The United Nations is many things, some of them more interesting than others. It is certainly useful; a tool that can be wielded in the service of any one or any collective willing to take that up and infinitely malleable in its form and utility. But that is politics and ought not to offend; though it does serve as a caution. Perhaps less well understood is the utility of the United Nation as an instrument, as a tool, for evangelization. It is that place--like Jerusalem in the years before the Emperor Titus obliterated the city and set the stage for the theater that one encounters today--where all sorts of zealots, separated by their commonality and the intensity of their reactions to each other, each wrapped in the belief (itself an object, a signific, and the basis for creating cognitive universes or ordered meaning) in the righteousness of however it is that they constitute themselves and reconstitute their targets, where these zealots run around as the modern day fishers of humans and their communities (Matthew 4:19; "And he saith unto them, Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.").
Belief, passion, conflict--discourse in the service of evangelization--that provides, at least for me, almost the only interesting element of the messy business of the global Sultanate of Women that the empire of the United Nations has become.
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It is with this in mind that I approached the question of what might be extracted from four related and interesting speeches made by a quartet of actors connected to each other by interest, hatred, love, need, and ambition, each dancing around a singularly absent center. The four speeches of four humans who identify as male:
1. United States of America; His Excellency, Donald Trump, President (22 September 2026);
2. Türkiye; His Excellency; Recep Tayyip Erdoğan; President (22 September 2026);
3. Jordan; His Majesty; Abdullah II ibn Al Hussein; King (22 September 2026);
4. Iran (Islamic Republic of); His Excellency; Masoud Pezeshkian; President (23 September 2026)
That resulted in a fairly deep dive into the semiotics and discourse of the four speeches that while singularly unremarkable become much more interesting, and valuable, when read against each other. The essay, entitled Reading in Three Dimensions: The 81st UN General Assembly Addresses of the United States, Türkiye, Iran, and Jordan, as Sites of Layered Meaning, Concealed Theology, and Competing Legalities . Here is the abstract to give you a sense of the project.
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This essay undertakes a close, multi-layered reading of four addresses delivered before the 81st Session of the United Nations General Assembly: those of the United States (Trump), the Islamic Republic of Iran (Pezeshkian), Turkey (Erdoğan), and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan (Abdullah II). The analysis proceeds through seven interpretive registers—surface diplomatic grammar, underlying legal-structural claims, theological Lebenswelt, civilizational self-positioning, the construction of absence and silence, instrumental invocations of international law, and the embedding of eschatological temporality within ostensibly secular rhetoric. One might suggest that a principal contribution of the present work lies in its demonstration that the shared vocabulary of multilateral diplomacy—sovereignty, human rights, rules-based order, peace—conceals radically incompatible meaning-structures, such that speakers who appear to be engaged in common discourse may in fact be operating within incommensurable semiotic universes.
It is perhaps possible to read the persistence of the so-called Jewish question—understood here not as an empirical matter but as a structuring absence around which the theological commitments of each address are organized—as one possible interpretive contribution of the essay. The empirical finding developed below is more specific: Islam and Christianity are named, invoked, defended, and prayed through across the corpus, while “Jew” and “Jewish” do not appear in any of the four speeches, and “Judaism” appears exactly once — in King Abdullah’s address, and there only in the mode of negation: “It is also tried to cast this conflict as a war of religions — Islam on one side, Judaism and Christianity on the other. It is not.” The single mention names the religious dimension precisely in order to foreclose it, a discursive operation whose analytical significance is developed below. The silence is therefore not general; its selective and targeted character warrants examination, even though the essay does not purport to settle the speakers’ motives. Drawing on my framework for analyzing theocratic constitutionalism (Backer 2009) and his methodological insistence on reading for plausibility rather than authorial intention, the analysis suggests that each speaker’s treatment of Israel-Palestine functions less as a policy position than as a site at which incommensurable theological, legal, and civilizational premises become momentarily visible. The essay employs my methodological approach (Backer 2024) to treat these addresses not as transparent policy statements but as layered texts requiring sustained hermeneutic excavation. The implications for international legal scholarship, diplomatic practice, and the coherence of multilateral governance are, one might cautiously submit, considerable.
The essay was created with the help of Harvey AI, which proved to be a more interesting experience than I had imagined--Harvey AI responded more like a student research assistant in need of constant correction and guidance than what is emerging as the discourse of AI computational systems "taking over." Still, the computational system was in the end useful in creating efficiencies in drafting (and in my case certainly in avoiding typos). Remaining errors including but not limited to conceptual decisions and the like remain entirely mine. The full text of the essay follows below and may be accessed HERE.
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Reading in Three Dimensions: The 81st UN General Assembly Addresses of the United States, Türkiye, Iran, and Jordan, as Sites of Layered Meaning, Concealed Theology, and Competing Legalities
Larry Catá Backer (白 轲)
W. Richard and Mary Eshelman Faculty Scholar; Professor of Law and International Affairs
Penn State Dickinson Law, a unit of The Pennsylvania State University system |
Working Paper / Pre-Publication Draft
September 2026
Abstract
This essay undertakes a close, multi-layered reading of four addresses delivered before the 81st Session of the United Nations General Assembly: those of the United States (Trump), the Islamic Republic of Iran (Pezeshkian), Turkey (Erdoğan), and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan (Abdullah II). The analysis proceeds through seven interpretive registers—surface diplomatic grammar, underlying legal-structural claims, theological Lebenswelt, civilizational self-positioning, the construction of absence and silence, instrumental invocations of international law, and the embedding of eschatological temporality within ostensibly secular rhetoric. One might suggest that a principal contribution of the present work lies in its demonstration that the shared vocabulary of multilateral diplomacy—sovereignty, human rights, rules-based order, peace—conceals radically incompatible meaning-structures, such that speakers who appear to be engaged in common discourse may in fact be operating within incommensurable semiotic universes.
It is perhaps possible to read the persistence of the so-called Jewish question—understood here not as an empirical matter but as a structuring absence around which the theological commitments of each address are organized—as one possible interpretive contribution of the essay. The empirical finding developed below is more specific: Islam and Christianity are named, invoked, defended, and prayed through across the corpus, while “Jew” and “Jewish” do not appear in any of the four speeches, and “Judaism” appears exactly once — in King Abdullah’s address, and there only in the mode of negation: “It is also tried to cast this conflict as a war of religions — Islam on one side, Judaism and Christianity on the other. It is not.” The single mention names the religious dimension precisely in order to foreclose it, a discursive operation whose analytical significance is developed below. The silence is therefore not general; its selective and targeted character warrants examination, even though the essay does not purport to settle the speakers’ motives. Drawing on my framework for analyzing theocratic constitutionalism (Backer 2009) and his methodological insistence on reading for plausibility rather than authorial intention, the analysis suggests that each speaker’s treatment of Israel-Palestine functions less as a policy position than as a site at which incommensurable theological, legal, and civilizational premises become momentarily visible. The essay employs my methodological approach (Backer 2024) to treat these addresses not as transparent policy statements but as layered texts requiring sustained hermeneutic excavation. The implications for international legal scholarship, diplomatic practice, and the coherence of multilateral governance are, one might cautiously submit, considerable.
* * *
I. Introduction in the Form of an Executive Summary for Policymakers
The four General Assembly addresses examined in this essay present policymakers with a problem that is at once familiar and profoundly underappreciated. On the surface, the speeches of the United States, Iran, Turkey, and Jordan at the 81st Session appear to participate in a common diplomatic discourse—each invokes sovereignty, each references international law, each claims fidelity to an order structured around the United Nations Charter. Yet a sustained reading across multiple interpretive layers reveals that these surface convergences mask divergences so fundamental that one might reasonably question whether the speakers inhabit the same discursive universe. This Executive Summary distills the principal findings for those tasked with interpreting, responding to, or constructing policy upon the basis of such addresses.
The Problem of Shared Vocabulary
A potentially consequential finding of this analysis concerns the radical polysemy of what might be called the core diplomatic lexicon. When President Trump invokes “sovereignty,” the term appears to operate within a framework of transactional bilateralism in which sovereign prerogative is understood as the capacity of a state—and more precisely, of a strong state—to define the terms of its engagement with international obligations. When President Pezeshkian deploys the same term, it seems to function within a quite different register: sovereignty as resistance to hegemonic imposition, undergirded by a theological understanding of legitimate governance that is, in important respects, incommensurable with the liberal-positivist framework that Western diplomatic practice tends to presuppose. President Erdoğan’s invocations of sovereignty appear to oscillate between these poles, drawing on both post-colonial resistance rhetoric and an Ottoman-inflected civilizational claim that positions Turkey as the rightful mediator between competing world-historical traditions. King Abdullah’s usage, by contrast, appears to operate within a Hashemite framework of custodial legitimacy that is itself theologically grounded but that seeks to translate theological authority into the secular grammar of responsible statehood.
Policymakers should note, with some caution, that the appearance of consensus generated by shared terminology may itself constitute an obstacle to accurate diplomatic intelligence. One might suggest that when four speakers use the word “peace” in four addresses to the same body on substantially the same topic, and when each usage presupposes a different metaphysical structure of what peace entails, the resulting discourse is not merely ambiguous—it is, in a sense that deserves careful consideration, structurally incoherent.
Theological Structures Within Secular Grammar
A second finding that warrants particular attention from policymakers concerns the invisibility of theological premises within ostensibly secularized diplomatic discourse. The conventional assumption governing the interpretation of General Assembly addresses—that these are secular political statements amenable to analysis through the standard tools of international relations theory—appears, upon closer examination, to be inadequate to the texts under consideration. Each of the four addresses analyzed here contains what one might characterize as a theological substructure: a set of assumptions about the nature of legitimate authority, the relationship between divine mandate and positive law, the eschatological horizon within which political action acquires meaning, and the ontological status of particular peoples, territories, and covenantal claims.
It is perhaps particularly important for policymakers to appreciate that this theological dimension does not operate merely at the level of rhetorical ornamentation or cultural background. The analysis suggests, albeit cautiously, that the theological Lebenswelt of each speaker functions as a constitutive grammar—that is, it does not merely color the presentation of policy positions but actively structures what can and cannot be said, what is thinkable and what remains foreclosed, what counts as a legal argument and what registers only as noise. The practical consequence, one might venture, is that diplomatic responses calibrated exclusively to the surface-level policy content of these addresses risk systematic misreading.
The case of Iran is perhaps instructive. President Pezeshkian’s address appears, at the level of its diplomatic grammar, to present a series of familiar demands—respect for sovereignty, opposition to sanctions, calls for regional stability. Yet a reading attentive to the theological register suggests that these demands are embedded within a Shi’a jurisprudential framework of governance in which the legitimacy of international institutions is itself conditional upon their conformity with principles that are, in the final analysis, derived from sources external to the Westphalian system. Whether one regards this as a problem or merely as a descriptive reality, the analytical point remains: the secular surface of the address does not exhaust, and may in some respects obscure, its operative meaning.
The Structuring Absence of the Jewish Question
The third finding of particular relevance to policymakers concerns the function of what this essay terms the “structuring absence” of the Jewish question within these addresses. By this formulation one intends to identify not the explicit references to Israel, Palestine, or the broader Middle Eastern conflict—which are abundant in all four speeches—but rather the way in which the theological and civilizational status of Jewish sovereignty, Jewish peoplehood, and the Jewish relationship to territory may operate as one unspoken organizing principle around which each speaker’s broader framework is constructed.
What appears to emerge from the analysis is that each address’s treatment of the Israel-Palestine question functions as something more than a regional policy dispute. It seems to operate, rather, as the point at which each speaker’s underlying assumptions about the relationship between theology and law, between divine mandate and positive right, between civilizational identity and territorial sovereignty, become momentarily visible before being re-submerged beneath the conventions of diplomatic speech. Policymakers who treat the Israel-Palestine references in these addresses as interchangeable policy positions may, one might cautiously suggest, be missing a significant dimension of what is being communicated.
Key Findings Across the Seven Layers
Across the seven interpretive layers applied in this essay—ranging from surface diplomatic grammar through legal-structural claims, theological presuppositions, civilizational self-positioning, the construction of strategic silence, instrumental deployments of international law, and embedded eschatological temporality—several patterns emerge that warrant the attention of those engaged in policy formulation. First, there appears to be a persistent disjunction between the legal vocabulary employed and the jurisprudential traditions from which that vocabulary derives its operative meaning. Second, the construction of absence—what is not said, and whose claims are rendered invisible—may prove as analytically significant as the explicit content of the addresses. Third, the eschatological horizons implicit in each address suggest quite different temporal orientations toward the resolution of conflict, such that negotiations conducted on the assumption of shared temporal expectations may be operating under a structural misapprehension.
Fourth, and perhaps most immediately relevant to policy, the analysis suggests that the concept of a “rules-based international order”—invoked, in various formulations, by all four speakers—does not refer to a single coherent normative architecture but rather to at least four distinct and potentially incompatible visions of what such an order would entail, who would govern it, upon what sources of authority it would rest, and which historical grievances it would be expected to remedy. The practical implication, one might propose, is that policy frameworks premised on the assumption of a shared commitment to “the rules-based order” may be resting upon a foundation considerably less stable than is conventionally supposed.
Actionable Implications
For policymakers, the analysis developed in this essay suggests several considerations that may warrant integration into interpretive and strategic frameworks. First, diplomatic intelligence functions might benefit from the incorporation of what one could term “theological literacy”—not in the confessional sense, but as an analytical capacity to identify the operative theological structures that shape the meaning of ostensibly secular discourse. Second, the persistent incommensurability of key terms within the multilateral vocabulary suggests the value of developing what might be called “semantic maps” of diplomatic discourse: analytical tools capable of tracking the divergent meanings that identical phrases carry across different discursive traditions.
Third, and most broadly, the analysis invites a reconsideration of the assumption that the multilateral system operates through a common language with locally variable content. It may be more accurate—and more useful for policy purposes—to understand General Assembly addresses as sites of strategic equivocation, in which the appearance of shared discourse serves functions that are themselves politically consequential: the maintenance of procedural legitimacy in the absence of substantive consensus, the deferral of irreconcilable commitments through deliberate ambiguity, and the preservation of a framework within which incommensurable claims can coexist without resolution. Whether this condition represents a failure of international discourse or a particularly sophisticated achievement is a question that this essay does not presume to answer, but which policymakers may wish to keep before them as they interpret the addresses examined herein.
II. The Speeches Re-Read: Summaries as Analytical Preparation
What follows are not neutral summaries. They could not be, and the pretense that they might be would itself constitute an analytical choice — one that obscures more than it reveals. Each summary is instead an attempt to surface the internal architecture of the speech in question: its selection of objects for attention, its management of sequence and emphasis, and — perhaps most critically — its orchestration of what remains unsaid. The reader should approach these summaries as preparations for the analytical layers that follow, each one constructed to make visible the semiotic operations that the speeches themselves may prefer to keep beneath the threshold of explicit articulation.
