This is the second part of a two part analysis of the constitution of the way that certain speeches delivered at that great performative theater that is the United Nations also usefully help unmask the underlying cognitive verities within which each is buried and also surfaces even as their discourse suggests something else entirely.
The first part undertook 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. Its principal contribution was meant to be encased in and as a 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.
The present essay brings into the analytical field the two voices that occupied, or might be said to have occupied, the very position of that structuring absence itself. Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, spoke as the voice of Jewish sovereignty — the claim to statehood grounded, at least in part, in theological narrative and historical suffering. Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority, spoke as the voice of Palestinian statehood — the counter-claim grounded in international law, territorial integrity, and the lived experience of dispossession. One might suggest that these two addresses, read against the seven-layer semiotic architecture developed in the original essay, illuminate dimensions of the structuring silence that the original analysis could only gesture toward.
The performative conditions under which each address was delivered are themselves of considerable analytical significance. Netanyahu spoke in person to a General Assembly hall from which approximately seventy-seven delegations had already walked out in coordinated protest — addressing, therefore, a hall defined as much by its absences as by its presences. Abbas, for the second consecutive year, was denied a United States visa and was compelled to address the Assembly via pre-recorded video — a mediated presence that enacts, at the level of the body itself, the very exclusion that the substance of his address decries. These conditions of delivery are not incidental to the analysis but constitute its outermost frame: physical presence amid orchestrated absence, and enforced absence within the institution of universal presence.
The analytical method remains, as in the original essay, phenomenological and semiotic rather than evaluative. The concern is not with the truth or falsity of the claims advanced by either speaker but rather with the positioning of those claims within layered systems of signification, the use of language simultaneously to disclose and to conceal, and the structures through which meaning is produced, contested, and rendered incommensurable. Everything, as the original essay insisted, must be read against the language and semiotics of "Reading in Three Dimensions."
And it starts, not as the operatic conflict between Gaza and the clan tribes of Israel, the children of Jacob in the land of Canaan in ther form of Samson and Delilah, though there is a bit of that going on here as well, but in the more broadly contemporary stage settiong of Verdi's opera Nabucco.
Va’, ti posa sui clivi, sui colli,
Ove olezzano tepide e molli
L’aure dolci del suolo natal!
Del Giordano le rive saluta,
Di Sionne le torri atterrate.
O mia Patria, sì bella e perduta!
O membranza, sì cara e fatal!
Arpa d’or dei fatidici vati,
Perché muta dal salice pendi?
Le memorie nel petto raccendi,
Ci favella del tempo che fu!
O simile di Solima ai fati,
Traggi un suono di crudo lamento,
O t’ispiri il Signore un concento
Che ne infonda al patire virtù!
Fly, thought, on golden wings;
Go, settle upon the slopes and the hills,
Where the warm and soft breezes
Of our native soil smell sweet!
Greet the banks of the Jordan
And the toppled towers of Zion.
O my country, so lovely and so lost!
O memory, so dear and so fatal!
Golden harp of the prophetic seers,
Why do you hang mute upon the willow?
Rekindle the memories in our breast,
And speak to us of the time gone by!
Mindful of the fate of Jerusalem,
Give forth a sound of raw lamentation,
Or may the Lord inspire you with a harmony
That infuses us with virtue to bear our suffering!
(Verdi, Nabucco (1842), libretto by Temistocle Solera, chorus, Va’ Pensiero)
Va’, pensiero begins not with an unmarked future but with the recollection of a damaged place, with the banks of the Jordan and the toppled towers of Zion, so that longing appears neither as a private emotion nor as an aesthetic response to loss but as a way in which a people inhabits history, and memory, lamentation, sacred geography, and the demand that suffering be made bearable become joined in a single movement of thought. The chorus is therefore not merely an evocative literary allusion but a phenomenological entry point: it discloses the Lebenswelt — the living world of longing, sacred geography, and fatal memory — from which the political and theological languages of the speeches draw their force. Read in this way, the chorus does not offer a proposition about the truth of a people or the justice of a claim; it opens the living world in which an absent homeland is made present through language, a ruined sanctuary becomes a sign of continuity, and endurance depends upon the return of a past that remains intimate, fatal, and unfinished.
The speeches cannot be understood apart from this Lebenswelt, and the Lebenswelt cannot be discerned except through the speeches. It is not a background against which political language happens to appear, but the living world of religious competition, longing, loss, and fatal othering that gives the language its objects and its urgency, even as the language discloses that world in partial and contested form. What the discourse reveals is therefore also what makes the discourse intelligible: the addresses are evidence of the Lebenswelt, while the Lebenswelt is the condition under which their invocations of land, sovereignty, return, sacrifice, and justice can be heard as more than public formulas.
Within this living world, religious competition is not a contest among discrete propositions but a struggle among comprehensive accounts of origin, inheritance, loss, and return, each organizing persons, places, histories, and institutions according to an account of where the world came from and what its restoration would require. When such accounts harden into reductionist essentialism, persons become bearers of categories, communities become remnants of an earlier dispensation, and political conflict is cast within a providential drama in which some are made to carry the future while others are treated as obstacles to its arrival. The secular vocabulary of sovereignty, occupation, security, recognition, and humanitarian obligation can then carry an older religious contest without naming it, and the speeches become the place where that contest is both concealed and made legible.
The essay follows below and may be accessed here.
Voices From the Structuring Silence
The Netanyahu and Abbas Addresses at the 81st UN General Assembly Read Against the Semiotic Architecture of 'Reading in Three Dimensions'
Larry Catá Backer (白 轲)
W. Richard and Mary Eshelman Faculty Scholar & Professor of Law, Professor of International Affairs; Pennsylvania State University
Working Paper / Pre-Publication Draft
September 2026
Abstract
This essay is offered as a companion to "Reading in Three Dimensions: A Semiotic and Phenomenological Analysis of Four Addresses Before the 81st Session of the UN General Assembly” (Backer 2026a), which undertook a layered, seven-register reading of the addresses delivered by Trump, Pezeshkian, Erdoğan, and Abdullah II at the 81st Session of the United Nations General Assembly in September 2026. That earlier work disclosed a structuring absence — a near-total silence on Judaism, on Jewish theological claims to land and covenant, and on the figure of the Jew as a subject of discourse rather than merely an object of geopolitical negotiation. The silence, the analysis suggested, functioned not as mere omission but as an organizing principle, a lacuna around which the other registers arranged themselves and through which the incompatibility of the competing discursive worlds was rendered at once invisible and determinative.
The present essay brings into the analytical field the two voices that occupied, or might be said to have occupied, the very position of that structuring absence itself. Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, spoke as the voice of Jewish sovereignty — the claim to statehood grounded, at least in part, in theological narrative and historical suffering. Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority, spoke as the voice of Palestinian statehood — the counter-claim grounded in international law, territorial integrity, and the lived experience of dispossession. One might suggest that these two addresses, read against the seven-layer semiotic architecture developed in the original essay, illuminate dimensions of the structuring silence that the original analysis could only gesture toward.
The performative conditions under which each address was delivered are themselves of considerable analytical significance. Netanyahu spoke in person to a General Assembly hall from which approximately seventy-seven delegations had already walked out in coordinated protest — addressing, therefore, a hall defined as much by its absences as by its presences. Abbas, for the second consecutive year, was denied a United States visa and was compelled to address the Assembly via pre-recorded video — a mediated presence that enacts, at the level of the body itself, the very exclusion that the substance of his address decries. These conditions of delivery are not incidental to the analysis but constitute its outermost frame: physical presence amid orchestrated absence, and enforced absence within the institution of universal presence.
The analytical method remains, as in the original essay, phenomenological and semiotic rather than evaluative. The concern is not with the truth or falsity of the claims advanced by either speaker but rather with the positioning of those claims within layered systems of signification, the use of language simultaneously to disclose and to conceal, and the structures through which meaning is produced, contested, and rendered incommensurable. Everything, as the original essay insisted, must be read against the language and semiotics of "Reading in Three Dimensions."
Executive Summary
This working paper extends the analytical framework developed in "Reading in Three Dimensions" by incorporating the two addresses that were, by design and by circumstance, absent from the original corpus. The expansion is not merely additive; it is, one might suggest, structural, in that it brings into the interpretive field the very voices around whose silence the original analysis was organized. The corpus now encompasses six addresses delivered at the 81st Session of the UN General Assembly, read across the same seven semiotic registers: surface diplomatic grammar, theological and civilizational substrate, the construction of victimhood and moral authority, temporal frameworks and historical narrative, the semiotics of sovereignty and territorial claim, the performative dimensions of institutional address, and the meta-semiotic register of reading itself.
Among the key findings that emerge from this expanded analysis, the following are suggestive. First, the Netanyahu and Abbas addresses do not resolve the structuring absence identified in the original essay but rather deepen it, revealing that the silence on Judaism and the silence on Palestinian selfhood operate through fundamentally different registers. Second, the conditions of delivery — physical presence amid walkout versus enforced absence via recorded video — themselves enact the very structures of inclusion and exclusion that constitute the substantive content of the addresses. Third, when read against the seven-layer architecture, the two addresses disclose radically incommensurable discursive worlds, not merely at the level of policy disagreement but at every register of signification simultaneously.
This essay is offered in the spirit of the Talmudic and Gemara tradition invoked in the original work — not as a closure of interpretation but as an opening of it, a further layer of reading that complicates rather than simplifies the semiotic field within which the discourse of the General Assembly operates.
The Broader Theological Field: Trump, Biden, and the Evangelical Register....................... 1
Layer 7: Recursive Tropes and Eschatological Temporality — The Architecture of Ultimacy..... 1
Cross-Reading: Netanyahu and Abbas as Complementary Halves of an Incomplete Discourse... 1
Mirror-Image Absences: The Complementary Structure of What Cannot Be Said.................... 1
The American Imperial Frame: Biden, Trump, and the Conditions of Address......................... 1
The Performative Conditions as Semiotic Structure: Speaking Across the Void....................... 1
1. Introduction: Va’, pensiero — The Lebenswelt of Longing, Loss, and Return
Va’,
pensiero, sull’ali dorate;
Va’, ti posa sui clivi, sui colli,
Ove olezzano tepide e molli
L’aure dolci del suolo natal!
Del Giordano le rive saluta,
Di Sionne le torri atterrate.
O mia Patria, sì bella
e perduta!
O membranza, sì cara e fatal!
Arpa d’or dei fatidici vati,
Perché muta dal salice pendi?
Le memorie nel petto raccendi,
Ci favella del tempo che fu!
O simile di Solima ai fati,
Traggi un suono di crudo lamento,
O t’ispiri il Signore un concento
Che ne infonda al patire virtù!
Fly, thought, on golden wings;
Go, settle upon the slopes and the hills,
Where the warm and soft breezes
Of our native soil smell sweet!
Greet the banks of the Jordan
And the toppled towers of Zion.
O my country, so lovely and so lost!
O memory, so dear and so fatal!
Golden harp of the prophetic seers,
Why do you hang mute upon the willow?
Rekindle the memories in our breast,
And speak to us of the time gone by!
Mindful of the fate of Jerusalem,
Give forth a sound of raw lamentation,
Or may the Lord inspire you with a harmony
That infuses us with virtue to bear our suffering!
(Verdi, Nabucco (1842), libretto by Temistocle Solera, chorus, Va’ Pensiero)
Va’, pensiero begins not with an unmarked future but with the recollection of a damaged place, with the banks of the Jordan and the toppled towers of Zion, so that longing appears neither as a private emotion nor as an aesthetic response to loss but as a way in which a people inhabits history, and memory, lamentation, sacred geography, and the demand that suffering be made bearable become joined in a single movement of thought. The chorus is therefore not merely an evocative literary allusion but a phenomenological entry point: it discloses the Lebenswelt — the living world of longing, sacred geography, and fatal memory — from which the political and theological languages of the speeches draw their force. Read in this way, the chorus does not offer a proposition about the truth of a people or the justice of a claim; it opens the living world in which an absent homeland is made present through language, a ruined sanctuary becomes a sign of continuity, and endurance depends upon the return of a past that remains intimate, fatal, and unfinished.
The speeches cannot be understood apart from this Lebenswelt, and the Lebenswelt cannot be discerned except through the speeches. It is not a background against which political language happens to appear, but the living world of religious competition, longing, loss, and fatal othering that gives the language its objects and its urgency, even as the language discloses that world in partial and contested form. What the discourse reveals is therefore also what makes the discourse intelligible: the addresses are evidence of the Lebenswelt, while the Lebenswelt is the condition under which their invocations of land, sovereignty, return, sacrifice, and justice can be heard as more than public formulas.
Within this living world, religious competition is not a contest among discrete propositions but a struggle among comprehensive accounts of origin, inheritance, loss, and return, each organizing persons, places, histories, and institutions according to an account of where the world came from and what its restoration would require. When such accounts harden into reductionist essentialism, persons become bearers of categories, communities become remnants of an earlier dispensation, and political conflict is cast within a providential drama in which some are made to carry the future while others are treated as obstacles to its arrival. The secular vocabulary of sovereignty, occupation, security, recognition, and humanitarian obligation can then carry an older religious contest without naming it, and the speeches become the place where that contest is both concealed and made legible.
The Jewish position within this living world requires particular attention because Jews appear at once as the source of the covenantal narrative from which universalist messianic traditions draw much of their authority and as the reminder that, within that narrative, the work of divine history has not been completed. The movement from Creation through expulsion, covenant, revelation, and the prospect of return gives the three Abrahamic traditions a shared but contested inheritance. Within that inheritance, the Jew is not simply another religious subject: the figure of the Jew keeps present the prior covenant, the continuing wound of expulsion, and the unresolved possibility of return, even where later traditions claim to fulfill, supersede, or otherwise reorder what came before.
The same movement from an originary condition through contradiction toward a transformed relation appears, in a different register, in Marxist-Leninist theory and particularly in Mao Zedong’s 1937 essay On Contradiction (Mao 1937), where the unity of opposites is treated as the source of development and internal contradiction as the force that moves a thing beyond its present form. The point is not to collapse theological and materialist vocabularies into one another, but to notice the formal resemblance between a theological passage toward restoration and a dialectical passage toward a new social order. Both give the present its significance by placing it within a movement whose direction is understood through its beginning and whose anticipated end lends authority to the struggle by which the present is to be surpassed.
That resemblance becomes more visible in Mao’s 1949 On the People’s Democratic Dictatorship (Mao 1949), where the vanguard party and the people’s state are presented as instruments for overcoming the remnants of the old order and preparing the way toward Great Harmony, 大同. Authority is justified not only by present consent but by a claimed place within a sequence of history; coercive work is represented as an interim necessity in the service of a future in which coercion itself will have disappeared. In this respect, the movement toward communism echoes the movement toward Eden: contradiction supplies the impetus, the vanguard supplies the mediating instrument, and the anticipated harmony gives the present struggle its final measure.
The covenantal and dialectical passages can thus be read as distinct overlays upon an older pattern of return, in which movement away from an originary harmony creates the conditions through which harmony is to be recovered. The Jewish tradition, in the phenomenological sense relevant here, continually enacts a return through the perfection of faith, the maintenance of covenantal relation, and a persistent orientation toward the sacred premises of the Temple, where the spirit of an unbroken covenant is imagined as remaining even after the institutional form has been destroyed. The memory of efforts to establish other temples, including at Elephantine, and the suppression of those efforts belongs to the history through which one authorized site acquired intensified significance. What follows is not a claim about what Jews are, but an account of how a tradition of return can become the object of displacement and othering when the presence of the prior covenant is experienced as an obstacle to another tradition’s completion.
This older contest can remain active beneath the legalisms and secular language of the United Nations, even when the surface vocabulary speaks of self-determination, territorial administration, humanitarian protection, or international peace. It appears more openly in Islamic invocations through which Israel is represented, within some actors and texts, as a reappearance of dar al-harb within dar al-Islam, a presence whose removal is treated as a condition of religious restoration. The 1988 Hamas Charter offers a clear textual instance, not because it speaks for all Islamic thought or every Palestinian political position, but because its own language binds territory, revelation, obligation, and historical destiny together: Article 11 describes Palestine as an Islamic Waqf entrusted to Muslim generations until the Day of Resurrection and denies authority to relinquish any part of it (Hamas 1988, Art. 11), while Article 13 declares that “There is no solution to the Palestinian Problem except by Jihad” (Hamas 1988, Art. 13). The land is thereby presented not as a negotiable object within a plural legal order but as a sacred trust governed by a higher norm. The text now survives as subtext in the current, dressed up for the appearance of acceptable legality tolerable when erupting from exotic subalterns, in the 2017 revisions.
