Israel Ambassador to U.S. Yechiel (Michael) Leiter Speaks on Long Island
Israel’s ambassador to the United States came to Long Island this week and made a presentation. Yechiel (Michael) Leiter was born in 1959 in the U.S., in Scranton, Pennsylvania. His father, he related to a packed audience at The Jewish Center of the Hamptons in East Hampton, came to the U.S. in 1938, a refugee from Nazi-occupied Austria.
When his father arrived in the U.S., said Leiter, opening his presentation, he had “a crusty piece of bread in one pocket, a quarter in the other pocket.” Leiter said he thought about this while in the Oval Office of The White House next to Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu shortly after being named in January 2025 ambassador to the U.S.
As a youth, Leiter studied at the Rabbinical Seminary of America in Kew Garden Hills in Queens in New York City. At 18, he made Aliyah. In Israel, he subsequently would be ordained a rabbi.
In Israel, too, his studies included receiving from the University of Haifa a Ph.D. in political philosophy. Back in the U.S., he received a Masters of Arts degree in international relations at Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.
He served in the Israeli government as deputy director general of the Ministry of Education, a political advisor to then Knesset member Ariel Sharon and chief of staff in the Ministry of Finance when Netanyahu headed it.
He served in the Israel Defense Forces as a combat medic.
In East Hampton on Sunday, Leiter spoke with emotion about his oldest child, his son, Dr. Moshe Leiter, a 39-year-old physician, a father of six, a reserve major in the elite Shaldag Unit of the Israeli Air Force, being killed in the Gaza Strip on November 10, 2023. His platoon entered a “booby-trapped” building, said Leiter, “a mosque on one side, a medical clinic on the other.” His son died with two other soldiers, and three nearby “lost legs.”
Hamas in its invasion of Israel from Gaza on October 7th “jumped the gun,” he said. That was “not the plan” which, said Leiter, involved formng what its enemies called a “ring of fire” around Israel, Hamas and Hezbollah from Lebanon and others, moving simultaneously.
“That was the plan,” said Leiter.
But “this generation is the greatest generation of Jews that ever lived,” he said. And when Hamas attacked, in the “command breakdown, thousands of them went into the line of fire” with their private vehicles and weapons, preventing the attackers from moving further.
“We’ve had to change our security doctrine after October 7th,” said the ambassador. “We will not allow jihadists of any kind on our borders.”
He spoke of the nuclear threat to Israel. With Israel having won “all conventional wars” waged against it, Iran has been scheming nuclear war—and until the attack by Israel and the U.S. on nuclear facilities in Iran, it could have been “weeks away from nuclear.”
“Our aim is the denuclearization of Iran,” said the ambassador, and for “Iran not to have nuclear weapons—today, next year or forever.”
As to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a Muslim, Leiter scored his assertion that he “loves you as Jews, just not Zionists.” He said Zionism is an integral part of Judaism going back to the time of Abraham.
As to various political candidates in the U.S. currently being “openly hostile to Israel,” Leiter said: “I wish I could say it’s a passing phase.”
A 68-page pamphlet was distributed at the event in East Hampton which was published by the Embassy of Israel and titled “Manufacturing A Modern Blood Libel.”
Leiter wrote its foreword which says it will “demonstrate the distortion and cruelty deployed to demonize Israel and delegitimize its right to exist and defend itself against the barbarous ideology and terrorism of Hamas and other Iranian proxies.”
In his presentation and in the pamphlet, Leiter cited a meeting he had last year with the editorial board of The New York Times. “For over two years,” he writes, “libelous accusations against the world’s only Jewish state have flown as fast as the speed of sound.”
“As with classic antisemitism, its current mutation, anti-Zionism, disposes of facts, logic and truth. I reminded the journalists that our meeting was taking place on the 50th anniversary of the 1975 United Nations ‘Zionism Is Racism’ resolution. In a speech condemning the resolution, American UN Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan stated, ‘A great evil has been loosed upon the world. The abomination of antisemitism has been given the appearance of international sanction. What we have here is a lie—a political lie of a variety well known to the twentieth century.’”
The conclusion of the pamphlet says: “What has unfolded since October 7, 2023 is not merely a war of rockets and ground maneuvers. It is a war over language, legal standards, and moral authority. The accusations against Israel of genocide and starvation are the output of a coordinated ecosystem: a terrorist organization manufacturing data and narratives, international institutions laundering them, media outlets amplifying them, and academic and activist communities consuming them without scrutiny.”
“Historically, misinformation about Jewish people has always had the same trajectory: accusation, amplification, dehumanization, political organization, orchestration, and then violence.”
Leiter said in his presentation, “We have to push back and push back hard with the truth.”
And he observed, “There is much more unity in Israel, more that unites us then divides us.”
“Herzl had it right,” said Leiter. The people of Israel didn’t “come back after being exiled from it for 2,000 years and not because of the Holocaust—they came back despite the Holocaust, and never again to be helpless and hopeless.”