The empty hall by Timothy Davies

Photograph definitely says more than a thousand diplomatic speeches and Benjamin Netanyahu standing at the United Nations podium while rows of delegates disappear from the chamber was one of them. The Israeli prime minister was speaking to an institution supposedly built to represent the international community, yet much of that community had already walked out.

And still Netanyahu stood there. He spoke. He attacked. He insulted. He accused. He praised Donald Trump. He attacked New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and dismissed the international criticism of Israel's war in Gaza. He even called departing delegates “moral cowards,” as though the problem was not the empty chairs but the people who had occupied them.

This is the strange new arithmetic of international politics, if enough powerful people protect you, accountability becomes an inconvenience rather than a consequence. Netanyahu is the subject of an International Criminal Court arrest warrant. The Court found reasonable grounds to believe that he bore criminal responsibility for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity, including starvation as a method of warfare, murder, persecution and other inhumane acts. The warrant does not constitute a conviction, but it is hardly a diplomatic parking ticket that can simply be forgotten when the motorcade arrives in Manhattan.

Yet there he was, walking through New York as though nothing had happened. That is perhaps the most disturbing part. Outside the United Nations, protesters filled the streets. Demonstrators blocked traffic, marched and demanded accountability, while police detained protesters. Inside, the machinery of diplomacy continued operating around the man whose international legal status should make his presence anything but ordinary.

And then there was the extraordinary spectacle of a foreign prime minister using the United Nations platform to attack the mayor of the city hosting the organisation. Mamdani is certainly a political figure with strong views on Israel and Gaza. But Netanyahu did not merely disagree with him; he turned the UN podium into another battlefield in his political war, accusing the mayor of endangering Jews and attacking him personally.

It was diplomatic theatre with an ugly twist, the guest insulting the host's city while protected by the most powerful man in Washington. Trump's protection matters because it changes the atmosphere around everything Netanyahu does. It creates political shelter where legal and diplomatic isolation might otherwise have consequences. The message is brutally simple: international institutions may issue warrants, governments may protest, delegations may walk out and citizens may fill the streets, but if Washington's political umbrella remains open, Netanyahu can still arrive, speak and leave.

That is not strength. It is the spectacle of power detached from accountability. The empty UN seats therefore mattered more than Netanyahu's microphone. They were not merely a protest against one speech. They were a visual reminder of a widening fracture between diplomatic ceremony and international legitimacy.

The United Nations cannot function as a theatre where leaders applaud the rules in the morning and ignore them by afternoon. Otherwise the empty chairs become the most honest diplomats in the building.

They say what governments often refuse to say aloud: that somewhere between immunity, political protection and international law, something has gone terribly wrong. And Netanyahu, standing beneath the UN emblem, offered the perfect picture of it. A podium full of power. A chamber full of empty chairs. And an international order pretending not to notice.