NEW YORK – Benjamin Netanyahu landed in New York on Thursday with a return flight already booked for the same night. In the roughly eight hours between, the Israeli prime minister addressed the UN General Assembly, accused delegates of swallowing a fabricated genocide, and left without ever being in the same room as Donald Trump.
That absence is the story. A year ago Netanyahu spent a week in the United States and sat with Trump in the Oval Office. This time his office listed nine leaders he would meet, five of them from Latin American states Israel has been courting as European partners fall away, and made no mention of anyone from Washington. Michael Oren, Israel’s former ambassador to the US, said he could not recall a prior visit where a sitting prime minister came to American soil without seeing the president.
“It’s a campaign speech,” Oren said of the UN address, noting it would have played very differently paired with a meeting at the White House, or with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, or with almost anyone senior in the administration. “I don’t recall a time when the prime minister came to the United States and didn’t meet with the president. So I’m sure that he was disappointed by that.”
Netanyahu’s office attributed the thin schedule to a packed calendar and the need to be home before Sukkot begins Friday evening, saying “many world leaders requested to meet him” but only some could be accommodated. It did not respond to a request for comment on Oren’s remarks, and it remains unclear, according to Israeli media reports carried by Anadolu Agency, whether he will see Rubio at all before he leaves.
The timing is not incidental. Israel holds a general election on Oct. 27, and Netanyahu’s security record has been under a cloud since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attacks exposed catastrophic intelligence failures. Eytan Gilboa, a professor at Bar-Ilan and Reichman universities who studies US-Israel relations, called the whole trip a miscalculation. “I think the trip is a mistake, because it exposes his weaknesses,” he said, adding that failing to secure even a courtesy meeting with Trump shows how badly Netanyahu has managed the one relationship Israel cannot function without.
While Netanyahu was airborne, Trump was working through a full room of visitors in New York, Arab leaders, the leaders of Denmark, Japan, Greenland, Ukraine and Venezuela, before flying back to Washington to receive Xi Jinping at a state dinner. Natan Sachs of the Middle East Institute called the contrast a “big, big miss” for a leader who has spent two decades positioning himself as the indispensable interpreter of the Middle East to American power.
Parallel to the Iran fallout, Israel’s standing among its older allies has kept eroding. Britain, France and Canada announced sanctions this month on Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, a move Washington greeted with silence rather than the pushback Jerusalem had hoped for. Even Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel and a career defender of the settlement movement, broke ranks this month to call West Bank settlers who attacked Palestinian communities “terrorists.”
Netanyahu is still wanted by the International Criminal Court over allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, a warrant that shadowed his arrival even though New York City has no authority to enforce it. Mayor Zohran Mamdani has called on the federal government to act on it and said he holds Netanyahu responsible for a Gaza death toll that has passed 73,000, though Mamdani has said he will not personally join the street protests planned around the visit.
What is not yet clear is whether Israeli voters will read the missing Washington meeting the way Oren and Gilboa do, as evidence of a leader who has spent his relationship with the region’s essential ally, or whether the prime-time broadcast slot he engineered for his speech will be enough to blunt that impression before ballots are cast next month.