President Trump: The Ledger as Geopolitical Grammar
The speech opens, as perhaps it must, with a temporal anchor that is simultaneously a claim of civilizational continuity and a subtle assertion of exceptionalism: the approach of America's 250th anniversary. One might read this as mere ceremony, but the placement is doing work — it positions everything that follows as the output of a civilization approaching its quarter-millennium, a nation whose longevity itself constitutes a form of authority. The question the speech does not ask, but which its structure implies, is whether such longevity generates entitlement to lead, or merely the obligation to account for what has been accomplished under its watch (Trump 2026).
What follows is, in a distilled form, a ledger. The domestic portion of the address reads less like a policy statement than like a balance sheet submitted to shareholders: more than one million jobs created, median household income reaching eighty-seven thousand dollars, eighty record-setting closes in the stock market, twenty-one trillion dollars in investment commitments. The precision of these figures is itself significant. They are not offered as aspirations or as elements of a narrative arc; they are presented as accomplished transactions, each one a line item whose facticity is assumed rather than argued. The speech appears to understand governance as deal-making, and the General Assembly hall as a venue in which the deals are reported — not debated, not justified, but enumerated.
The Iran sections may represent one of the speech's more revealing structural features. Operations Midnight Hammer and Epic Fury are named — the naming itself a performative act, since covert operations gain a different valence once announced from the podium of the General Assembly. The ultimatum to Iran is rendered in starkly binary terms: a deal or a confrontation, with no acknowledged middle ground. One might observe that this binary forecloses precisely the kind of multilateral, negotiated, incrementally constructed diplomatic architecture that the United Nations was designed to facilitate. Whether this foreclosure is incidental or constitutive of the speech's logic is a question worth holding open.
On Gaza, the formulation is striking in its compressed confidence: "we ended the war." The past tense is doing considerable analytical work here, transforming an ongoing situation of contested sovereignty, displacement, and unresolved legal status into a completed transaction — another line item in the ledger. The Board of Peace, described as encompassing approximately thirty countries, is presented as an institutional fact rather than an aspiration, though the relationship between this board and existing international legal frameworks remains, in the speech, entirely unspecified. The reader might note that the speech makes no mention of Palestinian statehood — not as a rejected proposition, not as a deferred question, but as a category that simply does not appear in the ledger at all. What cannot be transacted, it seems, cannot be spoken.
The Venezuela passage introduces what may be a particularly candid articulation of its operative logic. The arrest of Maduro, the sixty-five-billion-barrel oil arrangement, and the phrase "to the victor belong the spoils" (Trump 2026) — offered, one presumes, without irony — constitute an unusually explicit statement of extraction as entitlement. The Greenland agreement receives similar treatment: a territorial arrangement presented as a completed deal. The phrase "to the victor belong the spoils" might well serve as an epigraph for the entire address, capturing as it does the speech's understanding of international relations as a domain in which outcomes are distributed according to power rather than negotiated according to principle.
The closing sections address institutional reform — a fifteen-percent cut to the UN budget, an attack on the International Criminal Court — and technology, with artificial intelligence renamed "superintelligence" in a gesture that may tell us more about the speech's relationship to language than to technology. The address concludes with Washington at New York Harbor in 1776, a historical image whose function is to suture the entire ledger to a founding myth, thereby converting a list of transactions into a narrative of civilizational destiny. What is absent from the speech — international law as a constraint rather than an obstacle, multilateral obligation as a value rather than a cost, the existence of persons displaced or destroyed in the transactions enumerated — may ultimately prove more analytically productive than what is present.
President Pezeshkian: The Architecture of Inversion
A particularly significant feature of Pezeshkian's address may be its first gesture: the abandonment of his prepared remarks. This is itself a semiotic operation of considerable force. By setting aside the scripted text — the text vetted, approved, and calibrated for diplomatic consumption — Pezeshkian signals that what has just occurred in the hall (Trump's characterization of Iran as a terrorist state) has ruptured the conditions under which prepared diplomacy can function. The improvisation is, of course, also prepared in its way; spontaneity at the General Assembly is always a managed performance. But the gesture of rupture is doing real work: it positions everything that follows as a response compelled by the force of injustice, rather than a statement offered in the ordinary course of diplomatic exchange (Pezeshkian 2026).
The core rhetorical operation is inversion: "Those who are terrorists... describe us as such." This is not merely a denial of the accusation; it is an attempt to reverse the categorical apparatus entirely, to redirect the term "terrorist" back toward its speaker. The speech then proceeds to build its case through an accumulation of specific historical referents: the bombing of a school in Lamerd, attacks on a sports hall, the assassination of Iranian scientists, the killing of Ismail Haniyeh on the day of Pezeshkian's own inauguration. Each of these referents is offered not as an element of a geopolitical argument but as evidence in what amounts to a prosecutorial brief — one in which Iran occupies the position of victim and the unnamed but clearly indicated perpetrators occupy the position of aggressor.
The claim that "Iran has not attacked any country for the past two centuries" is perhaps a particularly audacious assertion, and its analytical weight depends entirely on the definition of "attack" one is willing to accept. The formulation appears to exclude proxy operations, asymmetric warfare conducted through allied non-state actors, and the various forms of strategic influence that do not conform to the classical model of one state directing its military forces against the territory of another. Whether this exclusion is a deliberate rhetorical strategy or a genuine expression of how the Iranian state understands its own conduct in the region is a question the speech itself cannot answer — though the very precision of the formulation ("two centuries," "any country") suggests a high degree of self-conscious calibration.
The nuclear passage operates through a carefully constructed double negation: "no nuclear weapons, and no limitations to peaceful nuclear technology." The conjunction is essential — it binds the renunciation of weapons to the assertion of an unqualified right, such that any attempt to impose limitations on the latter becomes, structurally, an accusation regarding the former. The double-standard formulation that follows — "the nuclear weapon is in Israel, but the inspectors in Iran" (Pezeshkian 2026) — may represent one of the speech's more effective moments of compression, distilling an enormously complex institutional and legal asymmetry into a single sentence whose force derives from its apparent simplicity.
Palestine appears as "an open wound on the conscience of the international community," and resistance is characterized as "human nature" — a formulation that naturalizes political violence by locating it outside the domain of choice and within the domain of biological or existential necessity. This naturalization is itself a significant move: if resistance is human nature, then it cannot be the object of moral judgment, only of recognition. One should note what the speech does not address: the 2022 protests within Iran, the domestic exercise of state power against Iranian citizens, the complex relationship between the state's claimed victimhood in international affairs and its exercise of sovereign authority over its own population. The speech's management of interiority — its consistent refusal to acknowledge any tension between its external posture of victimized restraint and the internal dynamics of governance — may be a particularly telling structural feature.
President Erdogan: Structural Contradiction as Rhetorical Strategy
Erdogan's speech positions Turkey, from its opening movements, as the voice of Palestine in the General Assembly — a positioning made both possible and necessary, he suggests, by the absence of President Abbas from the podium for two consecutive years (Erdogan 2026). The claim to speak for Palestine is thus grounded not in any formal mandate but in a vacancy: Turkey fills a space that would otherwise remain empty. Whether this filling constitutes solidarity, substitution, or appropriation is a question the speech prefers not to pose, though each possibility carries significantly different implications for the relationship between Turkish national interest and Palestinian self-determination.
The speech quotes the founding aspirations of the United Nations Charter and then measures the distance between those aspirations and the present reality — a rhetorical structure as old as the Charter itself, but one that Erdogan deploys with particular force in the context of Gaza. The descriptive language escalates systematically: Gaza as "the world's largest graveyard for children," as "the most inhumane and shameful concentration camp of our time” (Erdogan 2026). These formulations are not casual; the invocation of "concentration camp" carries a specific historical charge, one that reverses the victim-perpetrator relationship that has structured much of the post-Holocaust discourse surrounding Israel. Whether this reversal is analytically productive or politically inflammatory — or, perhaps more accurately, whether it is both simultaneously — is precisely the kind of question these speeches force upon their readers.
The five reform principles and the proposed defense alliance with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia introduce an institutional dimension that moves the speech beyond the register of moral condemnation into the register of structural proposal. Yet it is the call for recognition of Northern Cyprus that may constitute a particularly revealing moment — not for what it argues, but for the structural contradiction it introduces and must somehow manage. Turkey condemns the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory while simultaneously maintaining, and now seeking international legitimation for, its own military presence in and political control over northern Cyprus. The speech does not acknowledge this parallel; it cannot, for to do so would be to undermine the moral authority upon which its condemnation of Israeli occupation rests.
This is not to suggest a simple equivalence between the situations in Palestine and Cyprus — the histories, legal frameworks, and human costs differ in significant ways. But the structural homology — a state exercising effective control over territory whose sovereignty is internationally disputed, while condemning another state for doing the same — creates a tension that the speech must manage through omission. The reader might attend carefully to the mechanisms of this management: the spatial separation of the Cyprus passage from the Palestine passages, the shift in register from moral urgency to diplomatic formality, the implicit assumption that the audience will not perform the comparative operation that the speech's own structure invites. Whether this assumption is justified — whether, that is, the General Assembly operates according to norms that permit such selective application of principle — is itself a question of considerable analytical significance.
King Abdullah: The Semiotic Sovereignty of Naming
Abdullah's address is perhaps the most analytically disciplined of the four, not in its policy content — which is in many respects relatively constrained, reflecting Jordan's position as a state that must simultaneously maintain its relationship with Western powers and its legitimacy in the Arab world — but in its semiotic operations. The speech opens with a formulation that announces its own methodology: attention is characterized as both a "cognitive resource" and a "geopolitical one” (Abdullah 2026). This is not merely a rhetorical flourish; it is a claim about the nature of the struggle itself. If attention is a geopolitical resource, then the contest over where the international community directs its gaze is not peripheral to the conflict but constitutive of it.
The acknowledgment that Jordan has "chosen to manage the conflict, not confront it" may represent a particularly candid articulation of a middle-power strategy delivered from the General Assembly podium. The formulation is striking in its refusal of heroic framing: management rather than confrontation, accommodation rather than resistance. Yet this candor is itself a rhetorical strategy — by naming the constraint under which Jordan operates, Abdullah transforms limitation into a form of sophistication, positioning Jordan as the adult in a room of ideologues and maximalists.
A sustained operation is its systematic program of linguistic reformulation. What Israel calls "law enforcement," Abdullah renames "forcible transfer” (Abdullah 2026). This is not merely a contest over terminology; it is an attempt to exercise what one might call semiotic sovereignty — the power to determine the categories through which events are understood. Each reformulation carries legal weight: "forcible transfer" is a term with specific standing in international humanitarian law, and its substitution for "law enforcement" is an attempt to move the described events from the domain of domestic police power into the domain of international criminal liability. The speech is, in this sense, performing a legal operation through linguistic means.
The "three illusions to abandon" structure provides the speech with an architecture of systematic demystification, positioning Abdullah not as an advocate for a particular outcome but as an analyst who sees through the constructions that prevent others from perceiving reality accurately. The repeated formulation "this Israeli government" — rather than "Israel" — is itself a carefully calibrated choice. It localizes the critique in a particular political formation rather than in a state or a people, thereby preserving the possibility of future diplomatic engagement while sharpening the present condemnation. Whether this distinction is genuinely operative — whether, that is, the policies being criticized are specific to the current government or are continuous with longer structural patterns — is a question the formulation permits but does not pursue.
Perhaps most revealing is the explicit rejection of religious framing: "It is not." The brevity of this formulation belies its analytical ambition. By denying the theological dimension of the conflict, Abdullah is attempting to relocate the entire discourse from a domain in which claims are absolute and non-negotiable (the domain of religious truth) to a domain in which they are contingent and subject to political resolution (the domain of international law and diplomacy). Yet this relocation is itself a political act, one that serves Jordan's interests as a state whose legitimacy depends partly on its custodianship of holy sites and partly on its capacity to operate within the secular frameworks of international diplomacy. The speech's denial of religious framing is thus simultaneously an assertion of religious authority — only a state with recognized standing in the religious domain can credibly declare that the conflict is not, at its core, religious. This is a notably sophisticated semiotic operation: the exercise of theological authority for the purpose of denying theology's relevance.
Taken together, these four speeches do not merely represent different national perspectives on a common set of problems. They constitute, individually and collectively, exercises in the construction of reality through language — each one selecting, emphasizing, suppressing, and reframing in ways that reflect not only national interests but fundamental disagreements about the nature of international order, the meaning of sovereignty, the relationship between power and law, and the question of who possesses the authority to name what is happening in the world. The analytical layers that follow will attempt to trace these operations in greater detail, attending not only to what each speech says but to the conditions of possibility that make each speech sayable — and to the silences that each speech requires in order to maintain its coherence.
III. Reading the Speeches: Surface and Depth
It is perhaps useful, before turning to the deeper structures that organize these texts, to linger for a moment on their surfaces. The surface of a speech delivered to the General Assembly is itself a carefully constructed artifact—a membrane between what is said and what is meant, between what is offered to the audience and what is withheld from it. One might recall the foundational methodological caution that animates this inquiry: no person or thing says, describes, or represents what they or it means; and no person or thing means what they or it says or describes or represents. To read the surface, then, is not to take these speeches at face value in any naive sense, but rather to attend to what each speech appears to offer as its own self-understanding—the account each text provides of itself, the terms in which it invites its audience to receive it.
The Speeches at Face Value: What Each Text Appears to Say
One might begin with the speech of the United States, which appears to organize itself around what could be described as a transactional ledger—a systematic accounting of accomplishments rendered and debts owed. The text presents itself as a report from the chief executive of a going concern, one in which outcomes are measured in quantifiable terms: jobs created, markets opened, adversaries confronted, deals struck. The rhetorical posture is, on its surface, one of confident inventory. There is perhaps little ambiguity in the text's own understanding of itself: it is an enumeration of successes, an assertion that the current management of American power has produced results that are self-evidently desirable. The speech appears to assume—and it is this assumption that will require closer scrutiny below—that the audience shares, or ought to share, the evaluative framework within which these accomplishments register as accomplishments. Economic growth is presented not merely as a domestic achievement but as a contribution to the global order; bilateral negotiations are characterized not as exercises of superior bargaining power but as instances of mutual benefit. The text, at its surface, asks to be read as a record of service rendered.
The speech of the Islamic Republic of Iran offers, at its surface, what one might characterize as a counter-narrative—though that term perhaps already concedes too much to the framework it seeks to contest. The text presents itself as the testimony of a party that has been wronged, a systematic catalogue of injuries sustained and endured. Where the American speech offers a ledger of accomplishments, the Iranian speech offers a ledger of grievances. But the surface of the Iranian text is somewhat more complex than a simple enumeration of wrongs, for it also presents itself as a narrative of steadfastness—of a nation that has not merely suffered but has persisted in the face of suffering, and whose persistence is itself a form of moral achievement. The speech appears to organize itself around the tension between victimhood and agency: Iran is both acted upon and acting, both the object of unjust power and the subject of principled resistance. At its surface, the text invites the audience to understand Iranian conduct not as defiance for its own sake but as fidelity to principles that the international community itself professes to uphold.