A related movement appears in my essay, The Wandering Marx (Backer 2026b), where the denaturing of Marxism from its Jewish genealogical origins is described as a recoding through which the “international Marx,” the diasporic Jewish theorist, is superseded by the “Chinese Marx,” theory come home. The importance of this formulation lies less in any claim about the intention of a particular state or movement than in the possibility it opens: a universal theory, detached from the historical particularity of its Jewish intellectual origins, can come to treat Jewish national self-determination as an obstruction to the completion of the theory’s own homecoming. The wandering Jew is thereby changed from the carrier of universal theory into the remnant of a stage that the theory must overcome, while national return becomes difficult to accommodate within a universalism that has found its definitive place. The figure whose history helped make universalism possible is displaced when universalism claims to have arrived.
What emerges from these passages is a Lebenswelt of longing, loss, return, and sacrifice, in which restoration is imagined through the elimination, translation, or subordination of whatever is made to signify an unfinished past. The Jews occupy an unstable place within this world: they can be represented as the origin of covenantal language, as the living remainder of an uncompleted divine history, as the memory of revelation’s sacrificial character, and as the people upon whom sacrifice is repeatedly re-enacted in the imagination of others. These are not claims about the inner beliefs of a people or judgments about theological truth. They are observations about the ways persons and communities become legible, illegible, necessary, or disposable within recurring forms of religious language. The speeches of Benjamin Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas must be read against this Lebenswelt, but the Lebenswelt itself becomes visible only through the words, silences, and forms of address through which they speak.
The original essay, “Reading in Three Dimensions: A Semiotic and Phenomenological Analysis of Four Addresses Before the 81st Session of the UN General Assembly” (Backer 2026a), undertook a layered excavation of the four addresses delivered by Donald Trump, Masoud Pezeshkian, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and King Abdullah II. Moving through seven registers, from the surface grammar of diplomatic convention to the conditions of reading itself, that analysis disclosed a structuring absence: a near-total silence on Judaism as a theological tradition, on Jewish claims to land grounded in covenant and scripture, and on the Jew as a subject of discourse rather than merely an object of geopolitical calculation or humanitarian concern. The original essay did not treat this silence as an accidental omission. It found in it an organizing principle around which the other registers could take their form.
That silence did not mark a gap that a fuller inventory could simply fill. It made possible the appearance of a shared diplomatic language, because the four speakers could seem to disagree within a common vocabulary while leaving outside the field the theological particularity of Judaism, Jewish sovereignty, and the Jewish claim to covenantal relation with the land. The present essay is a companion to that work, and its ambition is at once more modest and more radical: more modest because it confines itself to two additional addresses and relies upon the interpretive architecture already developed; more radical because it brings into the field the voices that occupied the position of the structuring absence, the voice of Jewish sovereignty articulated by Benjamin Netanyahu (Netanyahu 2026) and the voice of Palestinian statehood articulated by Mahmoud Abbas (Abbas 2026). The addition of these voices therefore tests the architecture from the position it had previously left unspoken.
The conditions under which the two addresses were delivered belong to this inquiry from the beginning. Netanyahu stood at the General Assembly podium in person, but he spoke before a hall from which approximately seventy-seven delegations had already departed in a coordinated walkout. His presence was therefore constituted within a room marked by the visible absence of the audience to which he nominally spoke; the walkout performed rejection, solidarity with Palestine, and moral judgment, while also giving bodily form to the silence through which the earlier corpus had organized its apparent common language. Abbas, by contrast, was denied a United States visa for the second consecutive year and addressed the Assembly through pre-recorded video. His voice entered the institution as a mediated presence, formally heard but bodily excluded, and the condition of his appearance enacted at the level of the body the exclusion from institutional participation that his address describes. Netanyahu spoke into an absence produced by the departure of his audience; Abbas spoke from an absence produced by the denial of his presence. The relation is not incidental to the speeches but part of what they say before their words are interpreted.
The method remains phenomenological and semiotic rather than evaluative or prescriptive. The concern is not whether Netanyahu’s historical and theological account is true or whether Abbas’s legal account is sufficient, but how claims are positioned within layered relations of signification, how language discloses and conceals at the same time, how familiar terms such as peace, security, justice, international law, self-determination, and sovereignty acquire different force in different addresses, and how those differences are managed within the institutional form of the General Assembly speech. Everything must be read against the language and semiotics of “Reading in Three Dimensions” (Backer 2026a). Its seven registers — surface diplomatic grammar; theological and civilizational substrate; the construction of victimhood and moral authority; temporal and historical narration; sovereignty and territorial claim; the performative dimensions of institutional address; and the recursive conditions of reading — remain the path through which the Netanyahu and Abbas addresses enter the analysis, while their encounter also discloses what that path can and cannot show.
The background for this reading is also the framework developed in “Theocratic Constitutionalism: An Introduction to a New Global Legal Ordering” (Backer 2009), which attends to the ways theological commitments and constitutional ordering can intersect, overlap, and contend for authority. Within that account, religion is not an ornament added to political language from outside; it provides the principles through which a community understands law, legitimacy, governance, and the limits of power — it is, in my earlier formulation, “a world view” with its own internal logic, institutions, and normative architecture (Backer 1998, 249). Netanyahu’s invocation of biblical narrative and Abbas’s invocation of Islamic framing are therefore read neither as departures from legal discourse nor as transparent statements of doctrine, but as expressions of theological commitments within and beneath the secular grammar of the General Assembly. The Lebenswelt is the object disclosed through these expressions and the instrument through which they become intelligible.
Finally, the essay is offered in the spirit of an ancient traditions of religious commentary, commentary in which the core text is immutable and exogenous to the commentator, but in which they function as textual vessels that have been filled with the all too human impulse to see themselves in religious text. Here as well, a foundational text is opened by commentary rather than closed by it, and each layer of interpretation brings forward questions and relations that were present but not yet visible. All the while these exegetic exercises reveal not just the filling of text but the construction of belief which is itself, in this case at least, also touched by nd as the divine. This is not a claim to stand outside the competing Lebenswelten, to adjudicate between the voices, or to supply the final account of what the General Assembly addresses mean. It is an additional reading through which the relation between what is said, what is unsaid, and what remains difficult to say can be brought more clearly into view, so that the speeches and the Lebenswelt they disclose are read as mutually constitutive rather than as text and background.
2. Layer 1: Surface Diplomatic Grammar
The first interpretive register identified in "Reading in Three Dimensions" concerned what was there described as the surface diplomatic grammar of the General Assembly address — the shared vocabulary of conventions, courtesies, institutional references, and rhetorical postures through which speakers signal their participation in the discursive community of the United Nations and, in so doing, construct the appearance of a common communicative field within which substantive disagreements can be articulated as disagreements rather than as incommensurable assertions from within mutually unintelligible meaning-systems. Reading in Three Dimensions argued that this surface grammar — the grammar of "distinguished delegates," of references to the Charter, of acknowledgment of the Assembly President, of the framing of national interest within the rhetoric of universal values — functioned not as a neutral medium of communication but rather as a semiotic system in its own right, a system that simultaneously enabled and constrained the production of meaning and that masked, beneath its apparent universality, the radical incompatibility of the meaning-structures it purported to bring into dialogue.
When the Netanyahu and Abbas addresses are read against this first register, what emerges is a contrast of remarkable sharpness — a contrast that operates not merely at the level of rhetorical style or political content but at the level of the speakers' fundamental orientation toward the grammar of the institution itself. Netanyahu's address does not merely depart from diplomatic convention in isolated moments of rhetorical excess; rather, it refuses the grammar of the General Assembly hall from its very opening, substituting for the expected diplomatic register a mode of address that can be described, with restraint, as that of the warrior-patriarch: confrontational, accusatory, structured around personal narrative and moral judgment rather than institutional protocol and collective deliberation.
The opening of Netanyahu's address is, in this respect, of particular analytical significance, for it establishes at the threshold of the speech the semiotic register within which everything that follows is to be read. Where the conventions of the General Assembly address call for a greeting to the President of the Assembly, an acknowledgment of fellow delegates, and perhaps a framing statement that locates the speaker's concerns within the broader agenda of the session, Netanyahu begins with what one might characterize as an act of anti-diplomatic rupture:
"Before I begin, just a quick announcement: If there are any other moral cowards who haven't yet left this hall — please do so now."
This utterance violates every convention of General Assembly address simultaneously. It addresses not the President but the absent delegations — or, more precisely, any remaining members of the audience who might share the political orientation of those who have departed. It employs not the language of diplomacy but the language of moral combat: "moral cowards" is a designation that places the speaker in the position of moral judge and his audience in the position of the judged. It performs not institutional belonging but institutional confrontation: the speaker does not seek admission to the discursive community of the Assembly but rather claims a position above it, a position from which the Assembly itself can be assessed and found wanting. And it does all of this with a casualness — "just a quick announcement" — that itself performs contempt for the solemnity of the occasion, a contempt that is, paradoxically, more devastating to the institutional grammar than outright anger would be, precisely because it refuses to take the institution seriously enough to be angry at it.
The analytical significance of this opening extends well beyond its immediate rhetorical impact. Read against Reading in Three Dimensions’ account of surface diplomatic grammar as a shared vocabulary that masks incompatible meaning-structures, Netanyahu's refusal of that grammar can be understood as a refusal of the masking function itself — a deliberate stripping away of the diplomatic surface to expose the raw structure of confrontation beneath it. Where the four speakers analyzed in Reading in Three Dimensions — Trump, Pezeshkian, Erdoğan, and Abdullah — all participated, to varying degrees, in the surface grammar of the Assembly, thereby maintaining the fiction of a shared discursive field within which their competing claims could be adjudicated, Netanyahu refuses that fiction from the outset. His speech is structured not as an address to the Assembly but as a confrontation with it, an accusation against it, and — most significantly — a personal narrative that operates outside the institutional grammar altogether.
The body of Netanyahu's address sustains and deepens this anti-diplomatic register. The speech is organized not around the expected categories of international relations — regional security, development cooperation, institutional reform — but around a narrative arc that moves from personal moral authority through historical suffering to existential threat and righteous combat. Netanyahu invokes not the Charter of the United Nations but the Bible; he references not Security Council resolutions but the narrative of Jewish persecution across millennia; he constructs his authority not from the institutional position of head of state within the international order but from the theological-historical position of the leader of a people whose legitimacy precedes and exceeds the institutional framework within which he is nominally speaking. The surface diplomatic grammar, in Netanyahu's address, is not merely violated but replaced — substituted with a warrior-patriarch grammar in which moral authority derives not from institutional participation but from the willingness to confront, to accuse, and to stand alone.
Mahmoud Abbas's address, when read against the same register, presents a contrast so thoroughgoing that it can be described not merely as a difference in rhetorical style but as an inhabitation of the surface diplomatic grammar so complete that the grammar itself becomes both the medium and, in a certain sense, the message of the address. Abbas opens, as convention and personal practice dictate, with the Bismillah — "In the name of God, the Most Merciful, the Most Compassionate" — a framing that is itself a complex semiotic act, simultaneously performing Islamic identity and invoking a universal register of mercy and compassion that transcends the particularism of any single theological tradition. He then addresses the President of the General Assembly by name and title, acknowledges the assembled delegations, and proceeds to locate his address within the institutional framework of the United Nations with a precision and fidelity that is remarkable in its consistency and completeness.
The institutional references in Abbas's address are not merely decorative or conventional; they constitute the substantive architecture of his argument. He references specific United Nations resolution numbers — not as appeals to external authority but as the grammar within which his claims to statehood, to territorial integrity, and to the rights of his people are formulated. He describes in detail the institutional reform programs undertaken by the Palestinian Authority — governance reforms, anti-corruption measures, security sector professionalization, fiscal transparency initiatives — not merely as policy achievements but as demonstrations of institutional fitness, as evidence that the Palestinian Authority has mastered the grammar of the international order and thereby earned admission to its discursive community. Where Netanyahu refuses the grammar of the hall, Abbas masters it; where Netanyahu substitutes confrontation for convention, Abbas performs convention with an almost exhaustive thoroughness, as if the accumulation of institutional references could itself constitute the statehood that the institutional order has not yet formally conferred.
The performative paradox that emerges from this contrast is of considerable analytical significance for the broader project of reading the General Assembly addresses through a layered semiotic architecture. The speaker who violates every convention of diplomatic grammar — who opens with an insult, who refuses the institutional framework, who substitutes warrior-patriarch narrative for diplomatic protocol — is the speaker who is physically present in the hall, who commands the podium, who speaks to (and against) the assembled delegations in the fullness of embodied institutional participation. The speaker who exemplifies the surface diplomatic grammar with remarkable fidelity — who addresses the President, who cites resolutions, who demonstrates institutional competence with painstaking thoroughness — is the speaker who is physically absent from the hall, who has been denied the capacity to be present by the host country's refusal of a visa, who addresses the Assembly only through the mediation of recorded video and therefore cannot participate in the performative exchange — the eye contact, the pause for response, the physical commanding of institutional space — that the surface grammar presupposes.
This paradox is not merely ironic but structurally revelatory. It suggests that the relationship between surface diplomatic grammar and institutional inclusion is more complex, and more fraught, than the account in Reading in Three Dimensions might have implied. Reading in Three Dimensions argued that the surface grammar functioned as a shared vocabulary that masked incompatible meaning-structures; what the Netanyahu-Abbas contrast reveals is that the grammar can be refused by those who are included and mastered by those who are excluded, and that the grammar's capacity to mask incompatibility depends not merely on its deployment but on the performative conditions under which it is deployed. When Abbas cites resolution numbers from a pre-recorded video that plays in a hall where he cannot stand, the surface grammar does not mask incompatibility; it enacts exclusion. When Netanyahu dismisses his audience as moral cowards from the podium of the General Assembly itself, the refusal of the grammar does not expose incompatibility; it performs sovereignty.
It is useful, in this connection, to recall the finding in Reading in Three Dimensions regarding the surface diplomatic grammar of the other four speakers, for the Netanyahu-Abbas contrast illuminates dimensions of those earlier analyses that were not fully visible from within the original corpus alone. Trump's surface grammar was transactional rather than diplomatic in the conventional sense — organized around the rhetoric of the deal rather than the rhetoric of institutional solidarity. Pezeshkian's grammar was that of civilizational grievance wrapped in diplomatic courtesy. Erdoğan's was that of the reformist elder statesman who deploys institutional language in the service of civilizational claims. Abdullah's was perhaps the most conventionally diplomatic of the four, though organized around an implicit claim to mediating authority. None of these occupied the extremes that Netanyahu and Abbas represent: none refused the grammar as completely as Netanyahu, and none mastered it as thoroughly as Abbas. The original four speakers occupied various positions within the space of the surface grammar; Netanyahu and Abbas define the boundaries of that space — the boundary of refusal and the boundary of mastery — and in so doing reveal the grammar itself as a field of power rather than a medium of communication.
What the first-register analysis thus discloses, when the corpus is expanded to include the two voices of the structuring absence, is that the surface diplomatic grammar of the General Assembly is not, as it might initially appear, a neutral communicative framework within which political disagreements are articulated, but rather a semiotic system whose deployment, refusal, and mastery are themselves acts of political and existential positioning. The grammar does not precede the political contest; it is one of the terrains upon which the contest is conducted. And the positions that Netanyahu and Abbas assume within this terrain — refusal from the position of presence, mastery from the position of absence — enact, at the very first register of analysis, the fundamental incommensurability that the subsequent six layers will disclose in progressively deeper and more complex dimensions.
3. Layer 2: Legal-Structural Claims and Competing Classificatory Systems
If the rhetorical surface of the two speeches establishes a set of divergent communicative strategies, the second interpretive register — that of legal-structural analysis — discloses a far more consequential divergence, one that operates not merely at the level of persuasive technique but at the level of constitutional legitimation itself. Here the classificatory framework articulated in my 2009 work on theocratic constitutionalism, becomes an indispensable analytical instrument, for a perhaps significant insight — that "constitutionalism is 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" — permits us to read these two addresses not as competing political claims within a shared legal order, but as expressions of fundamentally distinct classificatory regimes, each of which produces its own criteria for what counts as a legitimate sovereign assertion.
The analytical yield of this framework becomes immediately apparent when one attends to the distribution of legal argumentation across the two texts. Netanyahu's address to the General Assembly is remarkable precisely for what it does not contain: there is almost no legal argumentation in the conventional sense, no invocation of treaties, no citation of resolutions, no appeal to the architecture of international law as a source of legitimating authority. The sovereignty claim that structures the entire address is instead asserted through historical-theological precedence — a mode of legitimation that operates outside, and indeed prior to, the post-1945 international legal order. When Netanyahu declares that "Judea — that's where the word Jew comes from," or that "Jews have been on the Golan Heights since the days of Moses" and that "you can read it in the Bible," the operative logic is not that of legal entitlement derived from positive law but rather that of an originary presence whose temporal priority renders subsequent legal instruments secondary, if not entirely beside the point.
