The most instructive moment of Benjamin Netanyahu’s appearance at the United Nations happened before he said a word. When the Israeli prime minister walked to the rostrum on Thursday, scores of delegates stood up and left, many of the visible seats sat empty thereafter, and the hall filled with a mix of cheers and boos. The walkout was not spontaneous. The Palestinian Mission to the UN had urged the 193 member nations to pack the hall with staff and “collectively walk out of the assembly” once Netanyahu was announced, to show that “no one is willing to aid, abet, or be complicit in its genocide and war crimes and illegal occupation.” Netanyahu’s answer was to raise the bid: “If there are any other moral cowards who haven’t yet left this hall, please do so now.”

The speech that followed was defiance at industrial scale. Allegations that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza are “the biggest lie of the century,” Netanyahu said. “Here’s the simple truth. Israel didn’t commit genocide. Israel prevented genocide,” he went on, calling the Israel Defense Forces “the most moral army in the world” and pointing to its facilitation of food aid and polio vaccination campaigns. For the record, the genocide case brought by South Africa sits before the International Court of Justice, which has ordered provisional measures but — as Time noted — has not ruled on whether genocide occurred; the case is pending.

He devoted much of the podium to Iran, the target of the war that began in late February with US and Israeli strikes. “Devastating Iran’s nuclear facilities was hard. It was very hard to do,” he said. “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.” He thanked Donald Trump — Israel has “no greater partner” — and, in defense, argued that Israel was “defending many of the countries whose delegates just left this hall,” adding, per the Associated Press, that some of those countries’ leaders “even thank us privately for taking out Iran’s nukes.” Netanyahu, who likes a prop, held up a pager, recalling the September 17, 2024 operation in which Israel remotely detonated thousands of pagers distributed to Hezbollah in Lebanon, wounding more than 3,000 people and killing 12, including two children. He also reminded the assembly that about 1,200 people were killed in the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack — “equal to 40,000 innocent Americans slaughtered in less than 24 hours,” he said, or 16 times the nearly 3,000 who died on 9/11.

Then came the domestic portion. Netanyahu attacked New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani as “the antisemitic mayor of New York,” accused him of supporting Hamas and of inciting riots against New York Jews, and said that “since you were elected mayor of this city, many Jews no longer feel safe.” Mamdani has denied supporting Hamas; he accused Netanyahu of repeating “baseless lies meant to sanitize his genocide of Palestinians,” adding that no lie changes the fact that Netanyahu faces an International Criminal Court arrest warrant alleging war crimes and crimes against humanity. The warrant, issued in November 2024, cites allegations including “starvation as a method of warfare.” Some context, per Time: anti-Jewish incidents accounted for 57% of all reported hate crimes in New York in 2025 according to NYPD data, while Mamdani has proposed raising the city’s hate-crime prevention budget from $3 million to $26 million and kept a dedicated Mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism. Mamdani had called on federal authorities to execute the ICC warrant after acknowledging the city lacked the authority to do it. Netanyahu also accused Britain and France of hypocrisy on colonialism (“For God’s sakes, they invented the term”), accused Qatar of spending billions on universities and Al Jazeera to “brainwash young minds to hate Israel, America and the West,” and called Turkey a “super-spreader of antisemitic lies.”

One procedural point deserves attention, because it shows how the rules of the room now work. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas did not address the assembly from the podium. The United States denied visas to him and other senior Palestinian officials for the second consecutive year, accusing the PA of “glorifying terrorism,” so Abbas spoke by prerecorded video from Ramallah. He said the Palestinian people face “one of the most dangerous times” in their history, accused Israel of “ethnic cleansing” and a “genocidal war,” and said Israel “has targeted all of the basic necessities of life”; he demanded full UN membership for Palestine. As he spoke, the Israeli delegation’s seats sat empty. Each side, you will notice, has learned the choreographed absence.

Outside the building, the street theater came with an arrest sheet. Roughly 200 demonstrators gathered near the UN, according to CBC, at a rally organized by Jewish Voice for Peace, chanting “Stop arming Israel, let Gaza live” and “Stop arming Israel, let Iran live.” The numbers detained vary by outlet: Al Jazeera reported more than 100 people arrested, Euronews put it at around 100 reportedly detained, and CBC counted more than two dozen. The names are consistent, though: Oscar winner Susan Sarandon, 79, photographed in handcuffs in a shirt reading “fund people not bombs”; Emmy winner Hannah Einbinder, 31; Democratic congressional candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier; and New York City Council member Chi Osse. An NYPD spokesperson told AFP that officers responded to an “unscheduled demonstration” blocking an intersection, that Community Affairs officers warned participants to leave, and that “multiple individuals who didn’t comply were taken into custody.” One attendee, a New Yorker named Jose, told Al Jazeera: “He’s a war criminal, and we don’t tolerate that.” All this lands a month before Israeli legislative elections widely read as a referendum on the October 7 security failures.

And then there is the week’s quieter accountability story, which unfolded a few days earlier and got less attention. On the eve of Yom Kippur, Israeli President Isaac Herzog pardoned Elor Azaria, the soldier convicted of killing Abdel Fattah al-Sharif in Hebron in 2016. The facts of that case, per CNN, are unusually well documented: a video showed Azaria, a combat medic, walking up to al-Sharif — a Palestinian suspected in a stabbing attack who was lying injured and incapacitated on the street — and shooting him in the head. The military called the shooting a “grave breach of IDF values, conduct and standards of military operations.” Azaria faced up to 20 years in prison, was sentenced to 18 months, and ultimately served nine. The pardon expunges his criminal record entirely. Herzog said it would let Azaria “continue with his life,” citing “the circumstances, the length of time passed, and the sorrow Azaria expressed.”

Note that last clause, because the army disputes it. In a July letter obtained in response to the pardon request, IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir wrote that “the request should not be granted,” stating that Azaria had never expressed sorrow or remorse, had taken no responsibility, and had shown no “specific personal circumstances of significant weight” to justify clemency. Herzog’s stated rationale — the sorrow — is thus contradicted in writing by the chief of staff, whose army did not comment after the pardon. Former Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon, whose resignation the case once helped cause, put it bluntly: the soldier never claimed self-defense but said he fired “because he deserved to die,” and, addressing Herzog, “You decided to erase the criminal record without hearing from the soldier he takes responsibility or regrets his actions.” Defense Minister Israel Katz, naturally, called the pardon a “humane and appropriate decision.”

Lay the week flat and look at it. The ICC’s warrant cannot be served by the city where the UN sits, and everyone involved concedes that. The ICJ’s genocide case will not conclude for years. The assembled nations of the world can register their verdict only by leaving their own seats vacant. And at home, the one fully completed act of accountability for a killing on camera — a conviction the military asked to preserve — has been erased as a pre-holiday courtesy. A prime minister who demands that the world hold other people to account is, it turns out, easy to find in New York. Working enforcement mechanisms are considerably harder to spot.