It is perhaps in the Turkish speech that one encounters a particularly moralized surface. The text appears to position Turkey as the conscience of the international community—or, more precisely, as the voice that articulates what the collective conscience of the international community ought to be saying but is not. The rhetorical posture is one of advocacy on behalf of those who cannot speak for themselves: displaced populations, besieged civilians, forgotten crises. The speech is organized, at its surface, around a series of humanitarian emergencies to which the international community has failed to respond adequately, and in each instance Turkey is presented as the actor that has stepped into the breach—hosting refugees, providing aid, demanding action. The text asks to be read as an appeal from a responsible member of the international community to its fellow members, a call to honor commitments that have been rhetorically endorsed but practically abandoned.
The Jordanian speech offers what is, on its surface, a particularly disciplined presentation among the four. One might suggest that it is distinguished by a particular attentiveness to the mechanics of international attention itself—the way in which attention functions as a geopolitical resource, distributed unevenly and according to logics that are rarely made explicit. The text appears to engage in a systematic project of renaming: it identifies the euphemisms through which uncomfortable realities are managed and proposes to replace them with more precise—and more discomfiting—designations. What others call a "conflict" the Jordanian speech insists on calling an "occupation." What others describe as a "peace process" the speech characterizes as a structure of indefinite deferral. The surface of the Jordanian text is notable for this quality of deliberate terminological contestation—the insistence that the words used to describe the situation are themselves part of the situation, and that to accept the prevailing vocabulary is already to have conceded the argument.
A preliminary observation on shared vocabulary
What is particularly striking about these four speeches, read side by side at the level of their surfaces, is the degree to which they share a common vocabulary. All four invoke "peace." All four appeal to "international law." All four assert the centrality of "sovereignty" and "security." And yet it requires very little analytical effort to observe that these shared terms function quite differently in each text—that they are, in a meaningful sense, homonyms rather than synonyms. "Peace" in the American speech appears to denote the absence of challenges to American interests; "peace" in the Iranian speech appears to denote the cessation of externally imposed coercion; "peace" in the Turkish speech appears to denote the resolution of humanitarian crises through Turkish-led moral action; "peace" in the Jordanian speech appears to denote the enforcement of legal obligations that have been systematically evaded. One might suggest that the General Assembly is, among other things, a space in which identical words are deployed to advance incompatible meanings—a phenomenon that the surface of these speeches simultaneously exemplifies and conceals.
"Sovereignty" performs a similarly paradoxical function across the four texts. For the United States, sovereignty appears to operate as a principle of non-interference—but selectively, and primarily as a shield against the claims of international institutions upon American autonomy. For Iran, sovereignty operates as a principle of resistance against external pressure—a legal and moral basis for refusing to submit to coercive demands. For Turkey, sovereignty is both asserted (against external criticism of Turkish actions) and transcended (in the claim to act on behalf of populations beyond Turkish borders). For Jordan, sovereignty is invoked precisely to mark its systematic violation by others. It is perhaps possible to suggest that "sovereignty" in the General Assembly functions less as a concept with determinate content than as a rhetorical resource whose meaning is constituted by the use to which it is put—and that this constitutive indeterminacy is not a defect of the discourse but a condition of its possibility.
The Speeches as Masks: Grounding Premises and Recursive Structures
One turns now from the surface to what lies beneath it—or, more precisely, to the structures that produce the surface while remaining largely invisible within it. It is here that the methodological principles articulated at the outset of this analysis become particularly relevant. If no person or thing means what they or it says or describes or represents, then the task of analysis is not merely to attend to what the speeches say but to reconstruct the premises from which they speak—the prior commitments, the foundational assumptions, the grounding convictions that organize the selection and arrangement of facts, arguments, and appeals. These premises are, by their nature, largely tacit: they are not argued for but argued from; they are not conclusions but starting points. And it is precisely their tacitness that gives them their organizing power, for what is assumed need not be defended, and what need not be defended cannot easily be contested.
The American speech: power as order
The grounding premise of the American speech—the premise that appears to organize the selection and arrangement of every fact, every claim, every rhetorical gesture—might be articulated, with appropriate caution, as follows: American power is the international order. This is not, one hastens to note, a premise that the speech states explicitly; indeed, the speech goes to considerable lengths to frame American power as operating within an order that it serves rather than constitutes. But the recursive structure of the text—the manner in which facts are selected to reproduce the premise from which they are selected—suggests something rather different. Economic data is invoked not as one indicator among many but as evidence of a natural hierarchy: American prosperity confirms American competence, which confirms American leadership, which confirms the rightness of the order over which America presides. Military actions are presented not as exercises of power but as acts of custodianship. Bilateral agreements are characterized not as outcomes of asymmetric bargaining but as expressions of shared interest—an interest that happens, in every case, to align with American preferences.
It is perhaps possible to suggest that a particularly deep premise of the American speech is one that cannot be stated within the speech itself without undermining its rhetorical architecture: that there is no law above American capacity. The speech pays elaborate tribute to the concept of sovereignty—but sovereignty, in the text's operational logic, appears to function as a principle that shields American autonomy while imposing obligations on others. International institutions are praised when they serve American interests and criticized—or simply ignored—when they do not. The speech's relationship to international law is, one might suggest, not one of subordination but of patronage: the law is upheld insofar as it reflects the preferences of the patron, and the patron's preferences are treated as the law's authentic meaning. The recursive quality of this structure is worth noting: the speech selects facts that confirm American dominance, presents that dominance as service to the international order, and thereby reproduces the premise that American power and international order are coextensive.
The Iranian speech: illegitimacy as ground
The grounding premise of the Iranian speech might be characterized—again with the necessary hedges—as the conviction that the current international order is illegitimate because it serves the powerful at the expense of the principled. Iran, within this framework, is positioned as the authentic voice of resistance against illegitimate power—a resistance that is not merely political but civilizational, rooted in a moral and historical tradition that predates and transcends the institutional arrangements of the post-1945 order. The recursive structure here is no less pronounced than in the American case, though it operates in a different register. Victimhood narratives are selected and arranged to confirm the illegitimacy of the order: sanctions are not regulatory instruments but acts of aggression; diplomatic isolation is not the consequence of Iranian conduct but evidence of the system's structural bias; the nuclear negotiations are not a process of mutual accommodation but a theatre in which illegitimate demands are imposed under the guise of legality.
What is particularly revealing about the Iranian speech's recursive structure is the manner in which it mirrors the American speech while inverting its valuations. Where the American speech treats the existing order as legitimate and American power as its guarantor, the Iranian speech treats the existing order as illegitimate and American power as its pathology. Both speeches operate from premises that are, in their own terms, irrefutable—because each selects only those facts that confirm its premise and excludes or recharacterizes those that might challenge it. The Iranian speech's relationship to international law is, one might suggest, no less instrumental than the American speech's, though the instrumentality takes a different form: where the American speech claims ownership of the law, the Iranian speech claims that the law has been corrupted by its custodians and that Iran's defiance is therefore a form of fidelity to the law's authentic spirit. Both positions are, in their recursive self-confirmation, structurally identical—a symmetry that neither speech can acknowledge without undermining its own foundations.
The Turkish speech: moral authority as inheritance
The Turkish speech operates from a premise that is perhaps somewhat more historically layered than those of the American and Iranian speeches. One might suggest—tentatively, and with awareness that the suggestion carries implications that the speech itself would likely resist—that the grounding premise is one of inherited moral authority. Turkey is positioned in the text not merely as a regional power with humanitarian commitments but as the legitimate spokesperson for Muslim conscience in the international arena—an inheritor, however implicitly, of a tradition of custodianship that resonates with Ottoman-era claims to authority over Muslim populations and holy sites. The speech's recursive structure is organized around the selection of humanitarian crises—refugee flows, civilian casualties, failed states—each of which serves to confirm Turkey's moral standing as the actor that responds when others do not.
The facts selected by the Turkish speech are not, one hastens to observe, fabricated; the humanitarian crises it invokes are real, the suffering it describes is genuine. But the principle of selection—the logic by which certain crises are foregrounded and others are not, by which Turkish actions are characterized as selfless while the inaction of others is characterized as culpable—reproduces the premise from which it proceeds. Turkey's moral authority is not argued for on the basis of evidence; rather, evidence is selected to illustrate an authority that is already assumed. The recursive loop is particularly visible in the speech's treatment of the refugee crisis: Turkey's hosting of refugees is presented not as a policy choice shaped by geographic proximity and political calculation but as an expression of civilizational commitment—a commitment that other nations, lacking Turkey's moral depth, have failed to match. It is possible to suggest that the speech's humanitarian rhetoric functions simultaneously as a claim to regional leadership and as a reproach to the Western powers whose moral vocabulary it appropriates and redirects.
The Jordanian speech: the conscience within the system
The Jordanian speech presents a structurally interesting case, for its grounding premise contains within itself an acknowledgment of the tension that the other three speeches suppress. The premise might be articulated as follows: the rules-based international order exists, and its rules are binding—but those rules have been selectively applied, and this selectivity threatens to destroy the order from within. Jordan speaks, within this framework, not as an outsider challenging the system's legitimacy (as Iran does) nor as a custodian claiming to embody the system (as the United States does) nor as a moral authority transcending the system (as Turkey does), but as a participant within the system who insists on holding the system to its own stated commitments. Jordan is, in the speech's self-understanding, the conscience of the order—the voice that reminds the other participants of what they have promised and demands an accounting of what they have failed to deliver.
The recursive structure of the Jordanian speech operates through the selection of legal violations—instances in which the rules-based order has been invoked to constrain some actors while being systematically waived for others. Each violation is presented not as evidence of the order's illegitimacy (the Iranian move) but as evidence of its incomplete and inconsistent application—a failure of will rather than a failure of principle. The facts selected by the Jordanian speech are arranged to confirm that the order could work, that its rules are adequate to the demands of justice, but that the political will to enforce those rules has been captured by interests that the rules themselves were designed to constrain. It is perhaps in this recursive structure that one can identify a significant vulnerability in the Jordanian speech's framework: for if the selective enforcement of rules is not an aberration but a structural feature of the order—if the rules were designed, from the outset, to be selectively enforced—then the Jordanian premise collapses into the Iranian one, and the distinction between reform from within and rejection from without becomes untenable.
The recursive architecture: a preliminary synthesis
What emerges from this reading of the four speeches—a reading that is, one acknowledges, itself organized by premises that would reward scrutiny—is a pattern of recursive self-confirmation that is perhaps endemic to the genre of the General Assembly address. Each speech begins from a premise that it cannot state explicitly without rendering itself vulnerable to contestation. Each speech selects facts that confirm its premise while excluding or recharacterizing facts that might challenge it. And each speech presents its conclusions—conclusions that are, in a meaningful sense, already contained in its premises—as discoveries arrived at through the neutral examination of evidence. The result is a set of texts that are, at the level of their surfaces, addressed to the same audience and engaged with the same world, but that are, at the level of their organizing premises, constitutive of different audiences and different worlds. The General Assembly is, in this reading, not a forum in which different perspectives on a shared reality are debated, but a space in which different realities, each sustained by its own recursive logic, are simultaneously performed.
It is perhaps worth noting, in conclusion, that the recursive structures identified here are not unique to these four speeches or to the General Assembly as an institution. They are, one might suggest, a feature of political discourse as such—a consequence of the fact that political speech is never merely descriptive but always also constitutive, never merely representing a world but always also constructing one. What distinguishes the General Assembly address as a genre is not the presence of recursive self-confirmation but its peculiar intensity: the compression of an entire national worldview into a single text, the requirement that this text address an audience that does not share the speaker's premises while simultaneously reinforcing those premises for the domestic audience that is its true addressee. The speeches analyzed here are, in this sense, performances of a particular kind—performances in which the mask and the face have become, through long practice, indistinguishable from one another.
IV. Semiotic Meanings and Values: The Construction of Objectivity Through Signified Objects
It may be useful, at this juncture, to consider the ways in which each of these speeches undertakes something far more ambitious than mere persuasion—namely, the construction of an entire semiotic field within which certain claims about the world can appear as self-evidently objective. One does not simply assert the real; one must first construct the apparatus of signification through which the real becomes legible, becomes available as a category of experience that an audience may receive as unmediated truth. The question, then, is not whether these speeches describe reality accurately—a question that would presuppose the very objectivity under examination—but rather how each speech constructs the conditions of possibility for its own realism. What are the signified objects upon which each text's claim to objectivity depends? And through what ideological frameworks do those objects acquire their apparent solidity?
For the Trump address, the signified objects are strikingly concrete—or rather, they perform concreteness with an insistence that itself becomes ideological. Numbers, deals, military capacities, economic indicators: these constitute the furniture of a world in which objectivity is coextensive with quantifiability. The "greatest economy in the history of the world," the "most powerful military," the sanctions that produce measurable economic pain—these are not merely claims but semiotic anchors that fix the speech's entire framework of meaning. Objectivity, in this register, is what can be counted, weighed, and deployed. The implications are considerable: a world composed entirely of quantifiable objects is a world in which power differentials are not merely real but self-justifying, for they too can be measured, and measurement itself is taken as morally neutral. One might suggest that this constitutes a kind of semiotic positivism—though one would want to be cautious about pressing the analogy too far—in which the gap between signifier and signified has been collapsed by sheer repetitive force.
The Iranian address constructs its objectivity through a radically different semiotic architecture. Here the signified objects are historical injuries, moral categories, and the accumulated weight of suffered injustice. The "maximum pressure" campaign, the assassination of General Soleimani, the withdrawal from the JCPOA—these are not presented as isolated facts but as specimens of a larger pattern whose reality is guaranteed precisely by its repetitive structure. Objectivity, for this speech, inheres not in individual data points but in the recognizable shape of domination across time. The ideological framework is one in which suffering constitutes evidence—indeed, a particularly reliable form of evidence, because it cannot be fabricated by the powerful. "We did not bend the knee. We did not bow our head"—the body's testimony becomes the ultimate signified, the object that grounds all other claims in experiential reality.
Turkey's semiotic field is particularly architecturally complex, inasmuch as it attempts to hold in suspension both the idealism of international order and the devastating evidence of that order's failure. The signified objects here are institutional—the United Nations Charter, the Security Council, the promise of collective security—but they are presented as objects that have been hollowed out from within, shells of meaning that retain their formal structure while having lost their substantive content. Objectivity, in this framework, is something that once existed and has been betrayed. The closing poem—invoking divine judgment upon those who let children die—suggests that the ultimate ground of the real lies not in institutions or in measurable outcomes but in a moral order that transcends both, and against which both may be judged. One might observe that this represents a kind of semiotic eschatology, though the observation would require substantial qualification.
Jordan's construction of objectivity is, it might be argued, particularly attentive to epistemic self-consciousness among the four. Abdullah's speech does not merely present signified objects; it systematically interrogates the process of signification itself. When he insists that "demolishing Palestinian homes to expand illegal settlements is not law enforcement" but rather "forcible transfer," he is performing a semiotic operation of considerable sophistication: stripping away a layer of signification to reveal another, more legally precise layer beneath. The objectivity of his account depends not on the accumulation of evidence but on the demonstration that existing descriptions are themselves distortions—that the current semiotic regime has been corrupted, and that a more accurate one can be recovered through disciplined analysis. This is objectivity as restoration—a return to the proper correspondence between signifier and signified that has been disrupted by political euphemism.