This absence of conventional legal citation is not a rhetorical deficiency but a classificatory choice — a determination, whether deliberate or intuitive, that the legitimacy of Jewish sovereignty over the land of Israel is not a matter that falls within the jurisdiction of international legal instruments, because such instruments are themselves posterior to, and therefore derivative of, a prior claim that rests on three thousand years of continuous habitation and, as the speech makes explicit, on divine covenant. The legal claims in Netanyahu's address are thus implicit rather than explicit: territorial legitimacy derives from biblical and historical precedence, and the classificatory system within which this legitimacy is assessed is one in which the Hebrew Bible functions as a kind of originary constitutional text — a document whose authority precedes and supersedes the United Nations Charter, the Geneva Conventions, and the accumulated corpus of Security Council resolutions.
The contrast with President Abbas's address could hardly be more stark, and it is the sharpness of this contrast that renders my classificatory framework so analytically productive. If Netanyahu's speech is characterized by the near-total absence of positive legal citation, Abbas's address is saturated with it. The legal vocabulary is not merely present but constitutive: Resolution 2803, Resolution 2334, the Paris Economic Protocol, the advisory opinions of the International Court of Justice, the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, the question of full United Nations membership — these are not ornamental references but the very grammar of Abbas's political speech. The phrase "international law" recurs throughout the address with an insistence that suggests it functions not merely as a source of authority but as the organizing principle of an entire political ontology, the conceptual framework within which Palestinian statehood is rendered intelligible and, crucially, legitimate. As Reading in Three Dimensions argued regarding Abdullah’s address, the legal-institutional register can also operate as a classificatory device: it does not merely describe political reality but determines which claims become legible within the institutional field.
What one ought to be able to perceive in this way, with a clarity that might otherwise remain unavailable, is that each speaker deploys law as a classificatory system — but the systems they deploy are fundamentally different and, in a strong sense, incommensurable. Netanyahu classifies sovereignty through theological-historical precedence: the legitimate sovereign is the one whose presence on the land extends backward through millennia, whose claim is attested by sacred scripture, whose right is grounded in an unbroken chain of habitation that connects the contemporary state to its biblical antecedents. Abbas classifies sovereignty through positivist international law: the legitimate sovereign is the one whose claim is recognized by the relevant legal instruments, whose borders are defined by Security Council resolutions, whose rights are adjudicated by international courts, whose statehood is validated by the procedures of multilateral institutions. The two classificatory systems do not merely disagree about the application of shared legal principles to a contested set of facts; they disagree about what constitutes a legal principle in the first place, about the very criteria by which legitimacy is to be assessed.
This incommensurability is not merely a feature of these two particular speeches but rather a structural characteristic of the broader conflict, one that helps to explain why legal argumentation has so often failed to produce resolution. Netanyahu's sovereignty claim rests on three thousand years of habitation and divine covenant — a temporal horizon that renders the post-1945 international legal architecture, from the perspective of this classificatory system, a relatively recent and therefore potentially provisional set of arrangements. Abbas's sovereignty claim rests precisely on that post-1945 architecture — on the principle that the legitimacy of states is determined by the international community through established legal procedures, and that any claim, however ancient, that cannot be validated within this framework lacks legal standing. Each system, viewed from within its own classificatory logic, is entirely coherent; each system, viewed from the perspective of the other, appears to be operating outside the bounds of legitimate legal discourse.
The finding in Reading in Three Dimensions regarding competing constitutionalisms — the observation that the corpus disclosed not a single constitutional order within which competing claims are adjudicated but rather multiple constitutional orders, each with its own internal logic of legitimation — is here confirmed and enriched by the addition of these two addresses. That framework is particularly illuminating in this regard because it resists the temptation, common in Western constitutional scholarship, to treat theocratic constitutionalism as merely an illegitimate or deficient form of secular constitutionalism. I argues that theocratic constitutionalism represents "a competing system," not "an illegitimate form of transnational secular constitutionalism" — and this distinction is crucial for understanding the legal-structural dynamics of the Israeli-Palestinian discourse at the United Nations, where the assumption that all participants are operating within a single, secular, positivist legal framework obscures the extent to which at least some participants are operating within an entirely different classificatory regime.
The incommensurability disclosed by this analysis is not absolute but admits of partial and provisional points of contact. The Israel-Lebanon Ceasefire Framework Agreement of June 2026 is instructive in this regard, for it constitutes a legal text that appears to bridge, provisionally, the two classificatory registers identified above. The agreement's affirmation that "Israel and Lebanon affirm the right of each state to exist in peace" operates within the familiar grammar of positivist international law — the language of state recognition, mutual obligation, and peaceful coexistence that characterizes the post-1945 legal order. Yet the ceremonial context of the agreement's announcement reveals a more complex classificatory dynamic: Ambassador Leiter's invocation of that week's Torah portion alongside the legal formality of the framework agreement suggests that even within the genre of contemporary international legal instruments, the theological register is never entirely absent, that the classificatory systems identified as distinct and competing are in practice capable of a certain degree of interpenetration, however unstable and provisional such interpenetration may prove to be.
The significance of this legal-structural analysis lies not in its capacity to resolve the competing claims but in its capacity to render visible the classificatory frameworks within which those claims are formulated and assessed. When Netanyahu asserts sovereignty without recourse to international legal instruments, and when Abbas asserts sovereignty through an exhaustive accumulation of such instruments, they are not merely making different arguments — they are operating within different constitutional orders, each of which produces its own criteria for legitimacy, its own hierarchy of authoritative sources, its own logic of validation. By insisting that constitutionalism is itself a classificatory practice, it is possible to perceive this structural divergence with a precision that purely doctrinal or purely political analysis would not afford, and it is this perception that prepares the ground for the third and most analytically productive interpretive layer: the theological Lebenswelt that underlies and, in certain crucial respects, generates the classificatory divergence disclosed at this second level of analysis.
4. Layer 3: The Theological Lebenswelt
If the second interpretive layer disclosed a structural divergence between competing classificatory systems — one grounded in theological-historical precedence, the other in positivist international law — the third layer undertakes to examine the theological Lebenswelt within which those classificatory systems are embedded and from which, in certain crucial respects, they derive their animating force. At this level, the expanded corpus yields its most consequential findings, for the addition of Netanyahu's and Abbas's addresses to the original textual field does not merely supplement the prior analysis but transforms it, filling what Reading in Three Dimensions identified as a structuring absence and thereby reconfiguring the semiotic economy of the entire corpus.
Netanyahu and the Explicit Theologization of Jewish Sovereignty
Netanyahu's address to the General Assembly is, one must observe with appropriate scholarly emphasis, the only address in the expanded corpus that explicitly theologizes Jewish sovereignty — that is, the only speech that names the theological ground upon which the Jewish claim to the land of Israel is asserted, that articulates this claim not in the secular vocabulary of international law or geopolitical strategy but in the language of prophetic lineage, sacred scripture, and divine covenant. The prophetic lineage is named with a specificity that has no parallel elsewhere in the corpus: Moses, David, Solomon, Isaiah, Jeremiah — the succession of prophets and kings through whom, in the theological framework of the Hebrew Bible, God's relationship with the people of Israel and the land of Israel is mediated and sustained. This is not allusion or implication but explicit invocation, a deliberate decision to ground the contemporary state's legitimacy in a sacred genealogy that extends backward through three millennia of recorded history.
The Hebrew Bible is not merely referenced but directly quoted. When Netanyahu pronounces the phrase "netsakh Israel lo yeshaker" — the eternity of Israel will not falter — he is citing 1 Samuel 15:29, a passage in which the prophet Samuel declares the irrevocability of God's purposes concerning Israel. The significance of this citation extends well beyond its immediate rhetorical effect, for it positions the contemporary State of Israel within a theological narrative of perpetuity — a narrative in which the survival and sovereignty of the Jewish people is not a contingent historical outcome, subject to the vicissitudes of geopolitical circumstance, but rather an expression of divine will that, by definition, cannot be defeated or overturned. The speech's closing invocation — "God willing, they'll continue to fail," referring to Israel's enemies — reinforces this theological framing, situating the political future of the state within the providential economy of divine intention.
It is here that the relationship between Netanyahu's address and the original essay's findings becomes most analytically consequential. The original essay identified what it termed a "structuring absence" within the corpus — the observation that, across the range of addresses examined, the words "Jew" and "Jewish" appeared with remarkable infrequency, that the theological specificity of Jewish identity was systematically elided even in speeches that purported to address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in its full complexity. Judaism, the original analysis found, occupied a curious position of simultaneous centrality and invisibility: it was the absent ground upon which the entire discursive field was organized, the unnamed referent without which the speeches would have no occasion, yet it was precisely this ground that remained unspoken, as though the act of naming Jewish theological particularity would disrupt the secular-diplomatic register within which the speeches operated.
Netanyahu's address is the speech that fills this semiotic gap — that confronts the structuring absence identified in Reading in Three Dimensions by naming, with an explicitness that borders on the declarative, what the other speeches could not or would not name. The words "Jew," "Jewish," and "the Jewish people" appear throughout the address with a frequency and emphasis that stands in marked contrast to the rest of the corpus, and the theological content associated with these terms is not muted or euphemized but fully articulated. Where the original corpus disclosed a discursive field in which Islam and Christianity were explicitly named while Judaism remained absent, Netanyahu's speech disrupts this asymmetry by insisting upon the theological specificity of Jewish identity as the very foundation of Israeli sovereignty. The structuring absence is, in this speech, no longer absent — it has become the structuring presence, the explicit theological ground upon which the entire political argument rests.
Abbas and the Theology of the Implicit
If Netanyahu's theological register is characterized by its explicitness — by the direct naming of prophets, the direct citation of scripture, the direct assertion of divine covenant — Abbas's theological register is characterized by a more complex interplay of the explicit and the implicit, the spoken and the unspoken, in which theological framing operates not as the substance of the argument but as its container. Abbas opens his address with "Bismillah al-Rahman al-Rahim" — In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful — and closes with "al-salam alaykum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh" — peace be upon you, and the mercy of God and His blessings. These are theological bookends, formulaic invocations that frame the entirety of the address within a sacred horizon, yet the content that they enclose is overwhelmingly secular-legal in character: the resolutions, the protocols, the court opinions, the institutional procedures that constitute the substance of Abbas's sovereignty claim.
This structural arrangement — theological frame, secular-legal content — is itself analytically significant, for it shows that the relationship between the theological and the legal in Abbas's address is not one of opposition or mutual exclusion but rather one of containment, in which the legal argumentation operates within a theological space that is acknowledged at the boundaries but not elaborated within the body of the text. The Bismillah and the closing salutation function as what liturgical scholars term a "performative frame" — a ritualized utterance that establishes the sacred context within which subsequent speech acts are to be understood, even when those speech acts are themselves entirely secular in their propositional content. The theological Lebenswelt is thus present in Abbas's address, but it is present as horizon rather than as substance, as the ambient condition within which legal claims are formulated rather than as the explicit ground upon which they rest.
Yet there is a further dimension to Abbas's theological register that warrants careful examination, and it concerns the selective naming of holy sites. Abbas invokes both Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre — Islamic and Christian sacred spaces, respectively — without naming Jewish holy sites, an asymmetry that acquires particular significance when read against the finding in Reading in Three Dimensions that Islam and Christianity were explicitly named across the corpus while Judaism remained absent. The question is whether this selective naming enacts a classificatory structure, one in which Jewish religious claims to the land are excluded from the legitimate theological field, in which the sacred geography of Jerusalem is rendered as an Islamic-Christian space from which the Jewish dimension has been systematically excised.
This question admits of no simple or definitive answer, and it would be intellectually irresponsible to assert with confidence that Abbas's omission of Jewish holy sites constitutes a deliberate act of theological exclusion rather than, for instance, a strategic rhetorical choice designed to build solidarity with both Muslim and Christian audiences, or a reflection of the political sensitivity surrounding the status of the Temple Mount and the Western Wall, or simply an unremarkable consequence of the limited time available for a General Assembly address. What can be observed, however, with somewhat greater confidence, is that the pattern of selective naming — the inclusion of Islamic and Christian sacred spaces and the exclusion of Jewish ones — reproduces, at the level of theological reference, the same asymmetry that the original essay identified at the level of religious naming more broadly, and that this reproduction is analytically significant regardless of the intentionality that may or may not lie behind it.
The classical jurisprudential vocabulary of territorial classification supplies a further frame for reading this asymmetry. In fiqh, the distinction between dar al-Islam and dar al-Harb was principally territorial and jurisdictional rather than a simple theological division between faithful and infidel: dar al-Islam denoted lands in which Muslim political authority and Islamic law were sovereign, while dar al-Harb denoted lands outside that jurisdiction. The Hanafi analysis, in particular, treated the categories through territorial control, security, and the effective application of law, not as a command that relations with every non-Muslim polity remain permanently hostile (Ahmad 2008; Eris 2000).
The jurists also recognized intermediate arrangements, described as Dar al-Sulh or Dar al-Ahd, in which treaty, truce, security, or reciprocal obligation organized relations with non-Muslim lands. These categories functioned as instruments for navigating international relations within a changing political world. They therefore complicate any reading of the classical scheme as a mandate for perpetual warfare: the relevant question was often the jurisdiction governing a territory and the obligations created by an agreement, not an unalterable metaphysical hostility between civilizations (Ahmad 2008; Eris 2000).
The colonial rupture in the nineteenth century forced a new question upon Islamic thought: when Muslim territory fell under non-Muslim rule, did it become dar al-Harb? The question was not merely doctrinal. It made territorial loss appear as a crisis in the relation between law, sovereignty, and communal identity. Later political Islam — from Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Rashid Rida through the Muslim Brotherhood and Sayyid Qutb — increasingly shifted the relevant boundary from geography to ideological sovereignty. In Qutb’s formulation, a society not governed by divine sovereignty, or Hakimiyyah, remained in Jahiliyyah; the logic of dar al-Harb could thereby be internalized, so that the Abode of War was no longer only beyond the border but could be identified with the ruling regime itself.
Abbas’s address can be read against this spectrum without collapsing it into a claim about his personal doctrine. Its overwhelmingly legal-institutional vocabulary — resolutions, protocols, court opinions, recognition, and procedural compliance — locates the Palestinian claim within the post-Westphalian grammar of Dar al-Sulh or Dar al-Ahd rather than the grammar of dar al-Harb. Yet the silences remain consequential. By not naming Jewish holy sites, by not identifying the Temple Mount as a Jewish sacred space, and by presenting the conflict as a legal-territorial dispute whose authoritative vocabulary is international law, the address enacts a classificatory structure in which Jewish theological claims occupy no recognized position. The Hamas Charter, already discussed above, sits at one end of this spectrum through its explicit dar al-Harb framing; Abbas’s legal-institutional rhetoric sits at another. Both nevertheless operate within the wider jurisprudential history of territorial classification, even as they mobilize that history toward sharply different political ends.
The Broader Theological Field: Trump, Biden, and the Evangelical Register
The theological analysis is further enriched by attending to the other addresses in the expanded corpus that operate within explicitly theological registers, for Netanyahu's and Abbas's speeches do not exhaust the theological dimensions of the discourse. Trump's address to the Knesset in October 2025 deploys a theological vocabulary that is distinct from both Netanyahu's Hebraic register and Abbas's Islamic framing: "thanks to the Almighty God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob" invokes the shared Abrahamic lineage in a formulation that, while compatible with Jewish theological tradition, carries the unmistakable inflection of American evangelical Protestantism — a tradition in which the restoration of Jewish sovereignty over the land of Israel is understood not merely as a geopolitical event but as a fulfillment of biblical prophecy, a necessary precondition for the eschatological drama that evangelical theology anticipates.
Trump's declaration that "this is not only the end of a war, this is the end of an age of terror and death, and the beginning of the age of faith and hope and of God" operates within an explicitly theological periodization of history — a division of time into ages characterized by their relationship to divine purpose — that echoes the dispensationalist framework common in American evangelical thought. The significance of this theological register, for the present analysis, lies in its demonstration that the theologization of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not limited to the direct participants but extends to the broader international community, and particularly to the United States, where evangelical Christian Zionism constitutes a powerful political and theological force whose influence on American Middle East policy has been extensively documented by scholars including, among others, Walter Russell Mead, Michael Oren, and Daniel Hummel.
Biden's contribution to the theological field is more restrained but no less significant. His recognition of Jewish historical specificity — "the Jewish people know, perhaps better than anyone" — operates at the boundary between the secular-historical and the theological, acknowledging a particularity of Jewish experience that, while not explicitly grounded in theological claims, resonates with theological narratives of election, suffering, and survival that are central to Jewish self-understanding. The phrase "perhaps better than anyone" suggests a unique epistemological position — a way of knowing that is grounded in a specific historical experience — that, while framed in secular terms, carries theological overtones insofar as the particular historical experience to which it refers is itself inseparable from the theological narratives through which it has been transmitted and interpreted across generations.
