After leaders from several Middle Eastern countries criticized Israel on the world stage at this week’s UN General Assembly, analysts told The Media Line that they were likely limiting their criticism in the hopes of decreasing the chances of an escalation of a wider regional war.
Strong applause greeted Palestinian Authority (PA) leader Mahmoud Abbas as he took to the podium at the UN on Thursday.
“We will not leave,” he told the audience, adding that Palestinians should have control over Gaza and the border checkpoints, and called on countries, including the US, to stop sending weapons to Israel.
Meanwhile, the Israeli ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, criticized Abbas after his speech, stating that he did not mention “Hamas” once.
“Only when he stands on the UN platform does he talk about a peaceful solution. There is no greater hypocrisy and lie than this. Abbas’s legacy is one of the chronic weakness in the face of terrorism and hatred,” Danon wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
Arash Azizi, a historian focused on the Middle East and a fellow at Boston University, told The Media Line that Abbas’s speech would be historic, being given at a time in which Palestinians have an elevated position at the UN and on the world stage, with many countries having sympathy for them because of the war in Gaza.
Earlier in the week, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian accused Israel of killing women and children in “cold blood,” stated the UN’s news service.
“We have been siding with the people across the world, who have flooded the streets in outrage against Israeli atrocities; we condemn Israeli crimes against humanity,” he said on Tuesday. However, Pezeshkian did not use as extreme language as his predecessors, such as Iran’s former president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who said that Israel must be eliminated when he addressed the UN General Assembly in 2012.
According to Aziz, Pezeshkian was limiting his criticism against Israel, which suggests that he may be open to talks with the West and is paying a political price for it.
There is the dynamic in which the hardliners are attacking him [Pezeshkian] for being weak, whereas he’s gaining support from his base as someone who wants to negotiate with the West and with the world and solve Iran’s economic problems in this way. They want things to calm down. They know this is not a moment that they can have a successful confrontation with Israel.
“There is the dynamic in which the hardliners are attacking him [Pezeshkian] for being weak, whereas he’s gaining support from his base as someone who wants to negotiate with the West and with the world and solve Iran’s economic problems in this way,” Azizi said. “They want things to calm down. They know this is not a moment that they can have a successful confrontation with Israel.”
In his address to the UN General Assembly, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan compared Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Hitler, something he has repeatedly done. “Just as Hitler was stopped by the alliance of humanity 70 years ago, Netanyahu and his murder network must be stopped by the alliance of humanity,” Erdoğan said.
Last December, he compared Israel’s bombing of Gaza to Nazi concentration camps and said Netanyahu’s actions were just as severe as those of Hitler.
Erdoğan also accused Israel of carrying out massacres and criticized countries for calling for a cease-fire while sending weapons to Israel.
“Along with children in Gaza, the United Nations system is also dying, the truth is dying, the values that the West claims to defend are dying, the hopes of humanity to live in a fairer world are dying one by one,” Erdoğan said, according to his Communication’s Office.
Ömer Özkizilcik, an Ankara-based foreign policy and security analyst, told The Media Line that leaders’ comments on Israel in their UN addresses were based on fears for their own country’s security in case of a regional escalation in violence. They were also sending messages to their respective domestic audiences, he added.
For instance, Erdoğan has come under significant pressure to take a harder line against Israel than he initially had after the October 7 attacks. Before the Hamas attacks, Turkey and Israel were undergoing a thaw in relations. When business continued between the two countries after the war in Gaza began, Erdoğan faced criticism. It is believed that the perception that he had not criticized Israel strongly enough over its actions in Gaza consequently contributed to major defeats for his Justice and Development Party in nationwide local elections in March.
However, Özkizilcik argued that pressure over the Turkish president’s position on Israel has subsided, and he believed Erdoğan’s comments this week at the UN were genuine rather than drummed up for domestic consumption.
“Therefore, his statement was out of his personal beliefs,” Özkizilcik said, adding that, as expected, there were no harsh statements against Israel by countries that have normalized relations with the Jewish state.
While Jordan’s King Abdullah II told the UN General Assembly that his country condemned the October 7 attacks, he still criticized Israel for crossing “one red line after another.”