The Semiotic Architecture of Law: Four Classificatory Systems
It is within the domain of law—and specifically in the divergent ways these speeches deploy the vocabulary of domestic and international law—that the semiotic differences among the four texts become especially visible. This observation may warrant extended consideration, not least because all four speeches share a remarkably common legal vocabulary while deploying that vocabulary within radically incommensurable meaning structures. Each speech invokes "law," "rights," "sovereignty," "international obligations"—and yet these shared terms function as what one might call false cognates across the speeches' respective semiotic systems, words whose surface similarity conceals fundamentally different classificatory logics.
One finds it useful here to draw upon the framework developed in the literature on theocratic constitutionalism, where constitutionalism has been understood as "a system of classification, the principal object of which is to define the characteristics of constitutions, which is used to determine the legitimacy of a constitutional system” (Backer 2009, 108). The insight is transferable—perhaps with appropriate caution—to the speeches under examination. Each speech, one might suggest, deploys law not merely as a set of rules or principles but as a classificatory system, a framework for sorting legitimate from illegitimate action, for determining which exercises of power merit the designation "lawful" and which do not. The question is not what each speech says about law in the narrow sense, but what classificatory apparatus each speech brings to bear upon the category of legality itself.
The Trump address treats law, it would appear, as fundamentally transactional. International agreements are "deals"—the Iran nuclear deal, trade agreements, bilateral arrangements—and their legitimacy derives not from any intrinsic normative content but from their utility to the contracting parties, or more precisely, from their utility to the United States as the dominant contracting party. The International Criminal Court is dismissed as "an evil group of people"—a characterization that does not merely reject the institution but refuses to engage with its legal character altogether, recategorizing it from the domain of law into the domain of hostile agency. Law, in this classificatory system, exists only insofar as the sovereign chooses to invoke it; it possesses no independent reality, no capacity to bind the powerful absent their consent. One might observe that this represents not so much a theory of law as a theory of power that has absorbed law into itself—though one would want to note that this absorption is itself a classificatory act of considerable ideological significance.
Using this framework as an analytical tool, the Trump speech can be examined as a classificatory system that effectively denies the existence of any classificatory system above the sovereign state. Legitimacy flows downward from sovereign power; it does not flow upward from legal norms. The bilateral deal replaces the multilateral framework not merely as a practical preference but as an ontological commitment—the only real legal relationships are those between identifiable sovereign actors exercising identifiable sovereign will. This may be described as a form of legal nominalism: law names particular arrangements of power, but the universals to which international law aspires have no independent existence within the speech’s operative logic.
Iran's classificatory system operates through a different logic entirely. Here, international law is real—indeed, its reality is precisely what makes the conduct of the powerful so egregious. "None of the international laws have been adhered to by them"—the formulation is revealing, for it simultaneously affirms the existence and binding character of international law while indicting those who claim to uphold it. Law, in this framework, is the weapon of the powerful that should—and in principle does—bind the powerful equally. The double standard is not merely unfair; it is a form of structural injustice, because the very legal architecture that was constructed to constrain power has been appropriated as an instrument of power. Iran invokes law as moral claim rather than as institutional framework: the authority of international law derives not from its institutional embodiment in courts and treaties—which have demonstrably failed—but from its moral truth, which persists despite institutional betrayal.
Within the classificatory framework I develop, this might be understood as a system in which the gap between constitutional text and constitutional practice itself becomes the measure of illegitimacy. The Iranian speech does not reject the classificatory apparatus of international law; it insists that the apparatus has been applied with systematic dishonesty. The classification of certain nuclear programs as threatening and others as legitimate, of certain assassinations as targeted killings and others as terrorism, of certain sanctions as lawful and others as aggression—these classificatory acts reveal, in the Iranian reading, not the operation of law but its corruption. Legitimacy, in this system, would require the consistent and impartial application of the classificatory criteria that already exist but are honored only in the breach.
Turkey's approach to law represents yet another classificatory modality—one that might be described, with appropriate tentativeness, as restorationist. The speech repeatedly invokes the founding promises of the United Nations and its Charter, not as dead letters but as aspirational commitments that retain their normative force despite decades of betrayal. Law exists; law is good; law has been selectively applied in ways that have emptied it of its original meaning. The Security Council's structure—"the world is bigger than five"—is presented not as merely unjust but as a classificatory distortion, a system that produces illegitimate outcomes precisely because its classificatory criteria privilege the interests of a small number of states over the universal principles the organization was founded to serve.
My framework can be used to examine this position. Turkey's classificatory system accepts the existing constitutional architecture of international law as legitimate in principle—the Charter, the Universal Declaration, the apparatus of collective security—but insists that the system has been captured, that the classificatory criteria have been subordinated to power in ways that produce systematic misclassification. States that violate international law are classified as allies rather than aggressors; populations that deserve protection are classified as threats. The call is not for a new classificatory system but for the restoration of the original one—a return to the founding principles that, in Turkey’s account, would produce the just outcomes that the current application prevents.
Jordan's approach to law may be among the more analytically disciplined of the four, though one should be cautious about ranking such incommensurable projects. Abdullah treats law as text—specifically, as text that has been subjected to a systematic regime of euphemistic glossing that has obscured its plain meaning. When he states that "demolishing Palestinian homes to expand illegal settlements is not law enforcement" but rather "forcible transfer," he is not merely making a legal argument; he is performing a classificatory correction, stripping away a layer of illegitimate signification to reveal the proper legal classification beneath. The settlements are "illegal"—a legal classification that exists in binding international law—and therefore actions taken to expand them cannot be classified as "law enforcement," because enforcement of law cannot logically proceed through violation of law. The syllogistic structure is precise and deliberately so.
This is, one might suggest, constitutionalism as hermeneutic discipline—the insistence that the classificatory system of international law contains within itself the resources for its own correct application, if only the interpretive distortions introduced by power can be removed. Abdullah does not need a new legal framework; he needs the existing one to be read honestly. A possible application of my framework is to treat this as a classificatory system that is not rejected (as in Trump's speech), indicted for selective application (as in Iran's), or called to restoration of founding principles (as in Turkey's), but subjected to close textual analysis that reveals the gap between what the law says and what powerful actors claim it says. Legitimacy, in this system, is presented as a function of interpretive fidelity—the willingness to call things by their proper legal names.
V. Recursive Structures of Textual Sonorities
One turns now to what might be called—with a tentativeness appropriate to the novelty of the analytical frame—the sonic and textual architectures of these speeches: the ways in which each text functions not merely as a vehicle for propositional content but as a sonoric structure that invokes, amplifies, and recursively reinforces particular cultural responses. It would be insufficient to analyze what these speeches say without attending to how they sound—not in the narrow acoustic sense, but in the broader sense of textual sonority, the patterns of rhythm, repetition, register, and resonance through which a speech constitutes its audience even as it addresses that audience. These are not merely rhetorical devices in the classical sense; they are, one might suggest, recursive structures that loop back upon themselves, each iteration reinforcing the premises established at the speech's core while simultaneously projecting those premises outward toward intended audiences and against designated adversaries.
The Trump address operates within a sonic register that one might tentatively characterize as the cadence of the domestic rally transposed into the international arena. The superlative is the fundamental unit of this sonority: "greatest," "biggest," "most powerful," "we won in a giant landslide." These are not arguments but sonic events—percussive assertions that function less through their propositional content than through their cumulative rhythmic force. The audience for this sonority is, it seems clear, not the assembled diplomats but the domestic American constituency watching through the mediating apparatus of television. The United Nations General Assembly hall becomes, in this sonic economy, a backdrop—a prestigious stage upon which the domestic performance acquires the patina of international significance without requiring any substantive engagement with internationalism. The boast, the threat, the dismissive aside: these are the sonic building blocks of a textual architecture designed to produce in its intended audience the satisfying sensation of dominance confirmed.
The recursive character of this sonority warrants particular attention. Each superlative reinforces the framework within which the next superlative becomes credible. If America has the "greatest economy in the history of the world," then it follows that its military must be "the most powerful," that its diplomatic achievements must be "unprecedented," that its leader's electoral mandate must have been "a giant landslide." The chain of superlatives is not additive but multiplicative—each claim amplifies and is amplified by every other, creating a closed system of mutual reinforcement that becomes increasingly resistant to external disconfirmation. One might observe that this recursive structure functions as a kind of closed recursive loop of mutual reinforcement, though the metaphor should not be pressed too far.
Iran's sonic register is constructed from fundamentally different materials, though it exhibits its own recursive logic. The martyr's lament, the righteous fury, the hand extended in peace despite undeserved suffering—these are the sonoric elements of a textual architecture rooted in a tradition of witness-bearing that is at once specifically Shi'a and broadly resonant across traditions of resistance. "We did not bend the knee. We did not bow our head"—the cadence here is incantatory, the parallel structure transforming a political claim into something approaching liturgical affirmation. The body that refuses submission becomes the ultimate sonic object, the thing around which the speech's entire sonority organizes itself.
The recursive structure of the Iranian address is particularly visible in its management of multiple audiences. The speech projects simultaneously toward a domestic Iranian constituency (for whom the language of resistance carries immediate experiential weight), toward the broader Islamic world (for whom the language of injustice resonates with collective historical memory), and toward Western media (which functions not as an audience to be persuaded but as an adversary whose expected hostility itself becomes evidence for the speech's claims). Each audience's reception reinforces the speech's premises: domestic pride confirms the reality of resistance; Islamic solidarity confirms the universality of the injustice; Western hostility confirms the existence of the double standard. The recursion is not merely structural but strategic—the speech is designed so that the very diversity of its reception amplifies its central claims.
Turkey's sonic register draws upon what one might cautiously identify as the patrimony of Ottoman rhetorical tradition—the voice of civilizational authority that speaks not for a nation-state but for a broader moral community. The speech positions Erdoğan as simultaneously a head of state and a voice of conscience, the patriarch who assumes the burden of speaking truths that others lack the courage or the standing to articulate. "The world is bigger than five"—the formula has the compression and memorability of a proverb, and it functions as one, condensing an entire critique of international order into a single sonic unit that can be repeated, quoted, and circulated far beyond its original context.
The closing poem—invoking God's punishment upon those who remain silent while children are killed—represents the culmination of this sonoric architecture. It is a shift in register so dramatic that it constitutes a kind of sonic rupture, breaking the frame of diplomatic address to invoke a higher tribunal altogether. The recursive logic here is eschatological: the poem's invocation of divine judgment retrospectively reframes everything that preceded it as testimony in a trial whose verdict is already determined. The audience—the Muslim ummah, with Turkey positioned as its spokesman—is constituted not merely as listeners but as witnesses to this testimony, co-participants in a moral reckoning that the diplomatic register of the speech's earlier sections had only prepared. One might suggest, with appropriate caution, that this recursive escalation from diplomacy to prophecy represents a distinctive sonoric strategy that is available only to speakers who can plausibly claim to speak from within a tradition of sacred rhetoric.
Jordan's sonic register is particularly restrained—and, one might argue, especially forceful precisely in its restraint. Abdullah speaks in the register of the technocrat-philosopher, the voice of measured analysis whose very composure becomes an indictment of the chaos it describes. The opening move—the acknowledgment that attention spans are short, that the audience is already preparing not to listen—is a sonic gambit of considerable sophistication, constituting the audience as self-aware participants in a shared predicament rather than passive recipients of rhetoric. The systematic renaming that follows—the stripping of euphemism, the insistence on proper legal terminology—has the cadence not of oratory but of diagnosis, the careful, methodical identification of symptoms that collectively point to a pathology the audience may prefer not to name.
The recursive structure of Abdullah's sonority operates through the accumulation of corrected classifications. Each renaming—each insistence that a euphemistic description be replaced with a legally precise one—reinforces the speech's foundational claim that the existing discourse has been systematically corrupted. The recursion is epistemological: each correction demonstrates the need for the next, because if "law enforcement" can be revealed as "forcible transfer," then every other term in the existing lexicon becomes suspect. The audience—Western policymakers and opinion-formers, one might suppose—is constituted as a readership rather than a listenership, an audience that processes language analytically rather than emotionally. This is a speech designed not to be applauded but to be quoted, not to move but to be cited—its sonic economy is that of the policy paper rather than the podium, and its recursive force derives from the cumulative weight of evidence methodically presented.
What emerges from this analysis, if the foregoing observations carry any persuasive weight, is that the sonoric structures of these speeches are not merely decorative overlays upon substantive content but constitutive elements of the speeches' respective realities. The rally cadence, the martyr's lament, the patriarch's judgment, the technocrat's diagnosis—these are not different ways of saying the same thing but different ways of constructing the world within which saying becomes possible. The recursion is the critical feature: each speech loops back upon itself, each iteration tightening the connection between sonic form and ideological content, until the form itself becomes indistinguishable from the argument. To hear is already to be positioned within the speech's classificatory system, already to have accepted—if only provisionally, if only for the duration of listening—the premises upon which the speech's entire architecture depends. It is in this sense that textual sonority is not merely an aesthetic phenomenon but a political one, not merely a feature of rhetoric but a condition of the semiotic regimes through which these speeches construct their respective objectivities.
VI. Layer 5: The Jewish Question as Theological Lebenswelt
A proposed analytical contribution of this essay — the structuring absence at the heart of all four addresses.
The Jew as Theological Lebenswelt
One arrives, at this juncture, at what is perhaps a principal analytical contribution of the present essay — a contribution that requires, by way of preliminary caution, an acknowledgment of its own difficulty. The claim to be developed across the following pages is not, or not principally, a claim about the empirical circumstances of Jewish communities within Islamic or Christian polities, though such circumstances will necessarily figure in the analysis. It is, rather, a claim about a structuring absence: the proposition that the theological and historico-theological status of the Jew — understood not as an individual human subject but as a figure within competing theological economies of sovereignty, membership, and legitimate governance — may function as one organizing principle around which significant elements of all four addresses are arranged, even though, and indeed precisely because, this principle is never named as such.
To approach this claim with the care it requires, one must first attend to the theological traditions that provide its conditions of possibility. It would be imprudent to suggest that these traditions are monolithic or that they have remained static across centuries of development, contestation, and reform. Yet it is perhaps equally imprudent — and analytically more consequential — to ignore the persistence of certain structural features that characterize the relationship between Jewish existence and the theological imagination of both Islamic and Christian civilizational orders (Backer 2008). What follows is an attempt, necessarily schematic and offered with appropriate tentativeness, to sketch the relevant theological architecture.
The Theological Architecture of Jewish Non-Sovereignty
A preliminary methodological clarification is warranted before proceeding. The analysis that follows is discursive, not theological. It makes no claim about the verities of religious dogma, the correctness of any tradition’s self-understanding, or the internal development of theological positions within Islam, Christianity, or any other faith community. What is under examination is the discursive trace of theological categories as they surface in, structure, and constrain political speech — the work these categories perform in the texts under analysis, not their truth or falsity within the traditions from which they emerge. Formalist approaches to the verities of religious theology, outlook, and dogma may well be at variance with the discursive formations described here; traditions evolve, reform, and contest their own inheritance. That is a matter for the traditions themselves to address. The present inquiry concerns itself with what the texts do, not with what the traditions teach — or, more precisely, with what the traditions have deposited in the discursive field through which these speeches operate, whether or not the traditions themselves have since moved beyond those deposits in their formal theological self-understanding.
