RSS
Netanyahu touts prospects for an agreement with Saudi Arabia — and possibly the Palestinians — in UN speech
(JTA) — Benjamin Netanyahu used his address to the United Nations to tout the prospect of a diplomatic agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia, and to broach a topic that he has previously downplayed: Israeli-Palestinian peace.
The Israeli prime minister also used the end of his 25-minute speech to herald the benefits — and warn of the dangers — of artificial intelligence, largely reprising what he told tech mogul Elon Musk in a live streamed conversation earlier in the week.
And he did not mention one burning issue that has preoccupied Israeli politics — and led to civil strife — all year: his effort to weaken Israel’s Supreme Court. Opponents of that judicial overhaul plan have been gathering all week in New York City to protest Netanyahu, and demonstrated outside the United Nations on Friday morning.
In the past, Netanyahu has used the address to the U.N. General Assembly to warn of the threat posed by a nuclear Iran — once famously brandishing a picture of a cartoon bomb to show how close the Iranians were to obtaining a nuclear weapon. He warned of Iran’s dangers on Friday again, and also brandished a prop.
But this time, the visual aid was meant to spread a more optimistic message — demonstrating the growing number of Middle Eastern countries with which Israel has signed normalization agreements.
“Peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia will truly create a new Middle East,” Netanyahu said, borrowing a phrase that the late Shimon Peres, one of Netanyahu’s former rivals, had used to discuss Israel-Palestinian peace.
Netanyahu added, “Now as the circle of peace expands, I believe that a real path towards a genuine peace with our Palestinian neighbors can finally be achieved.”
The speech came as President Joe Biden’s administration has prioritized brokering an agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia, something Netanyahu has long sought. That agreement would likely require Israel to make concessions to the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, but it remains unclear what they would be.
As he has in the past, Netanyahu sought in the speech to turn upside down what had long been the conventional wisdom — that Israeli-Palestinian peace must be a predicate for a broader peace in the Middle East. Israel’s 2020 normalization agreements with four Arab countries, called the Abraham Accords, disproved that theory, he said.
“For years, my approach to peace was rejected by the so-called experts. Well, they were wrong,” he said. “The Abraham Accords heralded the dawn of a new age of peace.”
While holding his map, Netanyahu used a red marker to draw a potential trade corridor from India to Europe, with Saudi Arabia and Israel as hubs — a plan proposed by Biden that Netanyahu has enthusiastically endorsed.
“We will not only bring down barriers between Israel and our neighbors, we will build a new corridor of peace and prosperity that connects Asia through the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Israel to Europe,” he said. “This is an extraordinary change, a monumental change and another pivot of history.”
Palestinian demands have featured prominently in the discussions surrounding a possible Saudi-Israeli deal. A day before Netanyahu spoke to the United Nations, Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas in his speech said that peace with the Palestinians was a prerequisite for a broader peace. This year, Saudi leadership helped organize a side conference at the United Nations aimed at reviving the establishment of a Palestinian state as a realistic goal.
And according to the White House readout of Biden’s meeting with Netanyahu on Wednesday, the president told Netanyahu that it was essential to preserve prospects for Palestinian statehood, particularly in the face of escalating Israeli-Palestinian violence this year. The president called on both sides to refrain from “unilateral measures,” which includes Israel halting the West Bank settlement expansion championed by Netanyahu’s far-right partners.
Netanyahu opposes the establishment of an independent Palestinian state, and has often cast Israeli-Palestinian relations as a problem to be managed rather than solved. His far-right coalition partners vehemently oppose Palestinian statehood and have said they would bring down the government if he concedes anything significant to the Palestinians. On the map he displayed, the borders of Israel included all of the West Bank as well as Gaza, the Palestinian coastal territory Israel ceded in 2005.
Netanyahu made clear in his speech that he does not believe the Palestinian leadership is ready for peace, condemning in particular a recent speech by Abbas that was widely decried as antisemitic.
“For peace to prevail, the Palestinians must stop spewing Jew hatred, and finally reconcile themselves to the Jewish state,” he said. “By that I mean not only to the existence of the Jewish state, but to the right of the Jewish people to have a state of their own in their historic homeland, the land of Israel.”
But Friday’s speech still marked a shift, in projecting an Israeli-Palestinian deal as a possible outcome of normalization with other Arab countries. He said the word “Palestinian” more than a dozen times throughout the speech.