Divine Nomocracy and the Structure of Theocratic Constitutionalism
My concept of divine nomocracy developed in ‘Theocratic Constitutionalism’— "government administered in accordance with a divine system of law" — provides a theoretical framework within which the theological registers of the expanded corpus can be situated with greater analytical precision. The concept developed is one of theocratic constitutionalism as a distinct form of constitutional order, one in which the ultimate source of legal authority is not the sovereign will of the people, as in democratic constitutionalism, nor the procedural rationality of institutions, as in liberal constitutionalism, but rather the revealed will of God as articulated in sacred scripture and interpreted by authorized religious authorities. The relevance of this concept to the present analysis lies in its capacity to illuminate the theological foundations of the competing sovereignty claims disclosed by the corpus, and to situate those claims within a broader comparative framework of constitutional ordering.
Netanyahu's speech, read through the lens of divine nomocracy, presents what one might characterize as an alternative theological constitutionalism — one in which the Hebrew Bible functions as the foundational constitutional document, the prophetic lineage as the chain of constitutional authority, and the divine covenant as the source of sovereign legitimacy. This is not to suggest that the contemporary State of Israel operates as a theocracy in any straightforward institutional sense — it manifestly does not, and the distinction between a state that invokes theological legitimation in its diplomatic rhetoric and a state that is actually governed by religious law is one that must be maintained with scrupulous analytical care. What can be observed, however, is that Netanyahu's address articulates a theological ground for sovereignty that, in its structural logic if not in its institutional manifestation, shares certain formal characteristics with the theocratic constitutionalisms that I analyzed — most notably, the Iranian Constitution's doctrine of velayat-e faqih, or governance by the jurisprudent, in which political authority is derived from and subordinated to divine authority as mediated through qualified religious scholars.
The comparison with velayat-e faqih is instructive not because the two systems are equivalent — they differ profoundly in their institutional structures, their theological content, and their political consequences — but because the comparison illuminates a shared formal characteristic: the derivation of political legitimacy from a source that is understood to be prior to, and therefore more authoritative than, any merely human legal arrangement. For the velayat-e faqih, this source is the Shia jurisprudential tradition as it interprets the will of God for the governance of the Islamic community; for Netanyahu's theological constitutionalism, this source is the Hebrew Bible as it establishes the eternal covenant between God, the Jewish people, and the land of Israel. In both cases, the legitimacy of the political order rests upon a claim that transcends the temporal horizon of positive law and grounds itself in a divine dispensation that, by its nature, cannot be abrogated by subsequent human legislation.
The dhimmi structure identified as a characteristic feature of certain theocratic constitutional orders — the principle that "while religious minorities might be tolerated, they are not permitted to grow nor to threaten the state" — raises a further question that must be posed with considerable analytical delicacy: to what extent does Abbas's selective naming of Islamic and Christian but not Jewish holy sites enact, at the level of diplomatic rhetoric, a classificatory structure analogous to the dhimmi arrangement, in which Jewish religious claims to the land are not so much denied as excluded from the field of legitimate theological assertion? The question is not whether Abbas personally subscribes to the dhimmi framework — such a determination would be both impossible and irrelevant — but rather whether the discursive structure of his address reproduces a pattern in which the legitimate religious stakeholders in the holy land are identified as Muslim and Christian, with Jewish religious claims occupying an ambiguous position that is neither fully acknowledged nor fully denied.
The analysis must resist overly strong conclusions from this observation, for the absence of Jewish holy site naming in Abbas's address may reflect strategic, political, or practical considerations that have little to do with the dhimmi framework as such. The pattern of selective naming, however, when read against the broader findings of Reading in Three Dimensions and the expanded corpus analysis, is consistent with a classificatory structure in which the theological legitimacy of claims to the holy land is distributed asymmetrically across religious traditions — a structure in which Islamic and Christian sacred geography is explicitly acknowledged while Jewish sacred geography remains unnamed, much as Reading in Three Dimensions found that Islam and Christianity were explicitly named across the corpus while Judaism occupied the position of structuring absence.
Religion as Worldview: The Totality of the Theological Register
I have previously observed that "religion is not merely a series of conduct codes and precepts" but rather "a world view" — a comprehensive framework for understanding the relationship between the human and the divine, between the temporal and the eternal, between the political and the sacred — is perhaps the most important theoretical claim for the present analysis, for it suggests that the theological register identified in the expanded corpus is not a supplementary dimension of the discourse, not an ornamental addition to an essentially political or legal set of arguments, but rather the fundamental ground upon which the political and legal arguments rest and from which they derive their ultimate intelligibility. Both Netanyahu and Abbas, the analysis suggests with due caution, operate within theological worldviews — but the relationship between these worldviews and the surface of their respective speeches differs in ways that are analytically consequential.
Netanyahu's theological worldview is explicit, articulated, and foregrounded: the prophets are named, the scripture is quoted, the divine covenant is asserted, the providential framework is declared. There is no ambiguity about the theological character of the sovereignty claim, and no attempt to translate that claim into a purely secular register. Abbas's theological worldview is, by contrast, implicit, structural, and backgrounded: the Bismillah and the closing salutation establish the sacred horizon within which the speech operates, but the propositional content of the address is overwhelmingly secular-legal in character, and the theological framework that contains it is acknowledged rather than elaborated. This difference — between explicit and implicit theology, between theology as substance and theology as frame — is not a difference in kind but a difference in degree and mode of articulation, and it is a difference that has significant implications for the way in which the two speakers' sovereignty claims are received and assessed within the secular-diplomatic setting of the United Nations General Assembly.
For the General Assembly operates, at least formally, within a secular-legal framework — the framework of international law, state sovereignty, and institutional procedure that constitutes what I term the dominant classificatory system of the contemporary international order. Within this framework, Abbas's mode of articulation — legal citation, institutional reference, procedural argument — is immediately legible, while Netanyahu's mode of articulation — prophetic invocation, scriptural citation, theological assertion — represents a classificatory challenge, an introduction of a register that the institutional setting is not designed to accommodate. The theological Lebenswelt that Netanyahu makes explicit is thus not merely a feature of his speech but a disruption of the discursive norms of the setting in which it is delivered — a disruption that is itself a political act, an assertion that the theological register has a legitimate place in the discourse of international relations and that the exclusion of that register from the dominant classificatory system constitutes not neutrality but a particular form of bias.
It is this insight — that the theological Lebenswelt is not merely a background feature of the discourse but its most analytically productive dimension, the layer at which the deepest structural dynamics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are disclosed — that justifies the placement of this layer at the culmination of the three-register analysis. The rhetorical surface disclosed patterns of divergence; the legal-structural analysis disclosed competing classificatory systems; the theological analysis discloses the worldviews within which those systems are embedded and from which they derive their animating force. The original essay's finding that the United Nations corpus contained a structuring absence at the site of Jewish theological particularity is here confirmed, complicated, and enriched by the discovery that this absence is not absolute but rather a feature of a specific set of texts — and that when the voice that was absent from the original corpus is finally heard, it speaks in a register that is at once the most ancient and the most disruptive, the most deeply rooted and the most fundamentally challenging to the secular-legal framework within which the international community has attempted, with incomplete success, to adjudicate the competing claims to the land.
5. Layer 4: Civilizational Self-Positioning
The fourth register of analysis — the register of civilizational self-positioning — discloses one of the most consequential, and most structurally irreconcilable, dimensions of the Netanyahu and Abbas addresses. At this level each speaker locates the entity on whose behalf he speaks within a narrative arc of such scope and temporal depth that the categories through which the other speaker's claims might be apprehended are rendered not merely contestable but categorically unintelligible. The civilizational register does not merely frame political claims; it constitutes the epistemological ground upon which political claims can be recognized as claims at all, and the two speakers construct radically different civilizational grounds through which their assertions pass without contact, refutation, or genuine disagreement.
Netanyahu's civilizational self-positioning operates, in the first instance, through a temporal claim of extraordinary ambition. "The story of my people, the Jewish people, goes back over 3,000 years," he declares, and one might note that this opening gesture establishes immediately the register within which all subsequent claims will be advanced — a register measured not in decades or centuries but in millennia, not in the temporality of modern statehood but in the temporality of theological-historical persistence. The sentence that follows deepens the claim through three dimensions of continuity that together constitute what one might describe as a totality of civilizational identity: "We speak the same language today that we spoke then. We live in the same land in which our ancestors lived then, David, Solomon, Isaiah and Jeremiah." Language, territory, and ancestral lineage are thus braided into a single assertion of unbroken civilizational continuity, and the naming of David, Solomon, Isaiah, and Jeremiah functions not merely as historical reference but as an invocation of figures who simultaneously occupy the registers of kingship, wisdom, prophecy, and moral witness — figures, that is to say, through whom the theological, the political, and the ethical are rendered inseparable.
The analytical significance of this civilizational framing becomes more apparent when one observes the rhetorical function of the Mark Twain quotation that Netanyahu introduces into his address. Twain, writing in 1899, is quoted at some length: "The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away." The passage continues through the Greek and the Roman, each civilization rising to magnificence and then dissolving into historical memory, and culminates in the observation that the Jew remains, visible and prominent, exhibiting no evidence of decline or infirmity. The rhetorical force of this quotation derives not from its content alone — the observation of Jewish persistence is, after all, a commonplace of both Jewish and non-Jewish historiography — but from the identity of the speaker who makes it. Twain is, for the purposes of Netanyahu's semiotic architecture, the quintessential voice of the American literary canon, the secular American observer par excellence, and his testimony functions therefore as civilizational witness from the Other: an external validation of Jewish civilizational persistence that cannot be dismissed as self-serving because it originates from outside the Jewish discursive tradition entirely.
The deployment of Twain thus accomplishes a double rhetorical operation characteristic of the civilizational register as Netanyahu constructs it. On the one hand, it establishes Jewish civilizational longevity as an empirical fact attested by a disinterested observer — the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans all "passed away," but the Jewish people persisted, and this persistence is presented as remarkable precisely because it defies the normative pattern of civilizational rise and decline. On the other hand, the quotation positions the American literary tradition as a witness to, and therefore an implicit endorser of, the Jewish civilizational narrative, thereby braiding American cultural authority into the fabric of Jewish historical self-understanding in a manner that anticipates and reinforces the broader Israeli-American alignment that pervades the geopolitical register of the address.
It is within this civilizational framework that Netanyahu's rebuttal of the colonialism accusation acquires its particular rhetorical architecture. The charge that Israel is a colonial enterprise — a charge that occupies a central position in Palestinian and broader Global South discourse — is not met with legal argument or historical counter-narrative but with a civilizational counter-claim. Netanyahu's dismissive "Some colonialism" operates through the logic of civilizational precedence: a people returning to the land from which their ancestors were expelled, speaking the language their ancestors spoke, rebuilding the cities their ancestors built, cannot, within the semiotic structure of this argument, be understood as colonizers, because colonialism presupposes an external imposition upon an indigenous population, whereas the Jewish claim is precisely a claim of indigenous return. The rhetorical force is amplified by the redirection of the colonial charge itself — it was, Netanyahu says, Britain and France who "invented the term" and who practiced colonialism in the region, and the application of the term to Jewish settlement represents, within this framework, a categorical error that confuses the colonized with the colonizer, the indigenous with the imperial.
This civilizational self-positioning is not an innovation of the September 2026 address but represents, as examination of the diachronic record of Netanyahu's addresses to the United States Congress reveals, a remarkably consistent rhetorical architecture maintained across three decades of public discourse. From the 1996 address to the joint session of Congress through the controversial 2015 address delivered over the objections of the Obama administration to the 2024 address before a Congress divided along partisan lines regarding the Gaza conflict, the civilizational framing remains structurally identical: the three-thousand-year temporal claim, the invocation of biblical figures as political ancestors, the positioning of Israel as the continuation of an ancient civilizational project rather than the creation of a modern political movement. What varies across these addresses is not the civilizational architecture itself but rather the specific threats against which the civilizational claim is mobilized — Iran's nuclear program in 2015, the broader challenge of Islamic fundamentalism in earlier addresses, the Hamas-initiated conflict in 2024 — suggesting that the civilizational register functions, within Netanyahu's rhetorical practice, as a stable substrate upon which shifting geopolitical arguments are constructed.
The civilizational positioning receives external reinforcement, one might further note, from American political discourse in ways that illuminate the broader semiotic field within which the Netanyahu address operates. Trump's address to the Knesset, with its declaration of "the golden age of Israel," functions as an American endorsement of the civilizational narrative from the position of the world's most powerful state, and the phrase "golden age" itself carries civilizational connotations — evoking not merely a period of prosperity but an epoch of cultural and spiritual flourishing of the kind associated with classical civilizational peaks. Biden's alignment of Israel and Ukraine as parallel cases of civilizational struggle against what is implicitly characterized as barbarian threat — whether Russian or Islamist — extends the civilizational framing into the register of a global contest between civilization and its negation, thereby positioning Israel not merely as a particular civilization defending its particular territory but as an outpost of civilization as such, a bulwark against forces that threaten the civilizational order itself.
Abbas's civilizational self-positioning operates through an entirely different set of categories and within an entirely different temporal horizon, and it is this categorical difference — rather than any specific factual disagreement — that renders the two civilizational claims incommensurable in the strict sense of that term. Where Netanyahu locates Israel within a three-thousand-year narrative of theological-historical continuity, Abbas locates Palestine within the post-1945 international order and, more specifically, within the narrative arc of anti-colonial liberation that defined the second half of the twentieth century. The arithmetic of recognition — one hundred and sixty nations have recognized the State of Palestine — functions within Abbas's address as the civilizational equivalent of Netanyahu's three-thousand-year temporal claim: it establishes Palestine's legitimacy not through depth of historical continuity but through breadth of international acknowledgment, not through persistence across millennia but through acceptance within the institutional framework of the contemporary world order.
Abbas's civilizational claim is institutional rather than historical in its fundamental orientation. Where Netanyahu names David, Solomon, Isaiah, and Jeremiah — figures of kingship and prophecy — Abbas names reform programs, democratic elections, institutional capacity-building, and adherence to international legal norms. The Palestinian Authority's legitimacy is constructed, within this discursive framework, not through reference to ancient precedent but through demonstration of modern governmental competence: the ability to hold elections, to maintain security forces, to implement economic reforms, to participate in the institutional life of the international community. Palestine, in Abbas's framing, is a modern nation-state seeking its rightful place in the post-1945 international order, and its civilizational identity is constituted not by what it was three thousand years ago but by what it does — and what it is prevented from doing — in the present institutional landscape.
The incommensurability of these two civilizational claims is, one might suggest, not merely a matter of emphasis or perspective but a structural feature of the semiotic field itself. Netanyahu's civilizational register is fundamentally diachronic — it operates through the vertical axis of time, reaching down through millennia of historical continuity to ground the present in the deep past. Abbas's civilizational register is fundamentally synchronic — it operates through the horizontal axis of international recognition, reaching outward across the contemporary community of nations to ground the present in the breadth of institutional acknowledgment. These two axes — the vertical and the horizontal, the diachronic and the synchronic — do not intersect in any discursive space that either speaker acknowledges or perhaps can acknowledge, and it is this non-intersection, this fundamental orthogonality of civilizational self-positioning, that renders the two addresses not merely in disagreement but, at the deepest register of analysis, mutually unintelligible.
The consequence of this incommensurability, one might cautiously conclude, is that no amount of negotiation at the surface level of diplomatic grammar can resolve a conflict whose roots extend into the civilizational register, for the two parties are not merely disputing the terms of a settlement but inhabiting fundamentally different meaning-structures within which the very concepts of legitimacy, precedence, and right operate through different logics and different temporalities. The civilizational register thus functions, within the semiotic architecture of the General Assembly addresses, not as a background assumption but as the deepest stratum of the discourse — the stratum at which the impossibility of mutual comprehension is produced and reproduced with each invocation of ancient kings or contemporary recognitions, with each appeal to theological covenant or international norm.
6. Layer 5: The Construction of Absence and Silence
The fifth register deepens rather than repeats the preceding layers. Where Layer 3 disclosed the theological worldviews embedded in the two addresses and Layer 4 traced their civilizational self-positioning, Layer 5 examines how those worldviews are enacted through what each speaker cannot say. The analysis therefore turns from content to absence: it reads the structuring silences within the two principal voices and discloses the mechanisms through which each speaker constructs, through the very act of speaking, a domain of the unsaid that is no less constitutive of meaning than the domain of the said. This requires an inversion of the method employed in the original essay, "Reading in Three Dimensions," which attended to what was absent from the four external addresses — the speeches of Trump, Pezeshkian, Erdoğan, and Abdullah II — and discovered, through that analysis of absence, the structuring silence on Judaism and the figure of the Jew around which the entire semiotic architecture of the General Assembly session appeared to organize itself. The present analysis confronts a different and in some respects more demanding task: not to identify what is absent from the speeches of those who stand outside the Israeli-Palestinian dyad, but rather to identify what is absent from the speeches of those who stand at its very center.