Within classical Islamic jurisprudence (Mayer 1991) — and it is important to note that one speaks here of a tradition of immense internal complexity, not of a doctrinal monolith — the status of Jews was organized around two interlocking theological-legal categories. The first was their designation as ahl al-kitab, People of the Book, a categorization that accorded them a recognized place within the Islamic order precisely by defining the terms and limits of that recognition. The second was the institution of dhimma, the covenant of protection through which non-Muslim monotheists were incorporated into the Islamic polity on conditions that simultaneously guaranteed their physical security and inscribed their structural subordination. The Pact of Umar traditions, whatever their precise historical provenance — and this remains, as scholars have noted, a matter of considerable debate — codified what one might characterize as the theological grammar of this incorporation: Jews and Christians could reside within Dar al-Islam, could practice their faith within prescribed limits, could engage in commerce and certain professions, but could not exercise sovereignty, could not command Muslims, could not build new houses of worship taller than mosques, could not display their religious symbols in public space. They were, in a formulation that captures the essential structural point, residents who could never become members.
The Quranic narrative of Banu Isra'il provides what one might read as the deeper theological substrate of this arrangement. The covenant given to the Children of Israel — acknowledged, honored, and in its way revered within the Islamic textual tradition — was nevertheless understood as a covenant that had been, through the repeated failures of its recipients, forfeited or superseded. The dispersal of the Jewish people was thus legible, within this theological framework, not as a mere historical contingency but as a divine dispensation: the working-out in historical time of a theological judgment upon a people who had received revelation and failed to maintain its covenantal obligations. One need not endorse this reading to recognize its structural consequence: if Jewish dispersal is theologically mandated, then Jewish sovereignty — the re-gathering of a dispersed people into a self-governing polity exercising territorial authority — constitutes not merely a political problem but a theological impossibility, an affront to the divine order of history.
The Christian theological tradition requires a more differentiated treatment than the schematic account of supersessionism might suggest — and it is here that the distinction between discursive formation and formal theological position becomes most analytically consequential. Classical Christian supersessionism — the claim that the New Covenant in Christ replaces, fulfills, or renders obsolete the Old Covenant with Israel — did generate, across centuries of European history, a distinctive economy of Jewish displacement. The figure of the ‘wandering Jew’ — the Ahasuerus tradition in its various European elaborations — crystallized this theology into narrative form: the Jew who wanders because wandering is his theological condition, who cannot settle because settlement would imply the restoration of a covenant that has been superseded.
Yet the Catholic tradition has, in its formal magisterial expression, undertaken what may be the most consequential internal theological revision of any of the traditions under examination. The Second Vatican Council’s Declaration Nostra Aetate (1965) explicitly repudiated the claim that Jews should be ‘presented as rejected or accursed by God,’ affirmed that ‘God holds the Jews most dear for the sake of their Fathers’ and that ‘He does not repent of the gifts He makes or of the calls He issues,’ and recognized the Church as drawing ‘sustenance from the root of that well-cultivated olive tree onto which have been grafted the wild shoots, the Gentiles’ (Second Vatican Council 1965, sec. 4). John Paul II extended this trajectory, referring to Jews as ‘our elder brothers,’ invoking a ‘covenant never revoked by God,’ and characterizing the ‘mystery of Israel’ as involving an ‘irrevocable calling’ (John Paul II 1999). The theological architecture of Jewish displacement was thus formally dismantled — from within — by the tradition that had most elaborately constructed it.
The analytical significance of this revision for the present inquiry is, however, more complex than a simple narrative of theological progress might suggest. The question is not whether the Catholic magisterium has formally repudiated supersessionism — it has, and the documents are unambiguous. The question is what discursive trace the centuries of supersessionist formation have deposited in the broader civilizational field within which Christian-majority states, Christian-inflected secular cultures, and the institutional architectures they have produced continue to operate. Formal theological revision at the level of magisterial pronouncement does not, and perhaps cannot, immediately dissolve the discursive formations that centuries of contrary teaching produced — the habits of perception, the categories of political imagination, the assumptions about Jewish belonging and non-belonging that were deposited in European and subsequently global political culture long before Nostra Aetate attempted to uproot them. The wandering Jew may have been formally rehabilitated by the Council; whether the figure has been dislodged from the political unconscious of cultures shaped by centuries of its circulation is a different and perhaps more intractable question.
One might suggest — and the suggestion is offered as hypothesis rather than conclusion — that the discursive field within which the General Assembly addresses operate may contain sedimented theological formations whose relationship to the formal positions of the traditions that produced them is, at best, oblique. Trump’s speech, for instance, mentions ‘the persecution of Christians’ but does not engage with Judaism as a living tradition — a silence that may owe more to the residual categories of American Protestant culture than to any deliberate theological position, and that sits in tension with the Catholic magisterium’s explicit affirmation of Judaism’s continuing covenantal significance. The formal theology has moved; the discursive formation may not have followed — and it is the formation, not the theology, that this analysis traces.
What emerges from this admittedly compressed sketch is a structural convergence that deserves careful attention. Across both major theological traditions — and again, one must insist on the internal diversity and historical development of each — the Jew occupies a position that might be characterized as constitutive exteriority: present within the polity, recognized by the polity, in important respects necessary to the polity's self-understanding, yet permanently excluded from full membership in the polity and, in particular, prohibited from exercising sovereign authority. This is not a marginal or incidental feature of either tradition. It is, one might venture to suggest, a structural element of the theological Lebenswelt — the lived world of theological meaning — within which both Islamic and Christian civilizational orders have historically understood themselves.
Service Without Membership: The Instrumental Paradox
A feature of this arrangement that warrants particular analytical attention is what one might term its instrumental paradox. Across centuries of Islamic and Christian governance, Jews served monarchs and caliphs in capacities that were often indispensable to the functioning of the state: as court physicians whose medical knowledge was prized, as financiers whose access to credit networks sustained royal treasuries and military campaigns, as translators and diplomatic intermediaries whose multilingual competence facilitated communication across civilizational boundaries, as administrators whose very exclusion from the local networks of patronage and factional loyalty made them useful instruments of centralized authority. The tujjar al-sultan of the Moroccan tradition — the sultan's merchants — represent one particularly well-documented instantiation of this broader pattern.
Yet it is essential to recognize — and this is the point of analytical consequence — that this service, however valued, however materially rewarded, however apparently proximate to the centers of power, never operated to alter the fundamental theological-structural position of Jews within the polity. Service enhanced what one might call their residence status: it made them more securely present, more protected, more prosperous within the space of their permitted existence. But it never — and this is the critical structural point — converted residence into membership. The Jewish court physician who saved the caliph's life remained, in the theological grammar of the polity, a dhimmi: protected, tolerated, instrumentally valued, but ontologically excluded from the sovereign community. The Jewish financier who funded the king's wars remained, within the Christian theological order, a wanderer whose very usefulness was a function of his displacement. They were, one might say, useful precisely because they could not belong: their structural exclusion was not an obstacle to their instrumental incorporation but its very condition.
This paradox — service without membership, proximity without belonging, utility without incorporation — is not merely of historical interest. It may constitute a deep structural grammar that organizes the relationship between Jewish existence and the theological-political imagination of both traditions. And it is this grammar, refracted through several centuries of transformation and partially — but only partially — obscured by the secularizing vocabulary of modern statecraft, that one may detect operating beneath the surface of the General Assembly addresses under examination. The question of Jewish sovereignty — not Jewish existence, not Jewish rights, not even Jewish security, but sovereignty specifically — may remain, within this proposed theological grammar, a point of particular difficulty, a claim that some readings find difficult to accommodate without disrupting the architecture from which they arise.
Morocco as the State of Exception
One is obliged, at this point, to address what might appear to be a significant counter-example to the thesis being developed: the case of Morocco. The 1943 Dahir, often invoked in accounts of Sultan Mohammed V’s protection of Moroccan Jews against Vichy deportation orders, has become an important element of Morocco's self-presentation as a model of Islamic tolerance and Jewish-Muslim coexistence. The historical record regarding Mohammed V’s specific protective acts during WWII remains a matter of ongoing scholarly debate: while the tradition of royal protection is well-documented, the specific legal instruments and the extent of that protection remain contested. The tradition of Jewish advisors to the throne, the constitutional recognition in the 2011 constitution of the "Hebraic tributary" as a component of Moroccan national identity, the preservation of Jewish cemeteries and synagogues — these features of the Moroccan experience might seem to challenge the structural analysis offered above.
Yet upon closer examination, Morocco may be read less as a refutation of the proposed theological grammar of Jewish non-sovereignty than as a case that complicates it. The Moroccan model, for all its genuine distinctiveness and its real consequences for the lives of Moroccan Jews, did not necessarily disrupt the structural arrangement in which Jews were protected, honored, or celebrated within a framework whose sovereign community remained Islamic. But it would be premature to treat the example as either proof or disproof of the broader thesis: Jewish presence may be understood as a treasured feature of the Islamic order, an autonomous claim to political membership, or both in tension. The 2011 constitutional recognition of the Hebraic tributary is itself instructive: the term "tributary" — affluent in the French text — positions Jewish tradition as a stream flowing into the larger river of Moroccan national identity, contributing to but not necessarily constituting the sovereign whole.
One potentially consequential feature of the Moroccan case is the way in which this theological form has been re-clothed in the language of legality and the forms of constitutional governance (Hirschl 2008). It is possible to supply a vocabulary for asking whether theological premises are embedded in legal structures, transformed by them, or contested through them; it does not by itself establish that the Moroccan arrangement preserves a particular theological grammar (Backer 2009). The constitution recognizes the Hebraic tributary; the Commander of the Faithful protects all his subjects; the legal order guarantees religious freedom. The arrangement may therefore be read through several lenses, including theological continuity, dynastic legitimacy, cultural heritage, and constitutional pluralism. The theological grammar proposed above — that Jews are protected residents, not sovereign members — is one possible reading of the constitutional language, not its only available explanation.
The Semiotic Operation: Naming Israel, Unmaking the Jew
It is at this point that the analysis must turn from the theological-historical background to the textual operation that constitutes the essay's principal empirical observation. A careful reading of all four General Assembly addresses reveals a pattern whose significance, one might suggest, has been insufficiently appreciated in existing commentary. The pattern is this: the word "Jew" appears in none of the four speeches. "Judaism" does not appear. "Jewish" does not appear. By contrast, "Israel" appears with striking frequency across all four addresses. "Israeli government," "Israeli regime," "Israeli occupation," "Israeli aggression" — these formulations recur throughout the corpus. But the Jew, as a theological and historical subject, is absent from the text. This is a descriptive observation; its explanatory significance is not settled by the textual count alone.
The Asymmetry of Religious Naming: An Empirical Finding
The observation that “Jew,” “Jewish,” and “Judaism” appear in none of the four speeches might, at first approach, be attributed to a general diplomatic convention of avoiding religious designations in General Assembly discourse. One might suppose that the secular grammar of the Assembly simply excludes religious categories as such. The empirical record of the speeches themselves, however, does not sustain this reading. Islam is explicitly named, invoked, and prayed through across the corpus. Pezeshkian opens with the Bismillah — “In the name of God, the Most Compassionate, the Most Merciful” — and closes with “May God bless you all” (Pezeshkian 2026). Erdogan prays “to Almighty God,” invokes “God willing,” closes with a poem referencing “the punishment of God,” names “Islamophobia” as a Western plague, defends the headscarf as a religious right, and identifies “Muslims and Christians” as jointly denied access to Jerusalem’s holy sites (Erdogan 2026). Abdullah explicitly names both Islam and Christianity — “protecting Christianity in its communities and heritage, in its native and historic land, while promoting the true image of Islam” — and references “Muslim and Christian holy sites in Jerusalem” (Abdullah 2026). Trump laments “the persecution of Christians” worldwide and closes with “God bless the nations of the world, and God bless America” (Trump 2026). Christianity and Islam are thus spoken, named, invoked, defended, and prayed through — openly, from the podium, without apparent diplomatic inhibition. The convention of secularized diplomatic grammar does not, it would appear, extend to these two traditions. It extends, with remarkable specificity, to the third — the tradition whose state is the object of every speech’s central concern.
This asymmetry — Islam and Christianity named; Judaism unnamed — may warrant attention that goes beyond the individual speeches. If one were to examine the broader archive of General Assembly addresses, one might find a pattern in which this selective silencing extends across the institution’s discursive practice as such. Whether this constitutes an unwritten convention, a structural feature of the Westphalian grammar, or something more deliberately maintained is a question this essay raises but cannot, from its present evidentiary base, resolve. What one can observe is that the silence is not general but targeted: it applies to the Jew, and the evidence of these four speeches suggests it does not apply to Islam or Christianity.
One might extend the inquiry further. The naming convention — or its absence — may apply not only to Jews but to other communities whose theological or political existence is deemed problematic within majority traditions: the Baha’i, whose persecution in Iran proceeds in part through their exclusion from the categories of recognized religious community; certain Muslim sects deemed heretical by majority Sunni or Shi’a establishments, whose names may not be spoken in certain forums precisely because to name them would be to accord them a recognition their theological adversaries deny. These are, in a sense, the objects whose names may not be spoken — communities whose discursive erasure from the vocabulary of international fora constitutes a form of marginalization that operates beneath and through the conventions of diplomatic speech. The Jewish case may be the most consequential instance of this phenomenon, but it is perhaps not the only one; and the identification of this broader pattern — a category of communities that the discursive apparatus of the General Assembly is structurally ill-equipped to name — may itself constitute a finding of some significance.
This subsection draws on my work on the “denaturing” of Jewish presence within Chinese Marxist-Leninist internationalism (Backer 2026), where a structurally analogous operation — the erasure of Jewish particularity from a discursive framework that requires that erasure for its own coherence — is documented in a different institutional context. Nonetheless, one must be cautious about the interpretive weight placed upon textual absence; the hermeneutics of silence is a field in which overreading is an occupational hazard. The consistency of this pattern across four speeches emanating from four radically different theological-political traditions, addressing the same conflict, before the same audience, warrants examination, but it does not establish more than a recurring lexical choice. The preceding subsection, however, establishes an empirical constraint on the available explanations: because Islam and Christianity are explicitly named, invoked, defended, and prayed through, a general diplomatic convention of avoiding religious designations cannot account for the absence of “Jew,” “Jewish,” and “Judaism.” The question is therefore not whether the silence is general, but what the selective absence does within the competing theological and legal grammars. On a theological reading, one possible semiotic operation is the substitution of "Israel" — a state, a government, a regime, an entity legible within the Westphalian grammar of international relations — for "the Jew" — a theological-historical figure whose relationship to sovereignty is precisely what the theological traditions outlined above render problematic. This substitution may permit a theological claim to operate while remaining invisible. The speaker who condemns "the Israeli regime" is, at the surface level of diplomatic grammar, making a political criticism of a particular government's policies. Within one possible theological Lebenswelt, however, the condemnation may resonate with a broader claim about Jewish sovereignty; it does not follow that this is the only or controlling meaning of the language.
