Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not go to the United Nations General Assembly last week to flatter the institution. He went to call it out. After a mass walkout that Netanyahu branded an act of “moral cowards,” he delivered a speech designed to do what that hall so often refuses to do: set the record straight on Israel’s history, on the wars forced upon it, and on a global surge of antisemitism and anti-Israel hate.
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That is not a distraction from an America First national security policy. It is a crucial element of one. And Netanyahu was clear about who made the difference. Israel, he told the Assembly, has had no greater partner than President Trump—the man he has repeatedly called “the greatest friend Israel has ever had in the White House.” American and Israeli pilots flew joint missions over Iran. America and Israel together brought every remaining hostage home. That is America First in action.
I have long argued that standing strongly with Israel—one of America’s most important allies—and denouncing and fighting antisemitism are core elements of an America First approach, not a contradiction of it. America First means a strong national security policy, keeping the United States out of unnecessary wars, and requiring allies to carry their own weight. It also means standing with Israel and fighting antisemitism. For me, there is no room for compromise on this.
That commitment did not begin with this war, or even with 1967. After the Holocaust and the Second World War, the United States under President Harry Truman recognized the new State of Israel as a haven for the world’s Jews. We have stood with Israel since then not only because it is a capable ally but also because of a moral obligation to the Jewish people after that horror. America First does not erase that inheritance. It honors it.
Netanyahu’s speech made that case in historical terms. Israel has spent its life fighting for survival against enemies who refused repeated opportunities to live in peace. He reminded the Assembly that on the eve of the 1967 war, Israel sat on a sliver of land—no West Bank, no Gaza, no Golan Heights—and still faced armies sworn to destroy it. The conflict, he said, is not about territories. It is about whether a Jewish state will be accepted within any boundaries—and Palestinian leaders and their backers have refused to accept one. The United Nations has long tried to bury that truth under one-sided resolutions, walkouts, and inverted language.
For Netanyahu, the history is personal. Recalling his brother Yoni on the eve of the Six-Day War—“We’re going to win. We have no other choice”—and Yoni’s later death during the daring 1976 Israeli rescue mission at Entebbe, Netanyahu framed Israel’s struggle as the opposite of adventurism. It is the doctrine of a people who learned that no one else will save them. Yoni’s words, he said, are as true today as they were more than half a century ago—and nothing demonstrated that more clearly than the October 7, 2023, massacre of Israelis by Hamas.
That day looms over any serious debate about Middle East peace. Hamas terrorists stormed out of Gaza, where Israel did not have a single soldier or civilian. They murdered about 1,200 people, including Holocaust survivors, raped women, and livestreamed the slaughter. As Netanyahu recounted, they burned victims alive and beheaded men. For a nation of ten million, Netanyahu said, the scale was equivalent to 40,000 Americans killed in a day. Israel’s enemies expected collapse. Israel instead rose and fought a seven-front war.
Netanyahu’s UNGA address was also an indictment. He called October 7 the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, and he turned on the delegates who had walked out, asking where they were when Iran’s rulers butchered and maimed tens of thousands of their own people in early 2026. He called the genocide charge “the biggest lie of the century.” Israel, he argued, did not commit genocide. It prevented one—the genocide Hamas and its allies would have completed had they not been stopped. “They would have killed every last one of us.”
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Critics of the U.S.-Israel alliance like to pose a false choice: either you put America first, or you stand with Israel. That is nonsensical. Standing with Israel is in our strategic interest. Israel is dealing with enemies in the region that the United States would have to confront if Israel were not there—Iran and its proxies, including Hamas, Hezbollah, and the militias that have spent years targeting Americans and American interests. Netanyahu made the point directly: in defending itself, he said, Israel also defends many of the countries whose delegates walked out, and their leaders privately thank Israel for taking out Iran’s nuclear program. A capable ally that absorbs and degrades those threats is not taking advantage of the United States. It is strengthening U.S. deterrence. Moreover, Israel fights its ground wars with its own sons and daughters, which is exactly what an ally carrying its own weight looks like. That is why a strong U.S.-Israel alliance is a central element of the America First approach to national security.
An America First national security policy cannot ignore antisemitism. Antisemitism is not a campus fad; it is a threat to America’s domestic security and to our interests abroad. Jews have been threatened on the way to synagogue, stabbed in the street, and murdered in cities far from Gaza, from Sydney to Manchester to Boulder. Netanyahu condemned those in the United States spreading lies about Jews and Israel and said those lies have real consequences. He said New York Jews tell him this is no longer the city they remember, and he was blunt about Mayor Zohran Mamdani, whom he accused of feeding that hatred in America’s largest city.
On September 30, we got a stark reminder that this threat continues. According to Israeli officials, an Omani copilot on a Flydubai flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv stabbed the captain, Indian pilot Smit Machchhar, and tried to bring the plane down. The jet suddenly plunged thousands of feet. The wounded captain managed to open the cockpit door; Israeli passengers and crew subdued the attacker, and off-duty pilots landed the aircraft in Saudi Arabia. Defense Minister Israel Katz called it an attempted jihadist terror attack, and Netanyahu later said the copilot had undergone “Islamist radical indoctrination.” Saudi and Emirati authorities are investigating. Netanyahu also said the Israeli passengers who fought back “prevented another 9/11.” When he met passenger Yaniv Hayun, still in a blood-stained shirt, Netanyahu told him, “I see you, and I see a lion.” That is Israel: a nation that has survived because its people are prepared to fight.
The Trump partnership Netanyahu praised is what an America First national security policy looks like in practice: use American power when U.S. interests are at stake, demand that allies play the leading role in defending their regions, and refuse to defer to a deeply politicized United Nations that has long been hostile to Israel and would rather stage walkouts than confront legitimate global security threats.
Netanyahu’s speech mattered, and America First’s supporters should not flinch from it. The alternative is silence—and silence is exactly what too many governments have offered the Jews living with October 7’s aftermath. Israel’s answer, as Netanyahu said in closing, is the same as his brother Yoni’s in 1967: Israel will win because it has no other choice. Or, as Israeli reservist Neria Leiter wrote shortly before a terrorist rammed him with a car last month: “We have no other country.”
The United States still has a choice. It can join those who invert victim and aggressor. Or it can tell the truth about a small ally that has spent generations offering peace to people who answered with war, then defending itself when the war arrived. America First means standing with that ally—as Truman did in the shadow of the Holocaust, and as Trump has done in the shadow of October 7—and fighting the antisemitism that accompanies the genocide lie.
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Fred Fleitz is vice chair of the America First Policy Institute Center for American Security. He previously served as chief of staff of the Trump National Security Council.
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