Within Netanyahu's address, the analysis finds — while recognizing that claims regarding absence resist definitive verification — that the Palestinian as a people possessed of legitimate political claims is, in any substantive sense, absent from the discourse. This is not to say that the word "Palestinian" does not appear; it appears with considerable frequency. But careful attention to the syntactic and semantic environments in which the word is deployed shows that "Palestinian" functions within Netanyahu's address almost exclusively as a modifier within compound constructions of threat or passivity: "Palestinian terrorists," "Palestinian civilians used as human shields," "Palestinian children indoctrinated in Hamas schools." The Palestinian, within this discursive architecture, appears as an agent only when that agency is terroristic and as an object only when that objecthood serves to illustrate the depravity of Hamas — as a shield behind which Hamas hides, as a child whom Hamas corrupts, as a civilian whom Hamas places in harm's way. What is absent is the Palestinian as a political subject: a bearer of rights, an author of legitimate aspirations, a people whose claim to self-determination exists independently of, and cannot be reduced to, the pathologies of the organizations that purport to represent them.
The depth of this absence becomes more apparent when one inventories the specific political and legal frameworks that do not appear within Netanyahu's address. The Oslo Accords of 1993 — the foundational document of the peace process to which Israel is a signatory and through which the Palestinian Authority, the entity governed by the very man delivering the counter-address, came into existence — are not named, not referenced, not alluded to even obliquely. The two-state solution, which has constituted the official framework of international diplomatic engagement with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for more than three decades and which remains, at least nominally, the stated policy of the United States and the European Union, is absent from the discourse. Palestinian self-determination as a recognized principle of international law — affirmed by the International Court of Justice, endorsed by successive United Nations resolutions, acknowledged even by Israeli leaders in earlier periods — occupies no position within the semiotic field of the address. The effect of these absences, taken collectively, is the construction of a discursive universe in which the Palestinian question is not a political question at all but exclusively a security question: not a matter of competing legitimate claims to sovereignty and self-determination but a matter of terrorist threat and its neutralization.
This construction of absence extends to the geography of Palestinian life. Netanyahu names Gaza as a site of military operation and humanitarian crisis; he names the West Bank, if at all, in the register of security rather than habitation; he names Jerusalem as the eternal and undivided capital of Israel. But the Palestinian city — Ramallah as a seat of government, Bethlehem as a site of both Christian and Palestinian identity, Nablus as a center of Palestinian cultural and economic life, the refugee camps as sites of generational displacement — these places do not appear within the address, and their absence constructs a landscape in which Palestinian civilian life, Palestinian urban life, Palestinian life as ordinarily lived, simply does not exist as a category of discourse. The land is named, but it is named only as Israeli territory or as a theater of military operations, never as a place where Palestinians live, work, build, mourn, and persist.
Within Abbas's address, the structuring absence operates through a different but symmetrically significant mechanism. If Netanyahu's silence falls upon the Palestinian as political subject, Abbas's silence falls upon the Jewish theological claim to the land — the very claim that constitutes the deepest stratum of Netanyahu's civilizational self-positioning and that, as Reading in Three Dimensions disclosed, operates as a structuring absence within the addresses of the four external speakers as well. Abbas names holy sites: he warns of Israeli attacks on "Islamic and Christian holy sites," he names the Al-Aqsa Mosque explicitly, he references the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, he invokes the sanctity of Jerusalem as a city of religious significance to multiple faiths. But in this naming of holy sites, the Jewish holy site is absent. The Western Wall — the most sacred site in Judaism to which Jews may physically pray, the remnant of the Second Temple whose destruction in 70 CE inaugurated two millennia of exile — is not named. The Temple Mount, which Abbas references as the site of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Haram al-Sharif, is not acknowledged as the site of the Jewish Temple, as the place that constitutes, within Jewish theological understanding, the axis mundi of sacred geography. The absence is not merely an omission of a particular building; it is the effacement of an entire theological register — the register through which the Jewish claim to Jerusalem, and by extension to the land, is constituted at its most fundamental level.
The asymmetry that emerges from this paired analysis of structuring absences is significant for understanding the deeper semiotic architecture of the General Assembly session. Each speech's structuring silence is precisely the other speech's explicit content. Netanyahu fills the Jewish theological register to overflowing — David, Solomon, Isaiah, Jeremiah, three thousand years of civilizational continuity, the covenant between God and Abraham, the return to Zion — but empties the Palestinian political register entirely, constructing a discursive universe in which Palestinian political subjectivity simply does not exist as a meaningful category. Abbas fills the Palestinian legal-institutional register with equal thoroughness — international law, United Nations resolutions, the rights of peoples to self-determination, the arithmetic of diplomatic recognition, the reform programs of responsible governance — but empties the Jewish theological register, constructing a discursive universe in which the Jewish claim to the land is exclusively political and therefore subject to the same legal and institutional adjudication as any other territorial dispute. Each speaker, in other words, speaks voluminously about that which constitutes his own civilizational ground while maintaining an almost perfect silence about that which constitutes the other's civilizational ground.
A more granular examination of the selective naming patterns reinforces this observation. Does Abbas name Judaism as a religion, as a theological tradition, as a system of belief and practice that might ground a legitimate relationship to the land? The analysis indicates that he does not, except perhaps indirectly through the term "antisemitism," which he opposes and condemns but which functions, within the structure of his address, as a form of discrimination to be combated rather than as an index of a theological tradition to be acknowledged. Judaism, as a living religious tradition with its own claims to sacred geography, its own hermeneutical relationship to the land, its own covenantal theology — this Judaism is absent from Abbas's address in much the same way that Palestinian political subjectivity is absent from Netanyahu's. Does Netanyahu name Islam? Here the analysis yields a more complex and revealing result: Islam is indeed named, but it is named almost exclusively within the register of threat. "Muslim Brotherhood," "jihadists," "radical Islam," "mosques used as terrorist command posts" — these are the syntactic environments in which Islam appears within Netanyahu's address, and they parallel, in their structural function, the syntactic environments in which "Palestinian" appears. Islam, like the Palestinian, enters Netanyahu's discourse not as a legitimate tradition or identity but as a vector of danger, not as a faith with its own claims to truth and sacred space but as an ideology of violence that instrumentalizes religion for terroristic purposes.
The construction of absence extends beyond the textual register into the physical and performative dimensions of the addresses, where Reading in Three Dimensions’ framework is particularly well equipped to illuminate it. Netanyahu delivers his address in person, physically present at the podium of the General Assembly — but he speaks to a hall from which approximately seventy-seven delegations have already departed in coordinated walkout, so that his physical presence is enacted within a space defined by the physical absence of those who refuse to serve as his audience. The hall is an architecture of absence: the empty seats, the vacated desks, the nameplates of departed delegations all constitute a visual and spatial text that the television cameras, trained on the speaker, do not capture but that every delegate remaining in the hall perceives as the dominant feature of the scene. Netanyahu is thus maximally present — standing at the podium, commanding the microphone, deploying the full apparatus of sovereign address — within a space that is maximally emptied of the community to which the address is nominally directed.
Abbas, conversely, is physically absent from the hall itself. Denied a United States visa for the second consecutive year — a denial that is itself an exercise of sovereign power by the host state of the United Nations, and one that raises significant questions about the institutional integrity of an organization whose deliberations can be shaped by the visa policies of the state in which it is physically located — Abbas addresses the General Assembly via pre-recorded video. His image appears on the screen above the podium; his voice emanates from the loudspeakers of the hall; his words are distributed in the official transcript alongside those of every other head of state and government. But his body is not in the room, and this bodily absence constitutes a performative enactment of the very condition that the substance of his address describes: the exclusion of the Palestinian from the spaces of international deliberation, the denial of physical access to the institutions that are supposed to guarantee universal participation, the reduction of Palestinian presence to a mediated image — visible but not tangible, audible but not physically proximate, formally included but materially excluded.
The paradox that emerges from this analysis of physical presence and absence is theoretically significant, for it shows that the categories of presence and absence are not stable but shift depending on the register of analysis through which they are apprehended. At the level of physical embodiment, Netanyahu is present and Abbas is absent. At the level of audience reception, Netanyahu addresses an emptied hall and therefore speaks, in a sense, to absence, while Abbas's recorded image is received by whatever audience remains and therefore achieves, paradoxically, a more complete reception than the physically present speaker. At the level of diplomatic recognition, Netanyahu represents a state that is universally recognized but from which seventy-seven delegations have withdrawn their willingness to listen, while Abbas represents an entity that one hundred and sixty states have recognized but that the most powerful state in the system — the state that hosts the very institution in which the address is delivered — declines to recognize through the simple mechanism of denying its representative a visa. Presence and absence thus oscillate, shift, and reverse themselves at each register of analysis, and the attempt to determine who is truly present and who is truly absent proves to be itself a product of the register within which the question is posed.
It is at this point that the present analysis reconnects with the central finding of Reading in Three Dimensions — the discovery of the structuring absence of the Jew within the four external addresses. Reading in Three Dimensions disclosed a semiotic architecture in which the figure of the Jew was absent as a theological subject, present only as a geopolitical object, and in which this absence functioned as the organizing principle around which the competing meaning-structures of the four speakers arranged themselves. The present analysis deepens rather than contradicts this finding. The Netanyahu and Abbas addresses reveal that the structuring absence identified in Reading in Three Dimensions is not resolved by the addition of the two principal voices to the analytical field but is replicated, in inverted form, within each of those voices. The Jew, who was absent from the external addresses, is now maximally present — Netanyahu speaks as the Jew, from the position of Jewish sovereignty, filling the Jewish theological register with a density and an insistence that no external speaker could approximate. But this maximal presence of the Jew coincides with, and perhaps depends upon, the maximal absence of the Palestinian as a political subject within the same discourse. Conversely, the Palestinian, whose political claims were acknowledged at least partially within the external addresses, is now maximally present as a subject of legal and institutional discourse within Abbas's address but achieves this presence only through the effacement of the Jewish theological claim that constitutes the deepest stratum of the opposing position.
The construction of absence is not a deficiency of the discourse but its constitutive mechanism. Each speaker constructs the meaning of his address not merely through what he says but through what he does not say, and the domain of the unsaid is not random or accidental but precisely structured: it is the other's deepest claim, the other's most fundamental ground of legitimacy, that must be silenced in order for one's own claim to achieve the coherence and the comprehensiveness that sovereign address requires. The General Assembly, as an institution of universal address in which every member state is entitled to speak and to be heard, thus becomes the site at which the most fundamental forms of non-hearing are enacted — not through the failure of translation or the inadequacy of simultaneous interpretation, but through the structural incapacity of each discourse to accommodate, or even to name, the categories through which the opposing discourse constitutes its claim to legitimacy.
This structural incapacity is not susceptible to remediation through the conventional tools of diplomacy — through negotiation, compromise, or the drafting of mutually acceptable language — precisely because it does not operate at the level of policy or even of narrative but at the level of the categories through which policy and narrative are constituted. To acknowledge the Jewish theological claim to the land would require Abbas to restructure the entire categorical framework of his address, to admit a register of legitimacy — theological-historical continuity — that has no place within the legal-institutional framework through which Palestinian statehood is constructed. To acknowledge the Palestinian as a political subject with legitimate claims to self-determination would require Netanyahu to restructure his address in an equally fundamental way, to admit a register of legitimacy — post-colonial self-determination — that would necessarily relativize the civilizational absolutism upon which his claim depends. The silence in each address is not, therefore, an oversight that better speechwriting might correct but a structural necessity that the logic of each discourse requires and that the semiotic architecture of the General Assembly, with its formal equality of address and its substantive asymmetries of power, at once exposes and perpetuates.
7. Layer 6: Shifting Meaning Universes — The Semiotic Instability of Core Terms
The sixth layer of analysis — the register concerned with the instability of signification itself, with the capacity of ostensibly shared terms to carry radically divergent, indeed mutually exclusive, signifieds beneath a surface of apparent lexical commonality — most dramatically exposes the fault lines not merely of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but of the very possibility of diplomatic discourse as a shared semiotic enterprise. Every political conflict involves some degree of semantic contestation, some measure of divergence in the meanings attached to key terms by opposing parties; but the degree of semiotic inversion disclosed by a careful reading of these two speeches suggests something more fundamental than ordinary disagreement, something closer to the operation of parallel meaning universes in which the same signifiers function as portals into entirely incompatible structures of interpretation, evaluation, and moral judgment.
The term that undergoes its most dramatic semiotic revolution across the two addresses is "genocide" — a word whose legal, moral, and political weight is perhaps unmatched in the contemporary lexicon of international discourse, and whose deployment in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has become, as the scholarly literature increasingly recognizes, not merely a matter of factual dispute but a site of fundamental contestation over the normative architecture of international humanitarian law itself. Abbas's characterization of Israeli military operations in Gaza as a "war of genocide" — harb ibada jama'iyya, in the Arabic formulation that carries its own dense network of connotations — deploys the term as a description of what Israel does, as a naming of the observable consequences of military action in a densely populated territory, as an assertion that the pattern of destruction, displacement, and civilian death in Gaza meets or exceeds whatever threshold the international community has established for the application of this most grave of legal categories. For Abbas, genocide is not a hypothetical or a future possibility but a present reality, a condition that obtains in the lived experience of the Palestinian population and that demands recognition, intervention, and accountability.
Netanyahu's response to this characterization constitutes a complete semiotic inversion — not merely a denial of the accusation but a fundamental reorientation of the term's referential field such that the same word comes to name the precise opposite of what Abbas intends it to signify. Netanyahu calls the accusation of Israeli genocide "the greatest lie of the century," a formulation that does not merely contest the factual basis of Abbas's claim but challenges the very legitimacy of the semiotic operation by which the term is applied to Israeli conduct. More significantly, Netanyahu argues that Israel has in fact "prevented genocide" — that it is Israel, not the Palestinian population, that was the target of genocidal intent on October 7, and that Israel's subsequent military operations constitute not the perpetration of genocide but its prevention, its interruption, its defeat. The same word — "genocide" — thus carries diametrically opposed signifieds within the two addresses: for Abbas, it names the cumulative effect of Israeli military operations upon the civilian population of Gaza; for Netanyahu, it names what Hamas intended on October 7 and what the Israeli military, at great cost and with great restraint, prevented from reaching its full and terrible fruition.
Netanyahu's rhetorical strategy for sustaining this inversion is not confined to mere assertion or emotional appeal; it proceeds through a series of evidentiary claims that are designed to demonstrate the logical impossibility of the genocide characterization by pointing to specific Israeli actions that are, in his framing, incompatible with genocidal intent. "What genocidal regime," Netanyahu asks, "gives a million polio vaccinations to the enemy's population? What genocidal regime enables the distribution of two million tons of food into Gaza?" The rhetorical force of these questions depends upon a particular understanding of what genocide entails — an understanding in which genocidal intent is total, absolute, and incapable of coexisting with any humanitarian gesture, however limited or strategically motivated. To this evidentiary apparatus Netanyahu adds the testimony of Colonel John Spencer, described as the world's leading expert on urban warfare, who is cited as stating that "Israel has done more to prevent civilian casualties in war than any other military in history" — a claim that functions, within Netanyahu's semiotic framework, as an external validation of the impossibility of the genocide characterization, as proof that the very structure of Israeli military conduct is oriented toward the preservation rather than the destruction of civilian life. These are claims advanced within Netanyahu’s discourse and are treated here as elements of his semiotic architecture rather than as established facts; the figures and characterizations are contested in the scholarly and journalistic literature.
The analytical significance of this semiotic contest over the term "genocide" extends well beyond the immediate rhetorical strategies of the two speakers, touching upon fundamental questions about the nature of legal and moral categories in international discourse that have been the subject of considerable scholarly attention in recent years. In considering the genocide debates within international legal theory, I have suggested its principal value—to illuminate the extent to which genocide debates operate at two distinct and often incommensurable levels: the level of "accepting whatever legal parameters are thought currently to exist" — that is, the level of applying established legal definitions to specific factual circumstances — and the level of "effecting a change in the fundamental character and normative baselines of the concept" — that is, the level at which the very meaning, scope, and applicability of the genocide concept is being contested, renegotiated, and potentially transformed through the act of deployment itself.
This distinction is crucial for understanding what is at stake in the Abbas-Netanyahu exchange, for it suggests that the two speakers are not merely disagreeing about whether Israeli conduct in Gaza satisfies the existing legal definition of genocide — though they are certainly doing that as well — but are engaged in a more fundamental contest over what the term "genocide" can and should mean, over the normative architecture that determines when and how the term may be legitimately deployed, and over the political and moral consequences that follow from its successful or unsuccessful application. "There is no inherent or natural 'truth' or facticity in genocide — there is only a normative judgment producing interpretive structures through which facts are selected, organized, and evaluated." This formulation, which might initially appear to reduce genocide to a mere discursive construction, in fact accomplishes something more subtle and more analytically productive: it draws attention to the interpretive machinery that stands between raw events and their categorization, the normative infrastructure that determines which facts count as evidence, which patterns constitute proof, and which conclusions are rendered available or foreclosed by the framework of analysis within which the inquiry proceeds.