As used here, the phrase structuring absence names a hypothesis about how the discourse may be organized, not a demonstrated mechanism. On one reading, the theological position on Jewish sovereignty need not be stated because it may function as an atmospheric condition, a gravitational field, or a medium within which the discourse moves. To borrow from my earlier characterization of religious world-views: "Religion is not merely a series of conduct codes and precepts... It is a world view" (Backer 2009) with its own internal logic, its own institutions, its own normative architecture. That world-view may operate without explicit articulation, but the inference remains contestable: the asymmetry identified above supplies empirical reason to examine selective silencing rather than to treat the absence as a general feature of diplomatic vocabulary. The structuring-absence hypothesis therefore organizes one possible field of interpretation rather than the entire field of what can be said.
One might characterize this operation, with appropriate caution, as the hidden insinuation of theological and historico-theological positions into ostensibly secular analysis, achieving effects that are at once well understood and well hidden — well understood within the cultural and theological traditions from which the speakers emerge, where the resonances are immediately legible to audiences attuned to the relevant frequencies, and well hidden because they exist, as it were, in plain sight, without actual textual expression. The theological claim operates not through what is said but through what structures the saying: the selection of what may be named and what must remain unnamed, the determination of which categories are available for deployment and which are foreclosed, the shaping of argumentative trajectories by a force that is never directly perceived but whose effects are everywhere apparent in the curvature of the discourse.
Any interpretation built on absence has inherent limits. Reading what is not said is necessarily speculative: the theological reading offered here is one among several plausible frameworks, but the empirical finding in “The Asymmetry of Religious Naming: An Empirical Finding” forecloses an explanation based on a general diplomatic convention against religious designation. Over-determining a single theological key would nonetheless risk reproducing the very error of concealment it diagnoses. The structuring-absence thesis should therefore be treated as a hypothesis to be tested against explicit language, institutional context, historical evidence, and counter-readings, not as a settled account of the speakers’ motives or the speeches’ meaning.
The Management of the Jewish Question in Each Address
Having described a possible general structure of the semiotic operation, one may now turn — with the caveat that what follows is offered as interpretation rather than demonstration — to the specific manner in which each of the four addresses may manage the Jewish question while declining to name it.
Iran. The case of the Islamic Republic is perhaps particularly legible, though even here the theological dimension operates beneath a secularized surface. The empirical context is significant: estimates place Iran's Jewish community at approximately 100,000 at the time of the 1979 revolution and at roughly 8,000 to 15,000 persons today, figures that are approximate and vary by source. That demographic change is relevant context, but it does not by itself establish a theological cause. The single parliamentary seat reserved for the Jewish community under the Islamic Republic's constitutional framework may be read as a formalization of the dhimmi arrangement: recognition, representation, even a form of honor, but within a structure that defines the terms and limits of Jewish presence within the sovereign community. It may also be understood through the constitutional language of minority representation. As it is possible to observe of theocratic constitutionalist arrangements, "While religious minorities might be tolerated," they are not permitted to grow nor to threaten the state (Backer 2009, 108).
President Pezeshkian's address may be read as enacting this structure at the discursive level with some precision. The word "Jew" does not appear. "Jewish" does not appear. "Judaism" does not appear. What appears, with insistent frequency, is "Israel" and "the Israeli regime" — formulations that may allow the address to organize its regional analysis around Jewish sovereignty without acknowledging that this is the question being addressed. On one theological reading, the claim that Jewish sovereignty within Dar al-Islam represents an ontological violation of the divine ordering of history may operate as an unspoken premise giving coherence to otherwise disparate elements of Pezeshkian's regional analysis. The empirical finding in “The Asymmetry of Religious Naming: An Empirical Finding” narrows the available alternatives: whatever else explains the silence, a general convention against religious designation cannot do so, because Islam and Christianity are named openly across the corpus. One need not attribute conscious theological intention to the speaker to consider the theological reading, but neither should that reading be treated as conclusive.
Turkey. The Turkish case presents a distinctive configuration that reflects the Ottoman imperial legacy and its complex transformation through Kemalist secularism and the subsequent re-emergence of Islamic political identity. Turkey's Jewish community, which numbered approximately 80,000 in 1945, has declined to an estimated 15,000 to 17,000 — figures that are approximate and vary by source. That trajectory, while less dramatic than Iran's, may be read as broadly analogous, but it does not by itself establish a common theological cause. The Ottoman millet system, which organized non-Muslim communities into semi-autonomous confessional groups under their own religious leadership, represented a highly elaborated institutional expression of the dhimmi arrangement: a system of administrative sophistication that simultaneously guaranteed communal autonomy and inscribed structural exclusion from the sovereign community.
President Erdogan's address performs what one might describe as a particularly complex discursive operation. He condemns both Islamophobia and anti-Semitism — a pairing that, at the surface level, positions Turkey as an advocate of universal religious tolerance. Yet one notes, with analytical interest, that the condemnation of anti-Semitism is never connected to Israel, and the condemnation of Israel is never connected to Jews. The two discursive tracks run parallel but never intersect. Anti-Semitism is wrong because prejudice against any religious community is wrong — a proposition situated within the framework of universal human rights. Israeli actions are wrong because they violate international law and Palestinian rights — a proposition situated within the framework of Westphalian sovereignty and self-determination. The gap between these two parallel tracks may be the space in which the theological claim operates: the claim that Jewish existence deserves protection (the dhimmi guarantee) while Jewish sovereignty remains impermissible (the dhimmi condition). Erdogan's address may manage this structure by distributing it across two distinct discursive registers that are never allowed to meet; the empirical finding in “The Asymmetry of Religious Naming: An Empirical Finding” shows that general diplomatic convention cannot explain the silence, even if universalist language helps keep the two claims apart.
Jordan. The Hashemite case is, in certain respects, particularly revealing, not least because of the historical and demographic specificities that structure it. Jordan's Jewish population is effectively zero — a condition that is itself the product of the 1948 Jordanian occupation of the Old City of Jerusalem and the subsequent expulsion of all Jewish residents and the destruction of synagogues in the Jewish Quarter. This history — the conversion of a mixed urban space into a space from which Jewish presence was physically eliminated — represents, at the material level, a stark illustration of the theological logic under examination, although the historical record also permits political, military, and demographic explanations.
King Abdullah's address manages the Jewish question through what may be the most analytically revealing operation in the corpus — a strategy not of silence but of explicit theological disavowal. He names Judaism: “It is also tried to cast this conflict as a war of religions — Islam on one side, Judaism and Christianity on the other. It is not” (Abdullah 2026). This is the only mention of Judaism in any of the four speeches. The word appears at the precise moment of its denial and is never spoken again. The post-September 11 convention — that the conflict is not a clash of civilizations, not a war of religions — is here deployed as what one might characterize as a discursive fetish: a commonly held proposition whose invocation serves to foreclose exactly the inquiry it names. By dropping the line, Abdullah demonstrates its hold; by immediately sealing it — “It is not” — he forecloses the theological dimension from further examination within his own discursive framework. The operation is an inversion: what appears to be a rejection of the religious frame is, upon closer reading, an acknowledgment of its power, an acknowledgment that must be immediately contained. Having named Judaism in order to deny its relevance, Abdullah acquires an inoculation that the other three speakers lack: he cannot be accused of ignoring the religious dimension, because he has addressed it — and dismissed it — in a single sentence. The remainder of his address then operates within the secular grammar of international law and diplomatic accountability, a grammar that the foreclosure has secured against theological disruption. Abdullah's framing as custodian of Islamic and Christian holy sites in Jerusalem, even as he denies the religious character of the conflict, enacts a theological claim within the very gesture of refusing theology — only a state with recognized standing in the religious domain can credibly declare that the conflict is not, at its core, religious.
The United States. The American case introduces a configuration of the Jewish question that is, in important respects, distinct from the Islamic cases examined above, though it shares with them a structural homology that warrants careful attention. The operative theological framework here is not Islamic but Christian — specifically, the Christian Zionist tradition that has exercised considerable influence on American evangelical political engagement with the Middle East. Within this tradition, support for Israel is instrumentally linked to an eschatological narrative in which the return of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel constitutes a necessary precondition for the Second Coming of Christ. Jewish sovereignty is thus not prohibited, as in the Islamic theological grammar, but instrumentalized: it is affirmed not on the basis of Jewish theological claims but as a means to a Christian eschatological end.
President Trump's address at the General Assembly reflects this instrumentalizing logic with what one might characterize as a certain bluntness. He never mentions Jews, Judaism, or Jewish claims to sovereignty. Israel figures in the address as a strategic ally, a partner in regional stability, a counterweight to Iranian influence — but never as the instantiation of a Jewish theological claim to self-governance. The Jewish question is managed not through the Islamic grammar of dhimmi recognition-and-subordination, nor through the explicit denial of theological framing that characterizes Abdullah's address, but through what might be called theological instrumentalization: the deployment of Jewish sovereignty as a vehicle for purposes that are not themselves Jewish. This represents, one might suggest, a distinctively American configuration of the ancient problem — one in which the Jew is defended not as a subject of theological rights but as an instrument of theological design, protected not because Jewish sovereignty is acknowledged as legitimate in its own terms but because it serves a function within a Christian eschatological narrative that the Jew did not author and does not control.
The General Assembly as a Vehicle of Concealment
One final dimension of this analysis requires articulation before proceeding to the remaining interpretive layers. The United Nations General Assembly, one might propose, functions not merely as the venue in which this semiotic operation is performed but as a particularly conducive institutional vehicle — a structure that may make the operation possible or, in a certain sense, necessary. The Westphalian grammar of the General Assembly — its foundational commitment to the sovereign equality of states, its procedural framework of diplomatic address and formal exchange, its institutional vocabulary of international law, human rights, and multilateral governance — is ill-equipped to accommodate the theological claim that Jewish sovereignty is ontologically prohibited.
This incapacity is not accidental; it is constitutive. The very framework of "states" and "sovereignty" and "international law" and "self-determination" that governs General Assembly discourse makes it difficult to articulate, within the terms of that discourse, what the theological traditions outlined above hold: that Jews may not exercise sovereignty within Dar al-Islam or, in the Christian supersessionist variant, within Christendom — that Jewish sovereignty represents not a political arrangement to be negotiated but a theological impossibility to be resisted. The General Assembly's grammar recognizes states, governments, peoples, national movements — it does not readily recognize the category of a people theologically prohibited from statehood. The concept of what I have called divine nomocracy — governance under divine law — may structure the operative assumptions of speakers, but the institutional vocabulary of the General Assembly provides few direct terms in which nomocratic premises can be expressed.
The result, one might suggest, is a condition of systematic and structurally generated concealment. The theological claim cannot be stated within the General Assembly's discursive framework not because speakers choose to conceal it — though strategic considerations no doubt reinforce the concealment — but because the framework itself lacks the categories that would be required for its articulation. The substitution of "Israel" for "the Jew," of "the Israeli regime" for "Jewish sovereignty," of "international law violations" for "theological prohibition" — these are not merely rhetorical choices but recurring constraints imposed by the mismatch between the theological Lebenswelt of the speakers and the Westphalian grammar of the institution. The concealment is, in this sense, overdetermined: reinforced by strategic calculation and institutional structure, and by the genuine incommensurability between the theological premises that animate the discourse and the secular vocabulary in which the discourse must be conducted. But the empirical asymmetry identified in “The Asymmetry of Religious Naming: An Empirical Finding” limits the claim: the silence is selective, not a general consequence of diplomatic convention, because Islam and Christianity are named, invoked, defended, and prayed through.
It is perhaps here that one confronts directly the analytical contribution that this essay seeks to make. The speeches examined herein do not merely contain theological premises beneath their secular surface; they may be organized in part by such premises — shaping, among other influences, the selection of vocabulary, the structure of argument, and the determination of what may and may not be named. On this reading, a theological understanding of Jewish sovereignty may be a consequential element of the discourse, while the discourse may be ill-equipped to articulate it. That conclusion remains an interpretive hypothesis, but the empirical finding in “The Asymmetry of Religious Naming: An Empirical Finding” means that a general diplomatic convention cannot account for the silence; the remaining inquiry concerns the specificity of the selective absence. A layered method is useful here as a prompt to disclose the premises of the reading, not as proof that one explanatory frame governs the speeches.
VII. Layer 6: Shifting Meaning Universes — The Common Lexicon and Its Incompatible Signifieds
One arrives, at this stage of the analysis, at what may be a particularly challenging layer of the present reading: the recognition that the four addresses under examination share not merely a common institutional setting and a common occasion but, in important respects, a common vocabulary — and that this shared vocabulary, far from establishing the conditions for mutual comprehension, may function precisely as the mechanism through which mutual incomprehension is sustained, naturalized, and rendered invisible to its own participants. The speakers stand at the same podium, address the same chamber, invoke the same terms of art — sovereignty, international law, peace, terrorism, resistance, statehood — and it is perhaps this very convergence of lexical surface that permits the radical divergence of operative meaning to persist without acknowledgment or, one suspects, without full awareness on the part of the speakers themselves.
What might be useful here is my earlier framework for analyzing the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights can serve as a methodological point of departure for the present inquiry. Its account that meaning is "rooted in context, as a function of place, time, intent, speaker, application, form of communication, and circumstance" (Backer 2024) invites the analyst to examine how a term like "international law" acquires meaning at each site of utterance rather than assuming a portable semantic content. Applied here, that orientation treats the speeches’ terms as interpretive prompts whose meanings must be tested against discursive, theological, civilizational, and strategic context—not as evidence that any one framework supplies the privileged explanation.
"International Law"
Consider the phrase "international law" as it operates across the four addresses. For President Trump, international law appears to function not as a binding normative architecture to which the United States is subject but as an instrumental resource — a repertoire of arguments and institutions that may be selectively invoked when they serve American interests and quietly disregarded when they do not. This is not, one hastens to note, a characterization unique to the Trump administration; it describes, in broad strokes, the posture of great-power engagement with international legal institutions since at least 1945. Yet what is perhaps distinctive about the Trump address is the candor with which this instrumental relationship is performed: international law is not reverenced even as it is violated, but rather treated with the open pragmatism of a dealmaker assessing the value of a contractual clause. The normative horizon is not law but leverage.
For President Pezeshkian, the same phrase — "international law" — appears to perform a quite different function. Here, international law operates primarily as a standard of judgment against which the hypocrisy of the powerful is measured and found wanting. International law is what the United States and its allies claim to uphold but systematically betray; it is the promise broken, the principle invoked only against the weak. Yet one must note, with appropriate caution, that Iran's invocation of international law does not appear to entail a comprehensive submission to the international legal order as constituted. The Islamic Republic's relationship to international law is itself mediated through a jurisprudential tradition — the velayat-e faqih — that reserves to religious authority the ultimate determination of legitimacy. International law, in this register, is not sovereign but subordinate: a potentially useful instrument whose authority is recognized insofar as it converges with higher sources of normative ordering (Hallaq 2003). The term is shared; the operative meaning is, one might suggest, incommensurable.