“There are many hurdles on the path to peace,” he said. “But I’m committed to doing everything I can to overcome these hurdles, to forge a better future for Israel and all the peoples in our region.”
Netanyahu devoted the last six minutes of the speech to artificial intelligence, a topic at the center of his discussions earlier this week with Musk, the owner of X, the platform previously known as Twitter. Netanyahu said it was critical to seize control of the direction the technology takes before it is too late, repeating arguments he made in his conversation with Musk.
“The disruption of democracy, the manipulation of minds, the decimation of jobs, the proliferation of crime, and the hacking of all the systems that facilitate modern life — yet even more disturbing, is the potential eruption of AI driven wars,” he said. “Behind this, perhaps, looms an even greater threat, once the stuff of science fiction: that self-taught machines could eventually control humans instead of the other way around.”
He called for international cooperation to address the threat posed by A.I.
“We must do so quickly,” he said. “And we must do so together. We must ensure that the promise of an A.I. utopia does not turn into an A.I. dystopia.”
—
The post Netanyahu touts prospects for an agreement with Saudi Arabia — and possibly the Palestinians — in UN speech appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
RSS
New Poll: Majority of NYC Voters ‘Less Likely’ to Support Mamdani Over His Refusal to Condemn ‘Globalize the Intifada’
Zohran Mamdani. Photo: Ron Adar / SOPA Images via Reuters Connect
In a warning sign for the campaign of Democratic nominee for mayor of New York Zohran Mamdani, a majority of city voters in a new poll say the candidate’s hardline anti-Israel stance makes them less likely to vote for him.
In the survey of likely city voters conducted by American Pulse, 52.5 percent said Mamdani’s refusal to condemn the slogan “globalize the intifada” coupled with his backing of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement made them less likely to vote for him in November. Just 31% of city voters polled were more likely to support him because of these positions.
At the same time, a significant share of young New York City voters support Mamdani’s anti-Israel positioning, a striking sign of shifting generational views on Israel and the Palestinian cause.
Nearly half of voters aged 18 to 44 (46 percent) said the State Assembly member’s backing for BDS and “refusal to condemn the phrase ‘globalize the intifada’” made them more likely to support him.
Mamdani, a democratic socialist from Queens, has been under fire for defending “globalize the intifada,” a slogan many Jewish groups associate with incitement to violence against Israel and Jews. While critics argue it glorifies terrorism, supporters claim it’s a call for international solidarity with oppressed peoples, especially Palestinians. Mamdani has also voiced support for BDS, a movement widely condemned by mainstream Jewish organizations as antisemitic for singling out Israel.
The generational divide exposed by the poll comes amid a broader political realignment. Younger progressives across the country are increasingly critical of Israeli policies, especially in the wake of the Gaza war, and more receptive to Palestinian activism. But to many Jewish leaders, Mamdani’s rising support is alarming.
Rabbi David Wolpe, visiting scholar at Harvard University, condemned the phrase with a sarcastic analogy.
“‘Globalize the intifada’ is just a political slogan,” he said. “Like ‘The cockroaches must be exterminated’ was just a housing authority slogan in Rwanda.”
Jewish organizations have reported a surge in antisemitic incidents in New York and across the U.S. since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war last fall. The blending of anti-Zionist slogans with calls for “intifada,” historically linked to violent uprisings, has deepened fears among Jewish communities that traditional red lines are being crossed.
Whether this emerging coalition reshapes New York politics remains to be seen. However, the poll indicates that among younger voters, views that were once considered fringe are quickly moving into the mainstream.
The post New Poll: Majority of NYC Voters ‘Less Likely’ to Support Mamdani Over His Refusal to Condemn ‘Globalize the Intifada’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
Report: Jews Targeted at June’s Pride Month Events
A Jewish gay pride flag. Photo: Twitter.
The research division of the Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM) released a report on Wednesday detailing incidents of hate against Jews which took place last month during demonstrations in celebration of LGBTQ rights and identity.
Incidents reported by the group include:
- At a Pride march in Wales, the activists Cymru Queers for Palestine chose to block the path and show a sign that said “Profiting from genocide,” an attempt to link the event’s sponsors — such as Amazon — to the war in Gaza.
- A Dublin Pride march saw the participation of the Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign, which labeled Israel a “genocidal entity.”
- In Toronto at a late June Pride march, demonstrators again attacked organizers with a sign declaring, “Pride partners with genocide.”
