Emmanuel Macron banged his fist on the UN rostrum on Tuesday and told the world to be ashamed of the peace Donald Trump had hailed from the same spot hours earlier. "Some boast of a supposed peace," the French president said in his last General Assembly speech before he leaves office in May. "But that peace has not reopened humanitarian access for a single second. Are we simply to stand by and watch this spectacle that should shame us all?"
Macron did not name Trump. He did not need to. The White House answered within hours: Trump "ended the war," freed the hostages, and "no one has done more for peace and stability in the region."
Then the Arab leaders spoke, and they said things heads of state do not usually say into a UN microphone.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan called Gaza "the most inhumane, most shameful concentration camp of our time." Israel's delegation walked out while he said it. King Abdullah of Jordan, the most careful man in the room, said Israel's "sense of impunity has reached terrifying levels" and called it a "regional threat." Gaza and the West Bank, he said, are "two fronts of the same Israeli strategy": Israel is "squeezing Palestinians into barely a third of Gaza" and forcing families off their land. "There is a name for that: forced displacement. And that is a war crime." The world, he said, "chose to manage the conflict, not confront it."
Both men praised Trump before they indicted Israel, and what Benjamin Netanyahu's own week in New York did not contain explains why.