President Erdoğan's deployment of "international law" presents yet another configuration. In the Turkish address, international law appears to function as an aspirational framework — a system that, were it properly implemented, would vindicate Turkey's positions on Palestine, on humanitarian intervention, on the reform of the Security Council. There is something almost wistful in Erdoğan's invocations: a sense that international law describes the world as it should be, and that its failure to materialize in practice reflects not any deficiency in the law itself but the moral corruption of those entrusted with its enforcement. Yet one cannot avoid noting that Turkey's relationship to international law is itself marked by tensions that the address does not acknowledge — the ongoing occupation of Northern Cyprus, the military operations in northern Syria, the contested relationship to European human rights mechanisms — each of which complicates the aspirational register in which "international law" is deployed.
For King Abdullah, international law operates in what might be characterized as a particularly technically specific register among the four speakers. Jordan's invocations tend toward the citation of particular obligations, particular resolutions, particular provisions of the Geneva Conventions. Here, international law is neither an instrument of leverage, nor a betrayed promise, nor an aspirational horizon, but a set of concrete requirements that are being concretely violated. This specificity serves a strategic function: it positions Jordan as the responsible interlocutor, the state that takes international law seriously in its operational details rather than merely invoking it as rhetorical decoration. Yet this very specificity also, one might suggest, performs a kind of containment — reducing the Palestine question to a matter of legal compliance rather than confronting the deeper civilizational and theological dimensions that the other three speakers, each in their own way, bring closer to the surface.
"Sovereignty"
The term "sovereignty" undergoes perhaps even more dramatic transformation as it migrates across the four addresses. For Trump, sovereignty is American sovereignty — the freedom of the United States to act as it deems appropriate, unconstrained by multilateral obligations that would subordinate American interests to collective decision-making. This is sovereignty as autonomy, as capacity, as the prerogative of power. For Pezeshkian, sovereignty is the right to self-determination in matters of nuclear technology, regional policy, and domestic governance — sovereignty as resistance to hegemonic imposition, undergirded by a theological understanding of legitimate governance that derives its authority from sources external to the Westphalian system. The two usages share a word; they do not, one might venture, share a concept.
Erdoğan's invocations of sovereignty present a particularly instructive case of what one might term selective universalization. Turkish sovereignty — over its borders, its military operations, its domestic political arrangements — is asserted as an absolute principle. Palestinian sovereignty is championed with evident passion. Yet Kurdish sovereignty is unmentionable, and Cypriot sovereignty over the northern third of the island is actively denied. The principle of sovereignty is thus not applied uniformly but deployed strategically, its reach extending precisely to the boundaries of Turkish strategic interest and no further. Whether this selective deployment is conscious or structural — whether it represents a deliberate rhetorical strategy or the natural operation of a civilizational framework that cannot recognize its own partialities — is a question that the text permits but does not resolve.
King Abdullah's usage adds yet another dimension: sovereignty as custodial obligation. The Hashemite claim to legitimacy rests in part on a custodial relationship to Jerusalem's holy sites — a relationship that is itself theologically grounded but that translates, in the diplomatic register, into a commitment to sovereignty as the protection of sacred trust. Palestinian sovereignty, in this framework, is not merely a political desideratum but a condition necessary for the fulfillment of custodial duty. The sovereignty of the address is thus at once political and sacramental, secular and theological — a duality that the diplomatic grammar of the speech simultaneously performs and conceals.
"Peace," "Terrorism," and the Boundaries of Naming
The migration of "peace" across the four addresses reveals divergences no less fundamental. For Trump, peace appears to be understood as the absence of war achieved through the decisive exercise of dominance — "to the victor belong the spoils" representing not a departure from the peace framework but a particularly candid articulation of it. For Iran, peace is inseparable from justice for the oppressed, which is to say that peace without the rectification of historical wrongs is not peace at all but the consolidation of injustice under a pacified surface. For Turkey, peace requires the restoration of what Erdoğan terms the world's "conscience" — a concept that operates simultaneously in secular-humanist and Islamic registers. For Jordan, peace is a rules-based settlement whose content is defined by specific legal instruments. Four speakers say "peace"; four incommensurable conditions of possibility are invoked.
"Terrorism" undergoes what one might characterize as a complete semiotic revolution as it traverses the four addresses. For Trump, terrorism is what Iran does — it is the export of violence by state actors designated as adversaries. For Iran, terrorism is what America and Israel do — it is the imposition of suffering through sanctions, through military operations, through the support of what Iran regards as an illegitimate state. For Turkey, terrorism is what Israel perpetrates in Gaza — the systematic destruction of civilian life in pursuit of territorial and demographic objectives. For Jordan, the term is handled with notable care: terrorism is what the occupation produces, not as an apology for violence but as a diagnostic observation about the structural conditions that generate it. The word is constant; the referent is, in each case, the other speaker's ally or the other speaker's state.
"This Israeli Government" — A Shared Formula with Divergent Functions
Perhaps no single formulation better illustrates the phenomenon of shared signifier and incompatible signified than the phrase "this Israeli government," employed by multiple speakers across the addresses. The phrase performs a remarkable act of diplomatic calibration: by specifying "this" government, the speaker appears to distinguish between the current political leadership and the state as such, thereby preserving the Westphalian convention that criticism is directed at policies rather than at the legitimacy of the state itself. Yet the work that this formulation performs varies radically across speakers.
For King Abdullah, "this Israeli government" is a carefully constructed distinction that preserves Jordan's diplomatic relationship with the State of Israel — a relationship that is existentially important to the Hashemite Kingdom — while permitting trenchant criticism of specific policies. The formulation separates the government from the state, the temporary from the permanent, the contingent from the structural. It is, one might suggest, a masterpiece of diplomatic precision, maintaining the possibility of future engagement while registering present objection.
For President Erdoğan, the same phrase performs a different operation. When Erdoğan identifies "this Israeli government" as embodying a "genocidal mindset," the distinction between government and state begins to dissolve — for a "mindset" is not the property of a particular cabinet but of a political culture, a civilizational orientation, a structural condition. The phrase preserves Westphalian form while straining against it, permitting a critique that approaches existential condemnation while maintaining the technical grammar of state-to-state discourse. Whether this tension is deliberate or whether the phrase simply cannot contain the force of the accusation it is asked to carry is a matter on which reasonable readers might differ.
What emerges from this examination of shared vocabulary is not merely the familiar observation that words mean different things to different speakers — a truism that requires no elaborate scholarly apparatus to establish — but something more structurally consequential: that the multilateral system may depend, for its continued functioning, precisely on this capacity for semantic divergence within lexical convergence. The common vocabulary is not a failure of precision but a functional necessity — the mechanism through which incommensurable frameworks can coexist within a single institutional architecture without the incommensurability being forced into the open, where it might prove unmanageable. One might say, with appropriate tentativeness, that the General Assembly does not fail to produce shared meaning; it succeeds, rather, in producing the appearance of shared meaning, and this appearance is itself the principal achievement of multilateral diplomacy.
VIII. Layer 7: Recursive Tropes — The Master Figures of Incommensurable Discourse
Beneath the shifting meaning universes examined above, and operating as a kind of deep grammar that organizes each address at the level of its fundamental rhetorical structure, one may discern what this analysis terms recursive tropes — master figures of speech and thought that recur at every layer of the text, reinforcing the grounding premises of each speaker's discourse while creating what proves, upon examination, to be an illusory appearance of dialogue between fundamentally incompatible frameworks. These tropes do not merely ornament the arguments they accompany; they constitute the argumentative structure itself, such that to identify them is to identify the generative logic from which each address's particular claims derive their coherence and their force.
The Deal: Trump's Master Trope
President Trump's address is organized, at every level, around what one might call the trope of the deal. Everything is transactional; every relationship is a negotiation; every outcome is assessed in terms of leverage, advantage, and the capacity to extract favorable terms. War is a deal gone wrong — or, perhaps more precisely, a deal in which one party has failed to recognize the superior bargaining position of the other. Peace is a deal successfully concluded, in which the terms reflect the actual distribution of power rather than the polite fictions of juridical equality. International institutions are venues for deal-making, to be valued insofar as they facilitate favorable transactions and to be bypassed when they do not.
The recursive quality of this trope becomes apparent when one observes its operation across multiple layers of the address. At the surface level, specific deals are proposed or celebrated — the Abraham Accords, bilateral agreements, economic partnerships. At the structural level, the relationship between the United States and the international order is itself framed as a deal: America provides security, and in return expects deference, market access, and strategic cooperation. At a more fundamental level, the relationship between power and right is itself transactional: legitimacy flows not from legal principle or divine mandate but from the capacity to deliver results. "To the victor belong the spoils" is not, in this framework, a cynical aside but the fundamental theorem from which the entire address derives its logical structure. The trope of the deal is thus not one rhetorical device among others but the master figure that organizes all others — the meta-trope within which sovereignty, peace, law, and justice acquire their Trumpian meanings.
The Inversion: Iran's Master Trope
President Pezeshkian's address is governed by a trope of equal structural importance but radically different character: the inversion. Every accusation directed at Iran is returned to its sender; every term of condemnation is reversed, such that the accuser becomes the accused and the defendant becomes the judge. "Terrorists" becomes "defenders of the oppressed"; "destabilizing force" becomes "resistance to hegemonic imposition"; "threat to peace" becomes "obstacle to injustice." The inversion operates not as an occasional rhetorical tactic but as the constitutive logic of the address — the fundamental operation through which Iranian discourse produces its coherence.
One might observe that the trope of inversion has deep roots in the Shi'a theological tradition, which has historically understood itself as the defender of the righteous minority against the usurping majority — a tradition in which the apparent power of the oppressor is understood as a sign not of legitimacy but of distance from divine truth. Whether President Pezeshkian consciously draws upon this tradition or whether it operates, as it were, beneath the level of deliberate rhetorical choice — as a habitus rather than a strategy — is a question that the present analysis cannot resolve but that it seems important to pose. The recursive quality of the inversion becomes visible when one notes that Iran's critique of the international order is itself structured as an inversion: the order that claims to protect the weak in fact serves the strong; the institutions that claim universality are in fact instruments of particular interests; the law that claims to bind all states in fact constrains only those without the power to resist. At every layer, the surface meaning is reversed, and the reversal is offered as the deeper truth.
The Conscience: Turkey's Master Trope
President Erdoğan's address operates through what one might characterize as the trope of conscience — a figure in which the world's moral faculty, its capacity for ethical perception and response, is understood to have been violated, damaged, or rendered inoperative by the events in Gaza and by the international community's failure to respond adequately. Turkey, in this framework, speaks not merely for its own interests or even for the Palestinian people specifically but for conscience itself — for the moral capacity that the international order claims to embody but that it has, in Erdoğan's telling, catastrophically betrayed.
The recursive character of this trope manifests in its capacity to absorb and reorganize every other element of the address. Humanitarian concern becomes not merely a policy orientation but a mark of moral vitality — evidence that Turkey's conscience, unlike the world's, remains functional. Historical references to Ottoman custodianship become evidence of a civilizational tradition in which conscience was institutionally embodied. Criticism of the Security Council becomes a diagnosis of conscience's structural failure — the identification of the precise institutional mechanism through which the world's moral faculty has been disabled. The trope of conscience thus performs a double function: it positions Turkey as the voice of universal morality while simultaneously claiming for Turkey a civilizational distinctiveness — a historical depth of moral tradition — that distinguishes it from the morally depleted West. Whether this double positioning is sustainable — whether one can simultaneously claim to speak for universal conscience and for a particular civilizational tradition — is a tension that the address performs without resolving.
The Diagnosis: Jordan's Master Trope
King Abdullah's address is organized around a trope that differs markedly from the preceding three: the diagnosis. Where Trump deals, Iran inverts, and Turkey appeals to conscience, Jordan names — systematically stripping away the euphemisms through which the international community manages its relationship to the Israel-Palestine question and replacing them with clinical descriptions of the actual condition. "Settlement expansion" becomes the mechanism of territorial acquisition; "self-defense" is recharacterized as collective punishment; "security operations" are identified as the instruments of demographic engineering. The diagnostic trope positions Jordan not as an advocate or an adversary but as a physician of the body politic — the speaker whose authority derives from the capacity to see clearly and to name precisely.
The recursive quality of Jordan's diagnostic trope is perhaps subtler than that of the other three but no less pervasive. At the level of specific claims, the diagnosis operates through the systematic substitution of accurate description for diplomatic euphemism. At the structural level, the entire address is organized as a diagnostic exercise — moving from symptoms to etiology to prognosis, from the description of present conditions to the identification of their causes to the specification of the interventions required. At a more fundamental level, the diagnostic trope performs an epistemological claim: that the problem is not one of values or will but of perception — that the international community knows what must be done and lacks only the willingness to see clearly what is actually occurring.
The Appearance of Dialogue
What is particularly consequential about these four recursive tropes is not their individual character but their collective effect. Taken together, they create the appearance of a conversation — four speakers responding to a shared situation from different but commensurable perspectives. Yet the analysis suggests that this appearance is, in an important sense, illusory. The four speakers share the same stage, the same microphones, the same translators, the same procedural framework — but they are not, one might submit, engaged in the same conversation. They are performing four monologues within a single theatrical space, each organized by a master trope that is incommensurable with the others, each producing a coherent internal logic that is ill-equipped to engage with the coherent internal logic of the others. The deal cannot answer the inversion; the conscience cannot diagnose; the diagnosis cannot invert; the inversion cannot deal. They speak past one another not through failure of attention or good faith but through the structural impossibility of translating between the generative logics that each trope instantiates.
IX. Cross-Reading: Contradictions, Consistencies, and the Architecture of Shared Silence
The layered analysis undertaken in the preceding sections has, one hopes, established the interpretive groundwork necessary for a demanding exercise of this essay: the cross-reading, in which consistencies, inconsistencies, and structuring contradictions are traced not within individual addresses but across all four simultaneously, treating the corpus as a single multi-vocal text whose meaning emerges not from any individual speech but from the relations — concordant, discordant, and silent — between them.
"This Israeli Government" Revisited: A Cross-Textual Formula
The formulation "this Israeli government," examined briefly in the preceding section as an instance of shared vocabulary with divergent signifieds, repays further analysis when read across the full corpus. What becomes apparent in the cross-reading is that this phrase functions as a kind of diplomatic toggle — a mechanism that permits each speaker to calibrate, with considerable precision, the distance between their critique of Israeli policy and the existential challenge to Israeli statehood that each address, in different ways and to different degrees, either approaches or retreats from.
For King Abdullah, as noted, the toggle is set firmly in the direction of distinguishing government from state: the critique is of specific policies pursued by a specific coalition, and the implication is that a different government might pursue different policies, thereby rendering the relationship between Jordan and Israel susceptible to improvement without requiring the resolution of the deeper civilizational and theological questions that would attend a challenge to the state itself. For Erdoğan, the toggle is moved considerably further toward conflation: the "genocidal mindset" attributed to "this Israeli government" strains against the particularizing force of "this," suggesting a pathology that may be structural rather than contingent, governmental rather than governmental. For Pezeshkian, the toggle approaches its maximum setting — the distinction between government and state becomes vanishingly thin, such that the critique of "this Israeli government" shades into a challenge to the legitimacy of the Zionist project as such. For Trump, interestingly, the formulation operates differently still: Trump does not critique "this Israeli government" but rather embraces it, and the embrace functions as an endorsement not merely of policy but of a particular model of sovereign assertiveness that resonates with Trump's own transactional framework.