The phenomenon that Buser has documented under the rubric of "genocide inversion" — the academic and political practice of turning genocide accusations back upon the accusers, of claiming that those who allege genocide are themselves guilty of genocidal logic or genocidal intent — finds perhaps its most complete and consequential political expression in Netanyahu's speech, where the inversion is not merely implied or obliquely suggested but performed with full rhetorical explicitness before the assembled representatives of the world's nations. Netanyahu does not merely deny genocide; he asserts that Israel prevented it, that the real genocidal actors are those who attacked Israel, and that the accusation of genocide against Israel is itself a form of moral violence, a continuation of the very antisemitic logic that produced the Holocaust — the paradigmatic genocide against which all subsequent uses of the term are inevitably measured. The inversion is thus total: the accused becomes the preventer, the accusers become the perpetuators of a lie that is itself characterized as a species of the very evil it purports to name.
But it would be insufficient, and indeed analytically impoverishing, to confine the sixth layer of analysis to the single term "genocide," however dramatic and consequential its semiotic instability may be, for the two addresses disclose a broader pattern of semantic divergence that extends across virtually every key term in the lexicon of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, suggesting that what is at issue is not the contestation of individual words but the operation of entire meaning systems within which words acquire their significance through their relations to other words rather than through any stable connection to an extralinguistic referent. The term "occupation" provides a particularly instructive illustration of this phenomenon, for it functions within Abbas's discourse as the fundamental condition — the ur-category, as it were — from which all other forms of Palestinian suffering derive and to which all proposed solutions must ultimately respond. Abbas uses the term throughout his address, not as a contested characterization but as an established fact, a legal and political reality recognized by the international community and confirmed by multiple United Nations resolutions, International Court of Justice opinions, and the practice of the vast majority of the world's states. For Abbas, the occupation is the ground upon which the entire edifice of Palestinian grievance is constructed, and it is the termination of the occupation that constitutes the necessary and sufficient condition for the resolution of the conflict.
Netanyahu, by contrast, never acknowledges the existence of an occupation in the terms that Abbas employs, preferring instead the designation "Judea and Samaria" for the territory that Abbas and the international community refer to as the West Bank — a terminological choice that is itself laden with semiotic significance, for it substitutes a biblical and historical nomenclature for a geopolitical one, thereby implicitly asserting the primacy of Jewish historical connection to the land over the framework of international law and post-1967 diplomatic convention within which the term "occupation" acquires its legal and moral force. The absence of the term "occupation" from Netanyahu's lexicon is not, one might suggest, a simple omission or a rhetorical convenience; it is a constitutive exclusion that reflects and reinforces the fundamental incommensurability of the two speakers' meaning systems, for to acknowledge the occupation would be to concede the legitimacy of the very framework within which Abbas's claims are formulated and evaluated.
The term "terrorism" undergoes a parallel though not identical process of semiotic bifurcation across the two addresses, functioning in each case as the name for the violence perpetrated by the other side while being categorically denied as applicable to the violence of one's own. Netanyahu's discourse deploys "terrorism" as a comprehensive category for Palestinian violence — "Palestinian terrorists," the "seven-front war" waged by Iranian proxies, the actions of Hamas on October 7 and thereafter — and the term functions within his semiotic framework as the moral antithesis of self-defense, as the category that renders the adversary's violence illegitimate by definition and thereby renders one's own responsive violence not merely justified but morally imperative. Abbas, for his part, does not contest the existence of terrorism as a category but fundamentally redirects its application, speaking of "settler terrorism under the protection of the occupation forces" and, more broadly, of "state terrorism" — formulations that transfer the term from the register of non-state violence to the register of state violence, from the actions of individuals and militant organizations to the systematic conduct of an occupying power and its civilian adjuncts.
The concept of "self-defense" provides yet another illustration of the semiotic instability that pervades the two addresses, for Netanyahu's entire speech is structured, one might observe, as a self-defense narrative — a narrative in which Israel faces an existential threat from Iran's nuclear program, from the seven-front war waged by Iranian proxies, from the October 7 attack that revealed the genocidal intent of Israel's enemies, and from a world that fails to recognize the legitimacy and necessity of Israel's defensive responses. Within this framework, every Israeli military action — in Gaza, in Lebanon, in Syria, against Iranian nuclear facilities — acquires its legitimacy through its character as self-defense, as a response to aggression rather than an initiation of violence, as a necessary and proportionate exercise of the inherent right recognized by Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. Abbas, by contrast, frames Israeli military operations not as self-defense but as aggression — as the offensive actions of an occupying power that cannot, by definition, claim the right of self-defense against the population it occupies, a position that finds support in a substantial body of international legal scholarship though it remains contested in state practice.
The term "colonialism" similarly oscillates between incompatible meaning systems, with Abbas characterizing Israel as a colonial project — situating Israeli settlement expansion within the historical framework of European colonialism, apartheid, and racial domination — while Netanyahu offers a direct and, one might suggest, deliberately provocative rebuttal: "Some colonialism," he says, in a formulation that simultaneously dismisses the characterization and redirects the colonial accusation toward the British, French, and Ottoman empires that historically governed the region. Netanyahu's rhetorical strategy here is not merely defensive but appropriative: by invoking the history of colonial rule in the Middle East, he implicitly positions Israel not as a colonial power but as a post-colonial state, as a national liberation movement that achieved sovereignty against the resistance of colonial and imperial forces rather than through their patronage and support.
Perhaps the most revealing instance of semiotic divergence, however, is found in the treatment of settler violence, where the gap between the two speakers' characterizations is so vast as to suggest not merely a difference of emphasis or interpretation but the operation of entirely distinct perceptual frameworks through which the same phenomena are rendered visible or invisible, significant or trivial, systematic or anomalous. Netanyahu characterizes settler violence as the work of "a handful of juvenile delinquents, about 150 in number" — a formulation that simultaneously acknowledges the existence of settler violence and minimizes its significance by reducing it to the aberrant behavior of a small number of individuals acting outside the norms of Israeli society and the policies of the Israeli government. Abbas, by contrast, characterizes the same phenomenon as "settler terrorism" — a systematic practice that is not merely tolerated but actively supported by the occupation forces, that constitutes not an aberration but an integral component of the colonial project, and that cannot be understood in isolation from the broader structures of occupation, land confiscation, and demographic engineering within which it operates. The “150” figure and the characterization of those involved as “juvenile delinquents” are claims advanced within Netanyahu’s discourse; they are treated here as components of his semiotic architecture, not as adjudicated findings, and remain contested in the scholarly and journalistic literature.
The accumulation of these semiotic divergences across the full range of key terms — genocide, occupation, terrorism, self-defense, colonialism, settler violence — suggests, one might propose with appropriate tentativeness, that what is at stake in the Abbas-Netanyahu exchange is not a disagreement within a shared discursive framework but the collision of incommensurable meaning systems, each internally coherent but mutually unintelligible, each capable of organizing the same set of empirical facts into a narrative that is not merely different from but incompatible with the narrative produced by the other. My 2024 framing of cognitive rifts in the Israeli-Palestinian discourse is directly relevant here, that "each constructs the other in wildly different ways, suggesting the semiotic malleability of historical conclusions" — a formulation that captures, with characteristic precision, the phenomenon that the sixth layer of analysis discloses: not merely that the two sides disagree about facts or values, but that they inhabit different semiotic universes within which the same facts and values acquire different and often opposite meanings.
What the sixth layer of analysis ultimately reveals, it is perhaps possible to observe by way of preliminary synthesis, is that the physical dimensions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — the military operations, the territorial disputes, the humanitarian crises, the cycles of violence and response — are not merely accompanied by but are in a significant sense constituted by the semiotic contests that underlie them. As I suggested, "These conflicts merely manifest in physical form the more fundamental semiotic contests" — a passage that provides the epigraph for this layer of analysis, that the contests over what words mean, over which categories apply, over whose narrative framework will achieve the status of common sense and whose will be relegated to the margins of legitimate discourse. The Abbas and Netanyahu addresses, read through the lens of the sixth interpretive register, thus disclose not merely a political conflict but a semiotic war, a struggle over the means of signification that is, in ways that the participants themselves may not fully recognize, logically prior to and constitutive of the struggle over territory, sovereignty, and survival that occupies the surface of diplomatic exchange.
8. Layer 7: Recursive Tropes and Eschatological Temporality — The Architecture of Ultimacy
The seventh and final layer deepens the substantive and structural findings already disclosed. Where Layers 3 and 5 identified the theological contest and the silences through which it is maintained, Layer 7 examines the temporal architectures through which those dimensions acquire their force of necessity. The inquiry turns, therefore, from what the speakers believe and what they cannot name to the forms of time that make their claims appear inevitable: the recursive deployment of master tropes and the temporal architectures within which political claims are situated, justified, and rendered intelligible. Each rotation turns the same conflict like a prism, revealing a new facet of the underlying incommensurability rather than merely repeating an earlier result. The analysis discloses a divergence not merely in content, strategy, or semiotic orientation, but in the very mode of temporality through which each speaker constitutes the relationship between past, present, and future, and through which the political claims advanced in the preceding layers acquire their ultimate warrant, their claim to necessity, and their resistance to negotiation, compromise, or revision.
Netanyahu's master trope — the rhetorical figure that organizes the entire architecture of his address and that recurs at structurally decisive moments throughout the speech — is what one might characterize as the existential imperative, distilled into a single phrase that acquires, through repetition and contextual variation, the force of an axiom: "We're going to win. We have no other choice." This phrase is not, it should be noted, offered as Netanyahu's own formulation; it is attributed to his brother Yoni, spoken, according to Netanyahu's narrative, before the 1967 war — a moment of supreme existential crisis in Israeli collective memory — and thereby invested with a double authority: the authority of the fallen soldier-hero whose sacrifice consecrates the words, and the authority of the historical moment whose gravity renders the words not merely descriptive but constitutive of the Israeli condition. The phrase is, in its very grammar, a foreclosure of alternatives: it does not argue for a particular course of action among several possibilities but asserts that the course of action is the only one available, that winning is not a preference or a goal but a necessity imposed by circumstances that admit of no other resolution.
The structural significance of this trope within the architecture of the address becomes apparent when one traces its recurrences, for the phrase appears not once but multiple times — in the initial narrative of Yoni and the 1967 war, as a commentary upon the current situation facing Israel in its seven-front conflict, and as the closing peroration that sends the audience away with the impression not of a political argument that might be contested but of an existential truth that demands assent. Each recurrence both reinforces and subtly modifies the meaning of the phrase: in the Yoni narrative, it is the expression of a young soldier's determination in the face of mortal danger; in the commentary on the current situation, it becomes the distillation of a national strategic calculus; and in the closing, it achieves the status of a quasi-theological assertion about the nature of Jewish existence itself — an assertion that the Jewish people have, through the long arc of their history, always faced existential threats and have always been compelled to win because the alternative is not merely defeat but annihilation, not merely loss but erasure from the community of peoples.
The political consequences of the existential imperative as a master trope are, one might suggest, profound and far-reaching, for the trope performs a rhetorical operation that is both powerful and, from a certain analytical perspective, deeply problematic: it forecloses the space of political negotiation by rendering all Israeli actions necessary rather than chosen, compelled rather than elected, defensive rather than offensive. If there is truly "no other choice," then the question of whether Israeli military operations in Gaza are proportionate, legal, or morally justified becomes, within the framework established by the trope, categorically misframed — for proportionality, legality, and moral justification are concepts that presuppose the existence of alternatives among which a rational actor might choose, and the existential imperative denies precisely this presupposition. All force is justified because all force is necessary; all actions are defensive because the only alternative to action is annihilation; all criticism is misguided because it proceeds from the assumption that Israel has choices when in fact it has only the single imperative of survival.
The diachronic analysis of this trope across Netanyahu's long career of public address reveals, it is perhaps possible to observe, that the existential imperative is not a rhetorical innovation specific to the present crisis but a persistent structural feature of Netanyahu's political discourse that has been refined and reinforced over the course of nearly three decades of speeches before international audiences. In his 1996 address to the United States Congress — the first of what would become a series of appearances that themselves constitute a remarkable rhetorical archive — Netanyahu deployed variations of the same fundamental trope, positioning Israel as a nation compelled by circumstances to defend itself against enemies who seek its destruction. By 2015, in the address to Congress that became perhaps his most internationally visible rhetorical performance, the existential imperative had acquired its mature formulation: "The days when the Jewish people remained passive in the face of genocidal enemies, those days are over" — a declaration that simultaneously invokes the Holocaust as the paradigmatic instance of Jewish passivity in the face of existential threat and asserts that the establishment of the State of Israel has permanently foreclosed the possibility of such passivity, transforming the Jewish people from objects of genocidal violence into agents of their own defense.
The 2026 version of the trope, delivered before the United Nations General Assembly, achieves what one might describe as the fullest and most explicit articulation of the existential imperative that Netanyahu has yet produced, for it combines the personal narrative of Yoni, the historical narrative of Jewish vulnerability, and the theological narrative of divine election into a single comprehensive statement: "The days when Jews were defenseless victims marched to the slaughter, those days are over! Today we have a state. Today we have an army." The progression from the 2015 Congressional version to the 2026 General Assembly version is instructive, for it reveals a deepening of the trope's theological register — the substitution of "defenseless victims marched to the slaughter" for "remained passive in the face of genocidal enemies" intensifies the Holocaust reference and heightens the emotional and moral stakes, while the addition of "Today we have a state. Today we have an army" transforms the existential imperative from a negative assertion (we will no longer be passive) into a positive one (we now possess the instruments of sovereign self-defense), thereby grounding the trope not merely in the refusal of victimhood but in the affirmation of state power as the guarantor of Jewish survival.
Abbas's master trope operates, one might suggest with appropriate analytical caution, in a fundamentally different register — not the register of existential imperative but what might be characterized as the register of steadfast presence, distilled in the declaration that recurs throughout his address in various formulations: "The Palestinian people will remain on their land, will not accept displacement, and will not disappear." This trope is, in a precise structural sense, the inverse of Netanyahu's existential imperative: where Netanyahu asserts that Israel must win because there is no other choice, Abbas asserts that Palestine will endure because there is no force capable of erasing it. The existential imperative is active — it demands action, compels force, justifies the exercise of military power as the necessary condition of survival; the trope of steadfast presence is, by contrast, fundamentally passive — not in the pejorative sense of acquiescence or submission, but in the philosophical sense of a mode of being that is defined not by what it does but by what it refuses to cease being. Abbas does not claim that Palestine will win; he claims that Palestine will remain.
The distinction between these two master tropes is, one might propose, analytically consequential in ways that extend well beyond the merely rhetorical, for each trope constitutes a different relationship to political possibility and thereby generates a different horizon of expectation for the audience to which it is addressed. Netanyahu's existential imperative, by foreclosing alternatives and rendering all action necessary, generates an audience of allies and adversaries — those who support Israel's necessary self-defense and those who, by opposing it, align themselves with the forces of existential threat. Abbas's trope of steadfast presence, by contrast, generates an audience of witnesses — those who are called not to fight alongside Palestine but to recognize its enduring existence, to acknowledge the fact of Palestinian presence on Palestinian land, and to draw the moral and political consequences of that acknowledgment. The international community is thus positioned differently by the two tropes: by Netanyahu as a potential ally in an existential struggle, by Abbas as a witness to an enduring fact that demands recognition and justice.
It is in the domain of temporality, however, that the seventh layer of analysis discloses what is perhaps its most significant finding, for the two addresses construct fundamentally different and, one might suggest, incommensurable temporal architectures within which their respective political claims are situated and from which those claims derive their ultimate warrant. Netanyahu's eschatology is explicit, deliberate, and theologically grounded: his address closes with a biblical quotation, situates the present moment within a three-thousand-year civilizational narrative that extends from Moses to David to Solomon to the contemporary State of Israel, and culminates in the declaration, drawn from the prophet Samuel, that "the eternity of Israel will not falter" — netsakh Israel lo yeshaker, in the Hebrew that Netanyahu delivers with the deliberate force of a man invoking sacred authority before a secular institution. Netanyahu's time is, in this reading, sacred time — a time in which the present is not merely connected to the past by causal chains of historical development but is ontologically continuous with it, a time in which the Israeli soldier defending the northern border participates in the same act of national self-preservation as the Maccabees, the defenders of Masada, and the warriors of biblical antiquity.
The temporal structure of Netanyahu's address is thus circular-eternal rather than linear-progressive: it posits a recurring pattern in which the Jewish people face existential threats, are called upon to defend themselves, and prevail through a combination of divine favor and human determination — a pattern that has repeated from biblical times through the Roman destruction of the Temple, through the medieval persecutions and expulsions, through the Holocaust, and into the present conflict with Iran and its proxies. Within this temporal architecture, the present crisis is not unique but exemplary — not a new situation demanding novel responses but a recurrence of the eternal pattern demanding the eternal response: faith, courage, and the willingness to fight. The future, in Netanyahu's eschatological framework, is not open but determined — determined not by human political choices but by the divine promise that guarantees the eternal survival of the Jewish people and the Jewish state.
