Iran’s aggressions by billions of dollars in sanctions relief it makes war more likely.
“In the last six months alone, since the nuclear deal’s framework was announced in Lausanne, Iran has boosted supply of devastating weapons to Syria; sent more soldiers into Syria to prop up Assad’s brutal regime; shipped weapons to Houthi rebels in Yemen, including another shipment just a few days ago. Hezbollah smuggled in SA-22 missiles to down our planes.”
“Iran smuggled to Hezbollah missiles to accurately hit any target in Israel; aided Hamas and Islamic Jihad with armed drones in Gaza and the West Bank. In the Golan Heights, Iranian operatives recently fired rockets on Israel. Israel will continue to respond forcefully to any attacks to it from Syria, and will block transfer of weapons to Hezbollah through Syria.”
“The days when the Jewish people remained passive in the face of genocidal enemies… those days are over!” he asserted.
“I know that preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons remains the official policy of the international community,” he added. “But no one should question Israel’s determination to defend itself against those who seek our destruction. For in every generation there were those who rose up to destroy our people. Babylonia and Rome; Inquisition and expulsion; in modern times – pogroms and Holocaust. Yet the Jewish people persevered.
“And now another regime has arisen, swearing to destroy Israel. That regime would be wise to consider this: I stand here today representing Israel, a country 67 years young, but the nation state of a people nearly 4,000 years old. Yet the empires of Babylonia and Rome are not represented in this hall of nations. Neither is the “Thousand year Reich.” Those seemingly invincible empires are gone, but the people of Israel lives. Am Yisrael Chai!”
“I wish I could take comfort in the claim that this deal blocks Iran’s path to nuclear weapons, but I can’t, because it doesn’t,” Netanyahu continued. “This deal does place several constraints on Iran’s nuclear program, and rightly so. Because the international community recognizes that iran is so dangerous.
But here’s the catch: under the deal, if Iran becomes more dangerous, the most important constraints will still be lifted by year 10 and by year 15. That will place a militant Islamic terror regime weeks away from having enough fissile material for an entire arsenal of bombs. That just doesn’t make any sense.”
“The UN won’t help peace by trying to impose solutions or by encouraging Palestinian rejectionism,” he stated. “And the UN should do one more thing: the UN should finally rid itself of the obsessive bashing of Israel.
Here’s just one absurd example of this obsession: in four years of horrific violence in Syria, more than a quarter of a million peple have lost their lives. That’s more than 10 times the number of Israelis and Palestinians combined who have lost their lives in a century of conflict beween us. Yet last year this assembly adopted 20 resolutions against Israel. Count them: twenty! Talk about disproportion.”
‘Decisive rebuttal’
Sources close to Netanyahu said Wednesday night that his speech was to be a decisive rebuttal to Abbas’s lies, in which the PLO chairman accused Israel of breaking international law and agreements, and announced the PA no longer is committed to the very accords that incidentally created the PA.
Just after Abbas’s “bombshell” UN speech on Wednesday, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) flag was raised at the UN headquarters for the first time ever.
Ironically, the PLO had its status as an internationally recognized terrorist organization removed in the Oslo Accords – the same Accords that Abbas had just minutes earlier renounced.