CAM also identified a recurring narrative deployed against Israel by some far-left activists: so-called “pinkwashing,” a term which the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions (BDS) movement calls “an Israeli government propaganda strategy that cynically exploits LGBTQIA+ rights to project a progressive image while concealing Israel’s occupation and apartheid policies oppressing Palestinians.”
The report notes that at a Washington DC Pride event in early June Medea Benjamin, cofounder of activist group Code Pink and a regular of anti-war protests, wore a pair of goofy, oversized sunglasses and a shirt in her signature pink with the phrase “you can’t pinkwash genocide.”
Other incidents CAM recorded showed the injection of anti-Israel sentiment into Pride events.
A musical group canceled a performance at an interfaith service in Brooklyn, claiming the hosting synagogue had a “public alignment with pro-Israel political positions.” In San Francisco before the yearly Trans March, a Palestine group said in its announcement of its participation, “Stop the war on Iran and the genocide of Palestine, stop the war on immigrants and attacks on trans people.”
CAM notes that this “queers for Palestine” sentiment is not new, pointing to a 2017 event wherein “organizers of the Chicago Dyke March infamously removed participants who were waving a Pride flag adorned with a Star of David on the grounds that the symbol ‘made people feel unsafe.’”
In February, the Israel Defense Forces shared with the New York Post documents it had recovered demonstrating that Hamas had tortured and executed members it suspected of homosexuality and other moral offenses in conflict with Islamist ideology.
Amit Benjamin, who is gay and a first sergeant major in the IDF, said during a visit to New York City for Pride month that “All the ‘queers for Gaza’ need to open their eyes. Hamas kills gays … kills lesbians … queers cannot exist in Gaza.”
The post Report: Jews Targeted at June’s Pride Month Events first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
IAEA pulls inspectors from Iran as standoff over access drags on
IAEA chief Rafael Grossi at the agency’s headquarters in Vienna, Austria, June 23, 2025. REUTERS/Elisabeth Mandl/File Photo
The UN nuclear watchdog said on Friday it had pulled its last remaining inspectors from Iran as a standoff over their return to the country’s nuclear facilities bombed by the United States and Israel deepens.
Israel launched its first military strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites in a 12-day war with the Islamic Republic three weeks ago. The International Atomic Energy Agency’s inspectors have not been able to inspect Iran’s facilities since then, even though IAEA chief Rafael Grossi has said that is his top priority.
Iran’s parliament has now passed a law to suspend cooperation with the IAEA until the safety of its nuclear facilities can be guaranteed. While the IAEA says Iran has not yet formally informed it of any suspension, it is unclear when the agency’s inspectors will be able to return to Iran.
“An IAEA team of inspectors today safely departed from Iran to return to the Agency headquarters in Vienna, after staying in Tehran throughout the recent military conflict,” the IAEA said on X.
Diplomats said the number of IAEA inspectors in Iran was reduced to a handful after the June 13 start of the war. Some have also expressed concern about the inspectors’ safety since the end of the conflict, given fierce criticism of the agency by Iranian officials and Iranian media.
Iran has accused the agency of effectively paving the way for the bombings by issuing a damning report on May 31 that led to a resolution by the IAEA’s 35-nation Board of Governors declaring Iran in breach of its non-proliferation obligations.
IAEA chief Rafael Grossi has said he stands by the report. He has denied it provided diplomatic cover for military action.
Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi said on Thursday Iran remained committed to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
“[Grossi] reiterated the crucial importance of the IAEA discussing with Iran modalities for resuming its indispensable monitoring and verification activities in Iran as soon as possible,” the IAEA said.
The US and Israeli military strikes either destroyed or badly damaged Iran’s three uranium enrichment sites. But it was less clear what has happened to much of Iran’s nine tonnes of enriched uranium, especially the more than 400 kg enriched to up to 60% purity, a short step from weapons grade.
That is enough, if enriched further, for nine nuclear weapons, according to an IAEA yardstick. Iran says its aims are entirely peaceful, but Western powers say there is no civil justification for enriching to such a high level, and the IAEA says no country has done so without developing the atom bomb.
As a party to the NPT, Iran must account for its enriched uranium, which normally is closely monitored by the IAEA, the body that enforces the NPT and verifies countries’ declarations. But the bombing of Iran’s facilities has now muddied the waters.
“We cannot afford that … the inspection regime is interrupted,” Grossi told a press conference in Vienna last week.
The post IAEA pulls inspectors from Iran as standoff over access drags on first appeared on Algemeiner.com.