Abbas's temporality operates, one might observe with the caution that the analytical method requires, in an entirely different register — a register that is institutional rather than theological, secular rather than sacred, and linear-progressive rather than circular-eternal. Abbas's address is populated not by biblical figures and divine promises but by transitional periods, electoral timelines, reform deadlines, and the accumulating recognitions of the international community: November 28 elections, legislative elections to follow, presidential elections thereafter, institutional reforms undertaken in accordance with international standards and expectations. Abbas's time is the time of bureaucratic process and diplomatic accumulation — each reform step, each state recognition (one hundred and sixty at last count, Abbas notes), each United Nations resolution moves the Palestinian project incrementally closer to its culmination, not through dramatic rupture or divine intervention but through the patient accumulation of institutional facts that progressively narrow the gap between the existing reality of statelessness and the projected reality of sovereign statehood.
Abbas's eschatology, if one may employ the term for what is in fact a thoroughly secular teleology, is the eschatology of liberal-democratic statehood — the vision of "a democratic Palestinian state that respects the rule of law and human rights, an unarmed state living in security and peace alongside the State of Israel." This formulation constitutes, one might suggest, Abbas's messianic vision, his articulation of the end-state toward which all present suffering is directed and from which all present suffering derives its meaning and its promise of eventual redemption. But it is a messianic vision stripped of transcendence, purged of the theological dimensions that animate Netanyahu's eschatology, and grounded instead in the normative vocabulary of international liberalism — democracy, rule of law, human rights, security, peace. The deliverer, in Abbas's eschatological framework, is not God but the international community; the mechanism of deliverance is not divine intervention but diplomatic recognition; and the promised land is not a territory consecrated by sacred history but a state constituted by institutional legitimacy and international law.
Netanyahu's theological eschatology — "As the Bible says, netsakh Israel lo yeshaker" — and Abbas's secular eschatology thus represent not merely different political visions but different ontologies of historical time, different answers to the fundamental question of what kind of process history is and what kind of agency is available to its participants. For Netanyahu, history is the unfolding of a divine plan in which the Jewish people play a starring and irreplaceable role; human agency consists in the courage to fulfill the role that providence has assigned, to fight the battles that sacred history demands, and to trust in the promise that has sustained the nation through three millennia of persecution and survival. For Abbas, history is a human political process in which justice is achieved not through divine intervention but through institutional construction, diplomatic negotiation, and the progressive realization of norms that are themselves human creations — imperfect, contestable, but ultimately the only available instruments for the construction of a just international order.
The contrast between these two temporal architectures illuminates, one might propose with appropriate tentativeness, a dimension of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that is often overlooked in analyses focused on territory, security, demographics, and the distribution of material resources: the dimension of eschatological incompatibility, the radical divergence in the temporal horizons within which the two parties situate their claims and from which those claims derive their deepest motivational force. Netanyahu's circular-eternal time renders the conflict a chapter in an ongoing sacred narrative that will be resolved — indeed, that is being resolved — through the fulfillment of divine promise; Abbas's linear-progressive time renders the conflict a political problem that will be solved through the accumulation of institutional achievements and international recognitions. These two temporal frameworks are not merely different but incommensurable, for they generate different criteria of relevance, different standards of evidence, and different horizons of expectation that cannot be reconciled within a single overarching temporal architecture.
The seventh layer of analysis thus discloses, as its ultimate finding, that the Netanyahu and Abbas addresses are not merely expressions of competing political programs articulated within a shared discursive space but manifestations of incommensurable temporal ontologies — different answers to the question of what time is, what history means, and what kind of future is available to human political action. The recursive tropes that organize the two addresses — Netanyahu's existential imperative and Abbas's steadfast presence — are not merely rhetorical devices but temporal operators that configure the relationship between past, present, and future in fundamentally divergent ways, generating different political subjectivities, different modes of address to the international community, and different horizons of possibility for the resolution of the conflict that both speakers claim to desire. It is perhaps in this temporal dimension, more than in any of the substantive disagreements analyzed in the preceding layers, that the deepest and most intractable source of the Israeli-Palestinian impasse is to be found — not in the inability to agree on borders, refugees, Jerusalem, or the status of settlements, but in the inability to inhabit a shared temporal framework within which such agreements might become thinkable, negotiable, and ultimately achievable.
9. Cross-Reading: Netanyahu and Abbas as Complementary Halves of an Incomplete Discourse
The preceding analysis has moved through each of the seven interpretive layers as applied successively to the addresses of Netanyahu and Abbas in relation to the semiotic architecture developed in Reading in Three Dimensions. The cross-reading now turns the prism again: it does not repeat the layers but brings their substantive, structural, and temporal findings into relation, asking what becomes visible only when the two architectures are read against one another. This movement also returns to the patterns Reading in Three Dimensions argued regarding Abdullah’s address — the legal-institutional register, the single negating mention of Judaism, and the semiotic sovereignty of naming through which “law enforcement” was recoded as “forcible transfer.” Abbas and Abdullah operate within the same broad institutional mode: both construct legitimacy through compliance with legal and procedural categories rather than through an explicit theological claim, and both foreclose the theological dimension by controlling which names enter the field. What remains is a cross-reading that attends not merely to the explicit disagreements between Netanyahu and Abbas, which are predictable and have been rehearsed in countless diplomatic forums, but to the structural relations between their deployments of meaning, the ways in which each speech's architecture of signification constitutes something like the photographic negative of the other, and the manner in which the two addresses, taken together, disclose dimensions of incommensurability that neither, considered in isolation, fully reveals.
The 'This Israeli Government' Formula and Its Transformations
Reading in Three Dimensions identified, in its analysis of the four addresses by Trump, Pezeshkian, Erdoğan, and Abdullah, a recurring discursive formula through which external speakers negotiated the politically fraught terrain of criticizing Israeli policy while maintaining — or appearing to maintain — the distinction between the State of Israel as a legitimate member of the international community and the specific policies of its current government. The formula "this Israeli government" performed a precise semiotic function: it localized responsibility, temporalized the critique (suggesting that the problem was a particular government rather than the state itself), and thereby preserved the discursive architecture within which criticism could be advanced without triggering the accusation of existential delegitimization. Erdoğan's deployment of this formula was particularly notable because it permitted a register of moral condemnation that approached the absolute while simultaneously maintaining the grammatical and diplomatic structures of particularized critique — a feat of considerable discursive sophistication, whatever one might think of its political sincerity.
When this formula is examined in the context of the Netanyahu and Abbas addresses, however, its semiotic operation undergoes a transformation that is, one might suggest, structurally revelatory. The formula "this Israeli government" was developed by and for external critics — speakers who occupy a position outside the object of their critique and who therefore require a grammatical mechanism for managing the distance between the state and its policies. But Netanyahu is not external to "this Israeli government"; he is, in the most direct and unmediated sense, the Israeli government, or at least its principal representative and the figure in whom executive authority is most visibly concentrated. When critics employ the formula "this Israeli government" in his presence or in reference to his address, the distancing mechanism collapses: the temporal and political hedge dissolves into a direct personal accusation, and the distinction between state and government, which the formula was designed to preserve, becomes instead a distinction between the enduring legitimacy of Israel and the specific moral-political agency of Netanyahu himself. The formula, that is to say, functions as a personal indictment precisely to the degree that it was designed to avoid one — a structural irony that discloses the limits of the diplomatic grammar within which critique must be conducted.
Netanyahu's own rhetorical strategy, one might observe, is precisely to collapse this distinction from the opposite direction: where his critics seek to separate the state from the government (and thereby from the person), Netanyahu systematically identifies the state with its historical and theological mission and then positions himself as the agent and embodiment of that mission, so that any criticism of "this government" becomes, through the logic of his own semiotic construction, an attack on the state itself, on the Jewish people's right to sovereign self-determination, and ultimately on the theological narrative of covenant and return that, in his discourse, underwrites the entire enterprise. The formula "this Israeli government," designed as an instrument of modulated critique, thus encounters in Netanyahu's rhetorical architecture a counter-strategy that renders modulation impossible: one is either for the civilizational project that Netanyahu claims to represent or against it, and the grammatical middle ground that the formula was designed to create is systematically eliminated.
Abbas, for his part, navigates this terrain through a different set of discursive mechanisms that operate, it may be suggested, with their own distinctive logic and their own characteristic forms of elision. Abbas does not typically employ the phrase "this Israeli government" in the precise form used by Erdoğan or Abdullah; his preferred formulations — "the occupation government," "Israeli governments" in the plural, "the occupying power" as a legal designation rather than a political characterization — perform a different kind of work. The plural form "Israeli governments" distributes responsibility across administrations and thereby converts what might otherwise be a particularized critique into a systemic one: the problem, in Abbas's framing, is not this government or that government but rather the structural relation between Israeli sovereignty and Palestinian subjugation, a relation that persists across changes of government and that cannot, therefore, be resolved by the replacement of one government with another. The legal designation "the occupying power" accomplishes something further still: it removes the question from the register of political criticism altogether and repositions it within the register of international legal obligation, where the relevant categories are not policy choices subject to political debate but legal duties subject to adjudication and enforcement. Each of these formulations, one might suggest, constitutes a response to the same semiotic problem that the "this Israeli government" formula addressed — the problem of criticizing Israeli conduct without delegitimizing the state — but each resolves it differently, and the differences are not merely stylistic but architecturally significant.
Mirror-Image Absences: The Complementary Structure of What Cannot Be Said
The most consequential finding of the cross-reading, and the one that bears most directly upon Reading in Three Dimensions’ analysis of the structuring absence, is that each speech's organizing silence is precisely the other speech's explicit content. The two addresses, read against each other, constitute complementary halves of a discourse that cannot, within the existing institutional and semiotic framework, be made whole. Netanyahu's address is saturated, as the preceding analysis has shown, with Jewish theological claims: the covenant, the biblical narrative of return, the identification of the Jewish people with their ancestral homeland through a chain of signification that stretches from the patriarchs through the prophets to the modern state, the invocation of civilizational categories that position Israel not merely as a political entity but as the bearer of a sacred historical mission. But this theological saturation is achieved at the cost of a near-complete emptying of the Palestinian political register: Palestinian national aspirations, Palestinian legal claims, Palestinian subjectivity as a political and historical phenomenon — these are not merely contested in Netanyahu's address but rendered structurally invisible, present only as obstacles to be managed, threats to be contained, or, at best, populations whose welfare might be improved under conditions of Israeli security dominance.
Abbas's address enacts the precise inverse. It is saturated with legal-institutional claims — United Nations resolutions, International Court of Justice advisory opinions, the Geneva Conventions, the established framework of international humanitarian law, bilateral agreements and their alleged violations, the procedural requirements of statehood recognition and the mechanisms of international accountability — and this saturation of the legal-institutional register is achieved at the cost of a near-complete emptying of the Jewish theological register. Judaism as a living tradition, Jewish historical memory as a constitutive element of the conflict, the theological dimensions of Jewish attachment to the land, the covenantal narrative that informs not merely the religious fringe but substantial dimensions of mainstream Israeli political consciousness — these are not engaged, not contested, not even acknowledged as relevant categories of analysis in Abbas's discourse. They are simply absent, and the absence is a structural consequence of the meaning-system within which Abbas's claims are articulated: in a world constituted entirely by international law, theological claims to sovereignty are not wrong but unintelligible, not arguments to be refuted but category errors to be excluded from the field of legitimate discourse. This is the same classificatory operation identified in the prior essay’s reading of Abdullah: the legal register does not merely choose among names; it determines which dimensions of the conflict can enter the field at all.
The significance of this mirror-image structure extends well beyond the bilateral Israeli-Palestinian dispute and discloses something fundamental about the architecture of international multilateral discourse itself. Reading in Three Dimensions argued that the General Assembly produces "the appearance of shared meaning" and that this appearance constitutes, paradoxically, the principal achievement of multilateral diplomacy — not the resolution of disagreements but the creation of a discursive space within which radically incommensurable positions can be articulated in vocabularies that appear, at the surface level, to be mutually intelligible. The cross-reading of Netanyahu and Abbas adds a further dimension: the appearance of shared meaning is sustained not merely by common vocabularies with divergent significations but also by a structural distribution of silence, a tacit agreement — not negotiated, not explicit, but constitutive of the discursive field itself — that each participant will refrain from articulating the dimensions of meaning that would render the other's position not merely wrong but categorically unintelligible. Netanyahu breaks this tacit agreement by theologizing sovereignty; Abbas breaks it by legalizing history. Each thereby renders visible the architecture of silence that sustains the illusion of commensurability.
The two speeches are, in this reading, not merely opposing arguments within a shared debate but rather complementary fragments of a discourse that can never be assembled into a coherent whole, because the conditions of coherence demanded by each fragment are precisely the conditions that the other fragment's existence renders impossible. A discourse that fully accommodated Netanyahu's theological claims would have no room for Abbas's legal architecture, not because the two are logically contradictory (though they may also be that) but because they operate within meaning-systems that constitute different objects, different subjects, different temporalities, and different modes of authorization. And a discourse that fully accommodated Abbas's legal-institutional framework would have no room for Netanyahu's theology, not because it would refute it but because it would have no category within which to register it. The General Assembly, as the original essay suggested, manages this incommensurability precisely by preventing its full articulation — but the cross-reading of these two addresses, which bring the absent voices into the field of analysis, discloses the depth and the structural necessity of that prevention.
The Erdoğan Contradiction and Its Structural Analogues
The essay, ‘Reading in Three Dimensions,’ devoted considerable attention to what was described as the Erdoğan contradiction: the phenomenon whereby the Turkish president condemned Israeli occupation in terms of moral absolutism and civilizational critique while maintaining, without acknowledgment or apparent self-consciousness, Turkey's own military occupation of Northern Cyprus — an occupation that, whatever its historical justifications and however different its circumstances, presents structural parallels that the discourse systematically suppresses. This contradiction was analyzed not as a mere instance of hypocrisy (which would be a moral-political judgment external to the semiotic method) but rather as a symptom of the structuring logic of General Assembly discourse, which permits the articulation of universalized moral claims only by excluding the conditions under which those claims might be reflexively applied to the speaker's own conduct. The Erdoğan contradiction, in other words, was not accidental but structural: it disclosed the conditions under which moral-political claims can function as semiotic instruments in the multilateral setting.
The cross-reading of Netanyahu and Abbas reveals that each speaker harbors an analogue of this structural contradiction, and that these analogues, when identified and examined, illuminate further dimensions of the semiotic architecture under analysis. Netanyahu's analogue is, one might suggest, at once more fundamental and more carefully managed than Erdoğan's. Netanyahu proclaims democratic values as constitutive of Israeli identity — Israel as "the one true democracy in the Middle East," as a society characterized by the rule of law, the protection of individual rights, and the commitment to governmental accountability that, in the Western democratic tradition, constitutes the foundational legitimacy of sovereign authority. Yet this proclamation coexists with, and one might argue is structurally dependent upon, the maintenance of military control over millions of Palestinians who are denied political representation in the sovereign entity that governs the conditions of their daily existence — a condition that, whatever name one gives it and however one assesses its historical origins and current justifications, represents a fundamental tension with the democratic self-characterization that Netanyahu's discourse relies upon for its semiotic authority. The contradiction is not, to be clear, a simple logical error that might be resolved by more careful argumentation; it is rather a structural feature of the double meaning-system within which Netanyahu operates, in which Israel is simultaneously a Western liberal democracy (when addressing audiences for whom democratic legitimacy is a primary value) and a Jewish civilizational state whose mission transcends and may supersede the procedural requirements of democratic inclusion (when addressing audiences for whom the theological-historical narrative is primary).
The formula "the Jewish state" crystallizes this contradiction with particular clarity. In one register — the register of liberal democratic discourse — "the Jewish state" is simply a designation of national character, analogous to "the French Republic" or "the Japanese state," and carrying no implications that would conflict with democratic universalism. In another register — the register of theological-civilizational discourse that Netanyahu's address explicitly activates — "the Jewish state" designates a polity whose fundamental character is defined by a particular religious-ethnic-cultural identity and whose democratic procedures are, in the last analysis, instrumental to rather than constitutive of that identity. These two registers cannot be simultaneously fully activated without contradiction, and Netanyahu's rhetorical achievement, such as it is, consists precisely in the management of their coexistence — a management that is facilitated, one might note, by the institutional setting of the General Assembly, which rewards comprehensive self-characterization and punishes the kind of analytical specificity that would force the contradiction into explicit view.
