The Room We Keep Leaving

They stood up and walked out.

One delegation after another, diplomats rose from their seats as Benjamin Netanyahu began addressing the United Nations General Assembly. Within moments, whole sections of the hall were empty.

It was dramatic. Of course it was. That was the point. A walkout is not silence. It is a statement made without words.

And before criticizing those who left, it is worth asking what they were trying to say. For some, remaining seated while Netanyahu spoke would itself have felt like a statement, an unacceptable one. The war in Gaza, the civilian suffering, the conduct of the Israeli government: walking out was their way of saying that there are moments when diplomatic courtesy begins to look like complicity.

Others were protesting Netanyahu himself. Others undoubtedly knew that leaving the room would produce an image far more powerful than another carefully worded diplomatic statement ever could.

I disagree with them. But I understand the gesture. What I struggle with is what comes next.

Because the walkout captured something much larger than one speech, one prime minister or even one war. We are living through a moment when leaving the room has become one of our preferred forms of political expression.

We leave because we are outraged. We leave because the person speaking has crossed a line. We leave because staying might be interpreted as legitimizing something we reject. Sometimes those reasons are entirely understandable.

But if the people we most disagree with are precisely the people we refuse to hear, what is the room for?

And then there is the other walkout, the one that has been happening much more slowly.

For years, many of us have been walking away from the United Nations intellectually. We may still participate in it, argue before it, lobby it, condemn its resolutions. But belief in the institution has eroded profoundly.

I was born and raised in France, where Charles de Gaulle’s description of the United Nations as “le machin” — “the thing” — became part of the political vocabulary. A slightly contemptuous shorthand for an institution whose grand principles and actual behavior did not always seem to belong to the same universe.

Today that cynicism extends far beyond Jews or Israelis. Anyone who genuinely believes in democracy and human rights has had reason to look at the United Nations and wonder what exactly is going on.

In 2022, North Korea assumed the rotating presidency of the Conference on Disarmament. There was a perfectly legitimate procedural explanation: the presidency rotates alphabetically among its members.

But procedure does not erase symbolism.

A country under international sanctions over its nuclear and ballistic missile programs was presiding over the world’s multilateral disarmament negotiating forum.

Then there is Russia.

After invading Ukraine, Russia remained, of course, a permanent member of the Security Council, complete with veto power. In April 2023, under the Council’s normal rotation, it assumed the presidency. Sergey Lavrov then chaired a meeting on “effective multilateralism through the defence of the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.”

Again: procedurally explicable. And almost impossible to explain with a straight face.

These contradictions matter. Institutions do not survive because their procedures are technically correct. They survive because people believe they retain moral and political credibility.

When that credibility disappears, eventually the institution becomes a building. A magnificent hall. Flags. Podiums. Translation booths. And fewer people who believe that what happens inside really matters.

For all my frustration with the United Nations, I am more frightened by the idea of abandoning it. Maybe part of that comes from having spent more than twenty years as a journalist.

Journalism teaches you very quickly that you do not always get to hear what you want to hear. I interviewed people I disagreed with. People who made me angry. People whose version of events I thought was wrong. Sometimes deeply wrong.

But my job was not to get up. It was to stay in the chair. Listen. Ask the next question. Challenge the answer. Listen again.

Listening did not mean agreement. It certainly did not mean that every argument deserved equal weight. It meant that before challenging someone, I had a responsibility to understand what they were actually saying.

That distinction seems to be disappearing.

Today, listening itself can be interpreted as endorsement. Remaining in the room can look like legitimization. Acknowledging someone else’s suffering can be treated as a betrayal of your own.

I feel that particularly acutely since October 7.

I have spent a great deal of time in Israel since then, especially in Kibbutz Be’eri. I first entered the kibbutz in November 2023, and have returned repeatedly, documenting people I met in the immediate aftermath as they moved through grief, displacement, hostage captivity and release, return and reconstruction.

I have heard Israeli pain from very close up. And yet, Palestinian suffering is real.

Those two truths can and must exist in the same room.

Why has that become so difficult to say? One does not erase the other. Hearing one does not betray the other.

If there is one thing years of interviewing Holocaust survivors has reinforced for me, it is that listening to another human being’s testimony does not require surrendering your judgment. You listen first. You still have the right, and sometimes the obligation, to question, contextualize and disagree.

But you cannot do any of those things if you have already left.

That is why I keep returning to the diplomats who walked out.

There are moments when leaving a room is itself moral speech. But a walkout cannot be the end of diplomacy. At some point, someone has to come back.

Because diplomacy was not invented for people who like one another.

We do not need international institutions to talk to our friends. We need them precisely because there are governments, leaders and nations whose actions we find intolerable and with whom we nevertheless share a planet.

And this is where those of us who have lost faith in the United Nations face our own uncomfortable question.

If democracies abandon institutions because autocracies manipulate them, who benefits?

Not the democracies.

Authoritarian governments are not going to politely vacate their seats because the institution has lost credibility in Paris, Washington, Jerusalem or Kyiv. They will stay. They will learn the rules. They will build coalitions. They will speak the language of human rights and international law whether or not they practice either at home.

And they will occupy every chair that somebody else decides is no longer worth having.

So yes, reform the United Nations. Challenge its contradictions. Question a Security Council structure that allows a permanent member to invade another country while retaining its veto. Demand consistency on human rights. Call out double standards, including when they concern Israel.

An institution created in 1945 should not be immune from serious examination in 2026. But there is a profound difference between fighting to change an institution and surrendering it.

Which brings me back to Netanyahu’s speech.

The diplomats who walked out wanted us to notice the empty chairs. We did.

The harder question is what happens when they come back.

Do they challenge what they heard? Do they argue? Do they negotiate? Do they find another room in which the conversation continues?

Because if walking out becomes the conversation rather than an interruption of it, we have a problem much larger than the United Nations.

We are already seeing it everywhere: on campuses, on television, online, around dinner tables. Increasingly, we do not confront arguments we reject. We remove ourselves from the people making them.

The result is not greater moral clarity. It is parallel monologues.

Perhaps that is what those empty seats made me think about. Not whether Netanyahu deserved an audience. Not whether the diplomats were entitled to leave. But whether we are slowly losing the ability to distinguish between refusing to accept someone’s words and refusing to hear them at all.

There has to be space between those two things.

Democracy depends on that space. So does journalism. So does diplomacy. And, eventually, so does peace.

The room does not have to be comfortable. It probably should not be. Staying does not mean approving of what happens inside. Sometimes it simply means refusing to give up your chair.

So perhaps the question is not whether those diplomats should have walked out.

Perhaps the question is harder than that.

When staying in the room feels like complicity, but leaving it means surrendering the room to those we most oppose… who is brave enough to stay?