Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered an address before the United Nations General Assembly on Friday in which he vowed to defy international law, gloated about committing mass murder and terrorism, and vowed to continue the Gaza genocide in defiance of world public opinion.

Netanyahu traveled to the United States as his government deliberately subjected the population of Gaza to the worst famine in the world, driving the Palestinians from their land and killing dozens of people every day in its assault on Gaza City.

Netanyahu, who is facing an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court on war crimes charges, traveled to the United States via a jet that flew almost exclusively over water. He deliberately avoided the airspace of Greece, Italy, France, and Spain, where he risked apprehension and extradition to face trial. Once inside US airspace, Netanyahu received the full protection of the Trump administration, which has vowed to defy the ICC’s arrest warrant.

The very fact that the United Nations allowed this fascist mass murderer into the building, let alone gave him the rostrum to address the General Assembly, is an indictment of the impotence and complicity of this institution, whose forerunner, the League of Nations, Lenin accurately called a “thieves’ kitchen.”

Outside the United Nations building, thousands of people took part in demonstrations against Netanyahu’s appearance. Inside the hall, the vast majority of delegates walked out, leaving Netanyahu speaking to a mostly empty room.

But the American delegation sought to make up for the walkout by loudly cheering and applauding Netanyahu’s boasts about the people he has killed and his vows to kill more.

Netanyahu’s address was largely framed as a response to the ICC’s war crimes charges against him, as well as the finding this month by the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza.

The speech was not an attempt to rebut or refute these charges. Instead, Netanyahu’s 45-minute rant was a variation on the theme, “I am guilty of war crimes and plan to commit more. What are you going to do about it?”

He rattled off a list of political leaders and even scientists whose murder he had commissioned. “Half the Houthi leadership in Yemen – gone. Yahya Sinwar in Gaza – gone. Hassan Nasrallah in Lebanon – gone. The Assad regime in Syria – gone… And as for Iran’s top military commanders and its top nuclear scientists… Well, they’re gone too.”

Netanyahu also boasted of masterminding a terrorist attack that wounded over 4,000 people in Lebanon in September 2024 using exploding pagers and walkie-talkies. “You remember those beepers, the pagers, we paged Hezbollah, and believe me, they got the message. And thousands of terrorists… dropped to the ground.”

To the accusations that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, Netanyahu replied, “Would a country committing genocide plead with the civilian population it is supposedly targeting to get out of harm’s way? Would we tell them to get out if we’re trying to commit genocide?”

Netanyahu’s ridiculous argument amounts to, “We’re not committing genocide because we’re committing ethnic cleansing.”

The impudence and absurdity reached even greater heights. Protesting that he was nothing like Adolf Hitler, Netanyahu declared, “We’re trying to get them out… Did the Nazis ask the Jews to leave?”

The answer to this question is “yes.” Prior to the implementation of the “final solution” in 1941 it was the official policy of the German Nazi Party to encourage the emigration of Jews from Germany. In fact, more than half of Germany’s Jews had emigrated from Germany before the start of the Holocaust due to Nazi policies aimed at forcing the Jewish population to flee.

In other words, ethnic cleansing and genocide went hand in hand in Nazi Germany, just as it goes hand in hand in Israel’s rampage through Gaza.

Responding to the allegation by both the ICC and the UN Commission of Inquiry that Israel is using starvation as a weapon of war, Netanyahu declared, “Israel is accused of deliberately, deliberately starving the people of Gaza, when Israel is deliberately feeding the people of Gaza.”

The Gaza famine is the most rapid decline in the food security of a population ever recorded and the first modern famine outside the African continent. It takes place in an enclave whose borders are completely controlled by Israel, the occupying power, with tons of food stationed outside its borders, waiting to be allowed in.

The method in Netanyahu’s statements is simply to take the war crime that Israel is flagrantly committing before the eyes of the the world and assert the opposite: that instead of starving the Palestinians, Israel is feeding them.

It is a variant of Adolf Hitler’s theory of the “big lie,” which Hitler asserted is believed because the audience “would not believe others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” But in Netanyahu’s case, nobody is expected to believe the lie, and all that remains is the impudence.

There was one part of Netanyahu’s speech, however, in which he told the truth. Addressing the leaders of the imperialist powers, Netanyahu declared, “You know deep down that Israel is fighting your fight.” He continued, “This past June, when Israel struck Iran’s nuclear facilities, German Chancellor Mertz admitted the truth. He said, ‘Israel is doing the dirty work for all of us.’”

Here, Netanyahu has the imperialist leaders dead to rights. Not only the United States, but also France, the UK, and Germany have all funded and armed the genocide in Gaza and have publicly defended Israel’s illegal war of extirpation. Whatever tactical criticisms they may have of Israel, they are all complicit in the vast crimes Netanyahu has committed. To the extent that they now criticize one or another action by the Israeli government, it is to cover up this fundamental fact.

The protests taking place outside the UN on Friday were only a partial expression of the overwhelming opposition that exists among workers and young people all over the world to the Gaza genocide, which is only growing with the death toll.

We are rapidly approaching two years of mass murder in Gaza, and certain lessons must be drawn.

The first and most important is the total futility of appealing to imperialist governments and international institutions to stop the genocide. All of the imperialist governments are implicated in the Gaza bloodbath, which is part of a globe-spanning war by the imperialist powers to subjugate the world. The targets of this global war are not only in the Middle East, but also in Russia and China.

The same governments that are sponsoring the Gaza genocide are also presiding over vast attacks on the social and democratic rights of the working class. There is a deep-rooted connection between the criminality of the Gaza genocide, whose foremost international sponsor is Trump, and the efforts by the White House to establish a dictatorship in the United States.

The movement against war must be fused with the struggle to defend the social and democratic rights of the working class in a common effort to end the capitalist system, which is the root cause of imperialist barbarism and dictatorship.