What the cross-reading reveals, one might suggest, is that the formula's apparent universality — its availability to speakers of radically different orientations — is precisely what makes it so analytically significant. It is the point at which the four discursive universes intersect, and it is at this point of intersection that the depth of their divergence becomes especially apparent. The same four words — "this Israeli government" — carry, across the four addresses, implications ranging from targeted policy criticism to existential civilizational challenge, and the distance between these implications is the distance between the meaning universes that the present analysis has attempted to map.
The Erdoğan Contradiction: Occupation Condemned and Occupation Maintained
Perhaps a particularly visible contradiction that the cross-reading surfaces concerns the relationship between President Erdoğan's impassioned condemnation of Israeli occupation and Turkey's own maintenance of military occupation in Northern Cyprus — a territory that Turkey has occupied since 1974 and that Erdoğan's address not only fails to acknowledge as an occupation but actively seeks to have recognized as a legitimate state. The contradiction is, one might observe, not subtle; it does not require elaborate hermeneutic excavation to identify. Yet its significance for the present analysis lies less in the fact of its existence than in what it reveals about the structural conditions under which such contradictions can persist without apparent discomfort.
One might suggest that the contradiction is sustainable because it operates within a civilizational framework in which the relevant moral categories are not applied universally but distributed according to a logic of civilizational affinity. The occupation of Palestinian territory is an outrage because it is experienced as an act of civilizational transgression — the imposition of non-Islamic sovereignty upon what is understood, within the Ottoman and post-Ottoman framework, as belonging to the domain of Islamic civilization. The occupation of Northern Cyprus, by contrast, is experienced not as an occupation at all but as a restoration — the protection of a Muslim population and the reassertion of a custodial responsibility that Turkey inherited from the Ottoman order. The same word — "occupation" — is available in both cases, but the moral valence it carries is determined not by the formal characteristics of the act but by the civilizational identity of the actors involved. This is not, one hastens to add, a characteristic unique to Turkish discourse; it is rather a particularly visible instance of a phenomenon that the cross-reading reveals to be pervasive across all four addresses: the selective application of ostensibly universal principles according to unstated criteria of civilizational, theological, or strategic affinity.
Iran's Inversion and Its Erasure
The cross-reading also surfaces a contradiction within the Iranian address that is, in certain respects, the mirror image of the Turkish one. Iran's master trope of inversion — the systematic reversal of accusations, such that the accuser becomes the accused — operates with considerable rhetorical power when directed at American and Israeli policy. Yet this same trope contains within itself a possible erasure: when President Trump’s address asserts that Iran’s regime had killed over 72,000 citizens that year and that 10,000 were killed for protesting, those figures should be understood as the speaker’s assertions, not independently verified facts. The speech does not name or specifically attribute the latter claim to the 2022 Mahsa Amini protests; it presents it as a general claim about protest suppression. Iran’s silence on this general claim may reflect a structural limit in the inversion frame. The trope can reverse external accusations but may not accommodate internal ones without acknowledging that the framework of resistance and oppression could apply not only to the relationship between Iran and hegemonic powers but also to the relationship between the Iranian state and the Iranian people.
This erasure is, one might propose, analytically significant beyond the specific case of Iran. It illustrates a pattern that recurs across the corpus: each speaker's framework contains zones of structural blindness that are not incidental to the framework but constitutive of it — blind spots without which the framework could not maintain its internal coherence. The cross-reading reveals these zones not by imposing an external standard of consistency but by allowing the four addresses to interrogate one another, such that what one speaker says illuminates what another cannot.
Trump's Peace-as-Dominion: The Quiet Part Aloud
President Trump's formulation "to the victor belong the spoils" warrants particular attention in the cross-reading, for it may represent the moment at which the subtext that runs beneath all four addresses — the relationship between power and right, between force and legitimacy — is brought closest to the surface. The phrase is, in one sense, an aberration within the grammar of General Assembly discourse, which conventionally maintains the fiction that legitimacy is derived from law rather than from power. Yet in another sense, one might suggest, it articulates the operative assumption upon which the other three speakers' grievances are predicated: that the international order is in fact structured by power rather than by law, and that the appeals to international law, to sovereignty, to the rules-based order are, in the final analysis, appeals to a normative architecture that lacks the capacity to constrain the powerful.
The cross-reading thus positions Trump's formulation not as an outlier but as a moment of inadvertent transparency — the point at which the relationship between power and right that all four addresses presuppose but that the other three prefer to leave implicit is stated with a candor that is, depending on one's perspective, either refreshing or alarming. Iran's critique of American hypocrisy, Turkey's appeal to conscience, Jordan's diagnostic naming — each of these rhetorical strategies presupposes a world in which power determines outcomes regardless of legal principle, and each addresses this condition differently. But none of them says it as plainly as Trump does, and this plainness, one might suggest, is itself a form of rhetorical power — the power that accrues to the speaker who is willing to name the condition that others must euphemize.
The Structuring Absence: Jewish Sovereignty and What Cannot Be Named
A potentially consequential finding of the cross-reading, however, concerns not what the four addresses say but what they collectively do not say — and, more precisely, what they may be ill-equipped to say without exposing or unsettling the theological premises that underlie some readings of their respective positions. Across all four addresses, despite their mutual antagonism and their radically different orientations toward the Israel-Palestine question, one may discern a possible shared absence: none engages substantively with the theological basis of Jewish sovereignty, with Judaism as a living religious civilization possessing its own jurisprudential traditions regarding territory and statehood, or with the Jewish people's self-understanding as a nation with a covenantal relationship to a specific land. As the subsection “The Asymmetry of Religious Naming: An Empirical Finding” shows, the pattern is selective rather than general: Islam and Christianity are named, invoked, defended, and prayed through, while Jewish naming is absent. It therefore cannot be explained by a general diplomatic convention against religious designation.
This absence is, one might suggest, differently motivated in each case but structurally consistent across the corpus. For Trump, Jewish theological claims are irrelevant to a transactional framework in which support for Israel is a function of strategic alignment and domestic political calculation rather than theological recognition. For Iran, the acknowledgment of Jewish sovereignty claims would introduce a complication into the inversion framework that the framework cannot accommodate — for if Jewish sovereignty has theological roots, then its characterization as mere colonial imposition becomes analytically inadequate. For Turkey, the recognition of Jewish civilizational claims to Jerusalem would complicate the Ottoman custodial narrative upon which Turkey's own claims to moral authority in the region partly rest. For Jordan, the explicit engagement with Jewish theological claims to sovereignty would destabilize the carefully constructed distinction between the current government's policies and the state's legitimacy — for if the state's legitimacy rests in part on theological foundations, then the critique cannot be contained at the level of policy without engaging those foundations.
The cross-reading therefore suggests a possible shared silence: the four addresses do not substantively engage with Jewish sovereignty as a theological and civilizational claim rather than merely a political or colonial one. That convergence may reflect theological assumptions, but the empirical finding in “The Asymmetry of Religious Naming: An Empirical Finding” shows that a general diplomatic convention cannot explain the selective silence. The focus on state conduct and the limits of a General Assembly address may still shape the form of the silence, but they do not make it general. Nietzsche’s analysis of the genealogy of morals is invoked here as an analogy for a shared interest in not knowing, not as a diagnosis of the speakers’ motives or proof that a collective investment in concealment exists.
Nietzsche's Four Great Errors Applied
It is at this juncture that the application of Nietzsche's doctrine of the Four Great Errors — articulated in Twilight of the Idols (Nietzsche 1889) — may prove analytically productive as a further interpretive lens. The first error, the confusion of cause and effect, can be used to test the persistent treatment of Israeli policies as the cause of regional instability. The cross-reading asks whether some of the rhetorical energy animating the addresses might instead be connected, within particular Islamic jurisprudential readings, to the existence of Jewish sovereignty in territory understood as Dar al-Islam. That possibility should not be treated as an established causal account: the policies are real, their consequences are real, and the distinction between cause and occasion remains open to competing historical and legal explanations.
The second error, that of false causality, appears in the cross-reading as a possible interpretive problem: each speaker may present a position as derived from rational analysis of empirical conditions — from law, from strategy, from humanitarian concern — while theological substrates may also shape what counts as rational, what qualifies as law, and whose suffering registers as humanitarian concern. The ostensible grounds of the arguments may therefore be only part of the explanation; the theological Lebenswelt is a possible causal force, not an established hidden cause.
The third error, that of imaginary causes, finds a particularly vivid expression in the cross-reading's treatment of phrases like "this Israeli government" and "genocidal mindset" as placeholders — explanations that may be contingent without possessing the full explanatory power attributed to them. One possible reading treats the condition diagnosed by the speakers as structural rather than reducible to a particular government; another may regard the governmental and policy explanations as sufficient. The theological reading should therefore not assume that the disturbance is located in Jewish sovereignty itself, even if it tests whether that possibility is being excluded from the speeches’ available language.
The fourth error, that of free will, appears in the attribution of contingent "choice" to Israel — the persistent framing, across all four addresses in their different ways, of Israeli actions as freely chosen policies that could be otherwise. A risk of the present interpretive frame is that it may predispose the analysis to read Jewish sovereignty as inevitably reproducing violence, not because of an empirical characteristic of Jewish governance but because of the theological premises attributed to the speakers. That is an interpretive risk, not an empirical conclusion. The attribution of choice — Israel could choose to withdraw, to settle, to negotiate, to comply — may preserve the possibility that the problem is political rather than exclusively theological and therefore susceptible to legal and diplomatic solutions.
X. Conclusion: Reading in Three Dimensions and the Unfinished Text
What does it mean to read these texts not along a single interpretive path — not as policy statements to be assessed for their accuracy, or as diplomatic performances to be evaluated for their effectiveness, or as rhetorical artifacts to be appreciated for their craft — but in three dimensions, attending simultaneously to the surface and to the substrata, to what is said and to what is structurally unsayable, to the horizontal plane of diplomatic exchange and to the vertical depths of theological, civilizational, and epistemological commitment? The present essay has attempted, with whatever success the reader may judge it to have achieved, to demonstrate that such a reading is not merely possible but necessary — that the conventional single-layer analysis of General Assembly addresses may miss consequential dimensions of these texts.
The layered method employed here — proceeding from surface diplomatic grammar through legal-structural claims, theological Lebenswelt, civilizational self-positioning, the construction of silence, shifting meaning universes, and recursive tropes, before undertaking the cross-reading that allows the layers to illuminate one another — is itself a finding. The form of the analysis is not separable from its content; the decision to read in layers may reveal structures that linear reading leaves less visible, but that revelation cannot simply be treated as a property of the texts independent of the method. The addresses are layered on this account; whether the reading must be layered to apprehend them remains an open methodological question.
What the layered analysis reveals, in condensed form, is that the four addresses examined here participate in a process that might be characterized as the embrace of a common language with different meanings — a process that is at once the condition of possibility for multilateral diplomacy and a serious limitation. The General Assembly provides the institutional architecture within which speakers from incommensurable discursive universes can produce the appearance of shared deliberation; the common vocabulary of sovereignty, international law, peace, and human rights provides the lexical material through which this appearance is sustained. Yet the appearance is — to employ a term with appropriate caution — a kind of necessary fiction: a performative achievement that enables coexistence without requiring comprehension, that permits the formal procedures of international discourse to continue in the absence of the substantive consensus that those procedures appear to presuppose.
The implications for policy are considerable but perhaps not those most immediately expected. The analysis does not suggest that multilateral diplomacy is futile — that because the speakers inhabit incommensurable meaning universes, diplomatic engagement is impossible. It suggests, rather, that diplomatic engagement may need to be reconceived: not as the search for common ground (which may not exist in the sense conventionally supposed) but as the management of productive incomprehension — the development of institutional practices that can accommodate radical semantic divergence while maintaining the procedural framework within which coexistence, if not consensus, can be sustained.
The analysis also suggests that the interpretive frameworks conventionally applied to multilateral discourse — frameworks that attend to policy positions, strategic calculations, and rhetorical strategies but that may treat theological and civilizational substrates as background rather than constitutive structures — may require substantial revision. The addresses need not be treated as purely secular texts; they may also be read as texts with theological and civilizational substrates beneath secular surfaces. That reading is one interpretive option among several, and its claims should be tested against explicit language, historical evidence, institutional context, and competing secular accounts. To read the speeches only at the surface may miss structures that the layered method brings into view, but the method does not by itself establish that those structures are the speeches’ underlying meaning.
The meta-methodological finding of this essay — that the form of layering reveals what linear reading conceals — has implications that extend beyond the specific corpus examined here. It suggests that the entire archive of General Assembly addresses may repay the kind of multi-dimensional reading attempted in this essay, and that the patterns identified here — the shared vocabulary with incompatible signifieds, the recursive tropes that create the appearance of dialogue across incommensurable frameworks, the structuring silences that all speakers share despite their mutual antagonism — may prove to be characteristic features of multilateral discourse as such rather than artifacts of the particular geopolitical moment captured by the 81st Session.
One returns, in closing, to a tradition of reading that predates and in some respects exceeds the scholarly conventions within which this essay has been composed. In the Talmudic tradition, the text of the Mishnah is never read in isolation; it is always accompanied by the Gemara — the commentary that questions, elaborates, qualifies, and repositions the text it interprets, not to arrive at a final meaning but to generate a field of interpretive possibility within which the text can continue to mean. The Gemara does not close the Mishnah; it opens it. It does not resolve the tensions within the text but makes them productive, transforming apparent contradictions into sites of interpretive generativity.
The present essay has aspired, however imperfectly, to something of this spirit. It has read the four addresses not to resolve what they mean but to hold open the space of what they might mean — to resist the closure of interpretation in favor of the continuous repositioning of the text for the next reading. The layers are not stacked in a hierarchy, with a supposedly deeper layer revealing the "true" meaning that the surface conceals; they are, rather, set in relation to one another, such that each illuminates and is illuminated by the others in a process that does not terminate in a final synthesis but continues, as the Gemara continues, in the recognition that the text is never finished — only repositioned for the next encounter.
If this essay has succeeded in any measure, it has done so not by arriving at conclusions but by demonstrating the productivity of refusing to arrive — by showing that the four addresses, read in three dimensions, generate a field of meaning that is richer, more troubling, and more consequential than any linear reading could apprehend. The implications of this demonstration for the practice of diplomatic interpretation, for the scholarly analysis of multilateral discourse, and for the understanding of the theological substrates that continue to shape ostensibly secular international relations are, one might suggest in closing, matters that this essay does not presume to settle but only, in the manner of the Gemara, to pose for continued deliberation — in the hope that the next reading will find in these texts what this reading, constrained by its own situation and its own partialities, could not yet see.
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