Hey, moral coward: I want my money back!

A man who can’t face up to a proper commission of inquiry shouldn’t pass judgement on those who refuse to hear him out. What’s more, he shouldn’t be charging you and me for the pleasure

I love to watch our prime minister each year at the UN General Assembly.

The United Nations, you see, has long been a farce where Israel is concerned. It holds up my country to scrutiny and censure with far more regularity and severity than it does such beacons of freedom and decency like Iran, Russia, China and even North Korea.

No matter the forum – the Security Council, the General Assembly, the Human Rights Council or just the private john in the secretary-general’s office – the State of Israel is the UN’s whipping boy.

We all know this, so no expectations there. Which is why each September, when he mounts the podium during the opening week of the General Assembly’s annual session, Benajmin Netanyahu never – ever – fails to stoop to the occasion.

Up in front of that hideous Tinos green marble, Bibi puts his acting lessons to full use.

He projects his sonorous baritone. He lowers it to a whisper. He smiles, he pouts, he raises his eyebrows as if waiting for all to see the irony that he sees. He projects his voice once again but then stops mid-sentence… and holds the silence, looking out over the crowd. It’s as if he’s expecting his listeners to see salvation or rise as one to proclaim…. Whatever.

But this time it was something else entirely.

It was puffery. It was posturing. It was Iran. It was Hezbollah. It was Mamdani.

It was “I know you are but what am I” on steroids. It was Tony Montana, white nostrils aquiver, shouting to the cartel hitmen just beyond the heavy door: Say hello to my little friend!

It was a wild, full-throated, elbow-swinging, table-thumping stump speech. Just one delivered in English seven time-zones west of the stump.

TO BE HONEST, BIBI DIDN’T have to do all that. He nailed it as soon as he opened his mouth.

“Before I begin, just a quick announcement. If there are any other moral cowards who haven’t yet left this hall, please do so now. Thank you very much.”

From there he could have shut up and stood down. No need for the beeper (nor for that Starlink thingy).

Netanyahu had locked in his moment. This year’s main prop. The primary visual cudgel he could actually take home to his electoral base: Right there below him, a bunch of gutless, sniveling, Hamas-loving Jew-haters whose odious exit highlighted the very need not only for a state for the Jews, but for a tough guy to lead it.

He just had to fly 6,000 miles roundtrip to get this moment – which is the part that truly pisses me off. After all, it was on our dime. Not the Likud’s nor his reelection fund’s. Our dime.

I mean, he wasn’t addressing the world. He wasn’t even talking to the people in the hall. He was reasserting his credentials as a “leader” and a “statesman” to those Bibistim back home who perhaps see no other possible leader on the horizon yet somehow, just maybe, might be having second thoughts about all of his screwups, all of his shortcomings.

To most of us, the swashbuckling bluster was just Bibi’s salute to the toxic masculinity of politics back home. The loud and obnoxious cheering from the entourage he scraped together to sit in the bleachers and audibly make up for all the empty seats was as cringeworthy as it was poorly managed.

To many Israelis, Bibi’s address was their “screw you” to a world gone haywire. That’s because much of what Netanyahu had to say was true: There are those for whom Israel can never do enough to satisfy their double standard for acceptability among the nations of the world.

Israel always has to behave better than everyone else. Be quicker out of the gate. Leap a higher bar. Be the only real Christian in the world.

But about that “moral cowards” bit: Really, Bibi? From you?

If there was a moral coward in the room, his name was Benjamin Netanyahu. The man who pulled together a coalition of fascists, blowhards, holy rollers and scoundrels in return for a promise that they’d keep him in power long enough to outlast the winded prosecutors trying to nail him in three separate criminal cases.

A moral coward? That’s the type of person who pits his constituents against one another, hoping a society that’s off balance will be too preoccupied to note his shortcomings and transgressions.

A moral coward? That’s someone who should have known Israel’s main enemy and been prepared to defend the country when that enemy thought we had let our defenses down – and having failed to do so, is now doing everything in his power to prevent the establishment of a full commission of inquiry to figure out what went wrong, who let it go wrong, and how such a catastrophe can be prevented from befalling us again.

BIBI, IT’S TIME FOR YOU to face the music. Since there’s no full-fledged commission of inquiry, at least not yet, we’ll try to vote you out on October 27. If we can’t do that, we’ll have to make sure you can never again assemble such a reprehensible coalition.

Like I said, you’re a man who always went to the UN and stooped, rather than rose, to the occasion. So we have no great expectations from you.

If you can’t go quietly, at the very least pay us back for the cost of your trip to New York City. It was a political rally for your reelection rather than an effort to renew Israel’s good name among the world’s nations.

Let’s see: 24 flight hours at a block rate of about $12,000 per hour for an IAF 767–300ER, totaling $280,000; perhaps $30,000 at the day rate for the series of suites and rooms you needed at the Loew’s Regency New York Hotel; the security costs; the motorcade costs….

I’d like to be reimbursed. Unless you’re defeated at the polls, in which case I’ll suck it up and write it off as the cost of finally being rid of you.