Abbas's structural contradiction, though less frequently remarked upon in diplomatic commentary, is no less significant for the semiotic analysis. Abbas positions himself and the Palestinian Authority as representatives of Palestinian democratic aspiration, invoking the legitimacy of popular mandate and the commitment to institutional governance that, in the international order, constitutes the precondition for recognition as a responsible sovereign interlocutor. Yet this democratic self-characterization coexists with the fact that Abbas has not submitted himself to presidential election for well over a decade, that the Palestinian Legislative Council has not functioned for a comparable period, and that the institutional structures through which democratic legitimacy is ordinarily renewed — regular elections, legislative oversight, peaceful transfer of power — have been suspended under conditions that, whatever their justification in terms of the extraordinary circumstances of occupation, represent a fundamental discontinuity between the democratic claims of the discourse and the institutional realities of the governance it describes. Abbas's address at the General Assembly is, in this respect, not merely a political speech but a performative act of legitimacy-construction, in which the speaker's authority to represent the Palestinian people is established through the very act of speaking on their behalf in the international forum — an authority that, in the absence of the electoral mechanisms through which democratic representation is normally constituted and reconstituted, depends entirely upon the institutional recognition of the international community and the tacit consent of the audience to accept the speaker's self-characterization as sufficient evidence of its truth.
The structural parallels between these contradictions — Netanyahu's democratic claim amid non-democratic governance of Palestinians, Abbas's democratic claim amid the suspension of democratic procedures — are not, it is important to emphasize, offered here as equivalences, either moral or political. The circumstances are vastly different, the historical responsibilities are distributed unevenly, and any analysis that treated these contradictions as symmetrical would be not merely politically tendentious but semiotically imprecise. What the parallels do reveal, however, is something about the institutional grammar of the General Assembly itself: the forum requires, as a condition of participation, the performance of certain legitimating self-characterizations (democratic commitment, respect for international law, dedication to peace) that may or may not correspond to the institutional realities they purport to describe, and the gap between performance and reality, far from being an embarrassment that the institution seeks to close, is in fact the space within which multilateral discourse operates — the space, one might say, that makes the discourse possible at all.
The American Imperial Frame: Biden, Trump, and the Conditions of Address
Neither Netanyahu's nor Abbas's address can be adequately understood, the cross-reading suggests, without attending to the American imperial frame within which both speakers must position themselves and to which both addresses, at levels ranging from the explicit to the deeply structural, are oriented. The original essay analyzed the Trump address as one of its four primary texts and noted the distinctive features of American presidential discourse at the General Assembly — its assumption of a privileged position within the international order, its tendency to treat multilateral institutions as instruments of American policy rather than constraints upon it, its deployment of universalizing rhetoric in the service of particularist interests. The present analysis extends this observation by examining how the American frame, as constituted not only by Trump's General Assembly address but also by Biden's 2023 address on Israel and Ukraine and by Trump's 2025 address to the Knesset, creates the discursive conditions within which Netanyahu and Abbas must operate and the constraints to which their respective performances of sovereignty must accommodate themselves.
Netanyahu's rhetorical strategy for managing the American frame is, one might suggest, a strategy of civilizational identification: he positions Israel not as a client state or a dependent ally but as America's civilizational partner, a co-bearer of the values and historical mission that, in this construction, define the West as a meaningful category. The invitation to "join us in standing up to the barbarians who threaten our common civilization" is not merely a rhetorical flourish but a precise semiotic operation: it constructs a shared subject ("us"), identifies a shared threat ("the barbarians"), and positions Israel and America as co-equal participants in a civilizational project that transcends the ordinary categories of international relations — categories such as national interest, strategic calculation, and the balance of power that might otherwise position Israel as a dependent rather than a partner. The civilizational frame, moreover, permits Netanyahu to address the American audience (which is, in significant measure, the real audience for his General Assembly address, as it is for many speakers at the Assembly) not as a supplicant requesting support but as an ally offering shared purpose — a repositioning that is facilitated by the theological-civilizational register that his address explicitly activates and that resonates, it need hardly be observed, with significant dimensions of American political culture, particularly those associated with Christian Zionism and the broader tradition of American exceptionalism understood in providential terms.
Abbas's strategy for managing the American frame is fundamentally different and reveals, through its very difference, the asymmetry of the discursive field within which the two speakers operate. Where Netanyahu positions himself as America's civilizational equal, Abbas positions Palestine as deserving of American engagement through compliance with American demands — reform programs, curriculum changes, anti-corruption initiatives, security cooperation, the renunciation of violence as an instrument of political struggle, and the embrace of institutional governance structures modeled, at least formally, on Western democratic templates. This strategy of compliance-based legitimation operates within a different register of the American relationship: not civilizational partnership but conditional patronage, in which recognition and support are earned through the demonstration of conformity with criteria established by the more powerful party. The asymmetry is not merely political but semiotic: Netanyahu's civilizational frame permits him to address America as a subject addressing a subject, while Abbas's compliance frame positions him as a subject demonstrating its worthiness to a judge — and the difference between these positions is not a function of the speakers' rhetorical skill but of the structural conditions within which their respective claims to sovereignty are articulated.
Trump's address to the Knesset in 2025 and his General Assembly address illuminate a further dimension of the American frame that is consequential for both speakers: the treatment of Palestinians as objects of reconstruction rather than as subjects of political self-determination. Trump's vision of Gaza as a site of development — "the Riviera of the Middle East" — operates within a register that is simultaneously economic, philanthropic, and imperial: Palestinians appear as beneficiaries of development projects rather than as agents of their own political destiny, and the question of Palestinian sovereignty, Palestinian self-determination, Palestinian political subjectivity is not answered but rather dissolved into a calculus of economic improvement and humanitarian management. This framing creates conditions of extraordinary difficulty for Abbas, who must articulate Palestinian political claims within and against a discursive framework that has preemptively converted those claims into requests for material assistance — but it also creates opportunities for Netanyahu, who can embrace the developmental vision precisely because it leaves the question of political sovereignty unresolved and thereby preserves the status quo of Israeli control under the benevolent guise of economic partnership.
Biden's 2023 address on Israel and Ukraine, which framed Israel's security within the broader architecture of American global engagement and explicitly paralleled Israeli and Ukrainian resistance to aggression, created a different kind of discursive field — one in which Israel's military operations were positioned within the register of legitimate self-defense against existential threat, a framing that both enabled and constrained subsequent Israeli discourse. Netanyahu's General Assembly address operates, it may be suggested, within the space opened by Biden's parallel even as it exceeds and transforms that space: the self-defense framing is accepted and amplified but is also supplemented by the theological-civilizational register that Biden's more conventional geopolitical framing did not invoke. The American frame, in other words, is not a fixed structure but a field of discursive possibility that both speakers — Netanyahu with considerably more success than Abbas, given the structural asymmetries already noted — must negotiate, appropriate, and transform in the service of their respective semiotic projects.
The Performative Conditions as Semiotic Structure: Speaking Across the Void
The cross-reading returns, in its final movement, to the performative conditions with which the present essay began: Netanyahu present in a hall emptied by walkout; Abbas absent from the hall itself, his address delivered via pre-recorded video to an audience he cannot see and a forum he cannot physically enter. These conditions, it was suggested in the introduction, are not external to the semiotic analysis but rather constitute its outermost frame — and the cross-reading now permits a more precise articulation of their significance. Both speakers are, in a sense that is structural rather than merely metaphorical, addressing an absence: Netanyahu speaks to delegations that have left, to seats that are empty, to a silence that is the embodied performance of rejection; Abbas speaks to a hall he cannot enter, to an audience that receives his words through the mediation of a screen, to an institutional space from which he has been physically excluded by the denial of the visa that would have permitted his presence. The condition of reception mirrors, with an uncanny precision that is itself analytically significant, the condition of the conflict: mutual address across a void, speech directed toward an interlocutor who is structurally absent, communication that is performed but that cannot, given the conditions of its performance, achieve the dialogical reciprocity that communication, in its ideal form, presupposes.
Netanyahu's hall, emptied by walkout, is a space in which the speaker's physical presence is maximized — he stands at the podium, he commands the room, he displays the artifacts and images that punctuate his address — while the audience's presence is minimized, reduced to those delegations that have chosen to remain and thereby transformed from a representative assembly of nations into a self-selected audience of sympathizers and the merely curious. The walkout converts the General Assembly from a forum of universal address into something more closely resembling a political rally or a theatrical performance, in which the speaker's relation to his audience is not dialogical but declarative and in which the absent delegations function not as interlocutors who have declined to engage but as antagonists whose departure confirms the speaker's narrative of civilizational isolation and moral courage. Netanyahu, one might suggest, is most fully himself — most fully the embattled champion of a civilization under siege — when speaking to empty seats, and the walkout, far from undermining his address, completes it by providing the performative conditions that his discourse requires.
Abbas's absence from the hall presents the inverse structure: the speaker's physical presence is minimized — he appears on a screen, mediated, diminished, deprived of the bodily presence through which political authority is conventionally performed — while the hall itself is full, the audience is present, the institutional apparatus of the General Assembly is intact. Abbas addresses a complete institution from an incomplete position, and the incompleteness of his position — his inability to be physically present, his dependence on the technological mediation of pre-recorded video, his exclusion from the rituals of arrival, of corridor conversation, of the physical occupation of the institutional space — enacts, at the level of the body and its spatial relations, the very condition of exclusion and partial recognition that constitutes the substance of his political claims. The visa denial is, in this reading, not merely a diplomatic slight or an exercise of American sovereign prerogative but a semiotic event of considerable significance: it converts Abbas's address from a speech delivered by a head of state to a petition submitted by an applicant, from a sovereign act of diplomatic participation to a mediated request for the attention of an institution that his physical exclusion from it simultaneously invokes and undermines.
The cross-reading of these performative conditions discloses, it is proposed here, a structure that is homologous with the mirror-image absences identified at the level of textual content. Just as Netanyahu's discourse is saturated with theology and emptied of Palestinian subjectivity while Abbas's discourse is saturated with law and emptied of Jewish theology, so too are their performative conditions structured by complementary forms of presence and absence: Netanyahu is present but addresses absence; Abbas is absent but addresses presence. The symmetry is not perfect — it never is, and the insistence on perfect symmetry would itself be a distortion of the semiotic method — but it is sufficiently marked to suggest that the performative conditions and the textual content are not independent dimensions of the analysis but rather homologous expressions of a single underlying structure: the structure of a conflict in which the two principal parties cannot occupy the same discursive space at the same time, in which the presence of one entails the structural absence of the other, and in which the international institutional framework — the General Assembly, with its procedures, its protocols, its choreography of sovereign address — manages this mutual exclusion not by resolving it but by distributing it across the temporal and spatial dimensions of the institutional performance.
What the cross-reading ultimately discloses is not a resolution of the tensions identified in Reading in Three Dimensions but their intensification and repositioning within a more complex architecture of analysis. The structuring absence that Reading in Three Dimensions identified as the organizing principle of the four addresses by Trump, Pezeshkian, Erdoğan, and Abdullah is not filled by the introduction of the Netanyahu and Abbas addresses into the analytical field; it is revealed to be not a simple absence but a structural impossibility — the impossibility of accommodating, within a single discursive framework, meaning-systems that constitute different objects, different subjects, different temporalities, and different modes of legitimation. The General Assembly manages this impossibility through procedural universality: each speaker is given the same podium, the same time, the same institutional frame, and the appearance of commensurability is thereby sustained — but the cross-reading reveals that this appearance depends upon the systematic non-engagement of each speaker with the conditions of meaning that underwrite the other's claims, a non-engagement that is not a failure of diplomacy but its most fundamental achievement.
10. Conclusion: The Commentary That Opens Rather Than Closes
The Talmudic metaphor with which Reading in Three Dimensions concluded — the Gemara that does not close the Mishnah but opens it, multiplying the dimensions along which meaning can be sought, contested, and provisionally inhabited — returns here as a structural description of what the present analysis has undertaken and refused to accomplish. The seven layers, applied across the original four addresses and extended to the two addresses that occupied the position of the structuring absence, have not produced a synthesis or a master reading within which six semiotic architectures can be reconciled. They have instead disclosed structures that remained less visible when the corpus was smaller and that emerge only when the method operates across a wider field of semiotic possibility. The result is not closure but an opening: a multiplication of interpretive dimensions through which the relation between what is said, what is unsaid, and what remains difficult to say can be more precisely described.
The addition of the voices from the structuring silence — the voice of Jewish sovereignty as articulated by Netanyahu and the voice of Palestinian statehood as articulated by Abbas — does not close the interpretive field that Reading in Three Dimensions opened; it reveals new dimensions of incommensurability that were latent within the earlier analysis but could not be fully articulated while the voices occupying the position of absence remained unexamined. Reading in Three Dimensions argued that the four speakers operated within incommensurable meaning-systems, that their apparent disagreements concealed a more fundamental divergence at the level of the constitutive categories through which meaning itself is produced. The present analysis confirms, complicates, and extends that finding. The incommensurability disclosed by the cross-reading of Netanyahu and Abbas is not merely another instance of the earlier phenomenon; it reveals the architectural principle underlying the others and shows why the structuring absence was not a contingent omission but a necessary feature of the discursive field.
The Talmudic metaphor is structurally precise: commentary does not close the Mishnah; it opens it, and the opening is not a failure of commentary but its achievement. The foundational text contains dimensions of meaning that it cannot itself exhaust, and layered engagement — commentary, counter-commentary, and meta-commentary — brings those dimensions into view. The addition of Netanyahu and Abbas to the corpus does not settle what the four original speeches mean; it repositions them within a field of significance that is richer and more troubled than the field within which they were initially read. Erdoğan's condemnation of Israeli occupation means something different when read against Netanyahu's explicit theologization of Jewish sovereignty, because the theological dimension that Erdoğan's critique excludes is now present within the analytical field, not as a counterargument that refutes the critique but as an alternative meaning-system that renders the critique incomplete in ways the register itself cannot recognize. Abdullah's humanitarian appeal likewise means something different when read against Abbas's legal-institutional framework, because the institutional mechanisms through which humanitarian concern might be translated into political action are disclosed as sites of contestation rather than neutral instruments of implementation.
The metaphor also reaches beyond the Jewish tradition without losing its phenomenological force. The Catholic Magisterium offers another tradition in which a foundational text is opened by authoritative commentary rather than closed by it: the Catechism, papal encyclicals, and conciliar documents layer interpretation upon scripture and tradition, producing an ongoing field of doctrinal articulation. The Muslim schools of law, or madhahib, and the enterprise of fiqh enact a parallel practice, subjecting the Qur’an and Sunnah to sustained jurisprudential commentary across centuries. The four Sunni schools represent not interpretive closure but continuing multiplication of legal reasoning, disagreement, and application. These parallels do not equate the traditions; they show instead that all three Abrahamic traditions contain hermeneutic practices through which foundational texts remain generative, contested, and open to further articulation (Backer 2009; Ahmad 2008).
The seven layers, applied to the two speeches that occupy the position of the structuring absence, reveal that the absence was not a simple omission — not a gap in the analytical coverage that could be filled by including additional texts — but a structural feature of the discourse itself, a feature that the inclusion of the absent voices transforms into a different kind of analytical object. Before the present analysis, the structuring absence could be described as the non-articulation of Jewish theological sovereignty and Palestinian political subjectivity within the discursive field of the four addresses; after the present analysis, it must be redescribed as the structural impossibility of accommodating these two meaning-systems within a single discursive framework, an impossibility that the original four addresses managed by exclusion and that the inclusion of Netanyahu and Abbas renders explicit. The absence has been converted from a silence into an articulated impossibility, and this conversion advances the precision with which the limits of understanding can be specified.
When the absent voice speaks — when Netanyahu's address brings into the discursive field the explicit theologization of Jewish sovereignty that the four original addresses systematically excluded — it does not fill the gap that the structuring absence created but rather discloses the reasons for the silence, the structural logic that necessitated the exclusion. The theological claim is so fundamental, so constitutive of a different meaning-universe, so thoroughly incommensurable with the legal-institutional-humanitarian registers within which the other speakers operate, that the multilateral diplomatic framework cannot accommodate it without rupture. The appearance of shared meaning that the General Assembly sustains — the appearance that all speakers are disagreeing within a common grammar, contesting claims within a shared framework of intelligibility — depends upon the exclusion of precisely the kind of claim that Netanyahu advances: the claim that the conflict is not, at its deepest level, a political dispute amenable to legal resolution but a civilizational and theological reality that the categories of international law and multilateral diplomacy can neither comprehend nor contain. To include this claim within the discursive field is not to enrich the debate but to disclose the conditions under which the debate is possible — conditions that require, as it now becomes clear, the systematic exclusion of precisely such claims.
When the Palestinian voice speaks — when Abbas's address brings into the discursive field the legal-institutional framework through which Palestinian statehood is articulated — it discloses the counter-structure, the alternative architecture of meaning within which the conflict is not merely differently evaluated but differently constituted as an object of analysis. In Abbas's discourse, the conflict is entirely legible through the categories of international law: there is an occupation, governed by the Fourth Geneva Convention; there are settlements, prohibited by Article 49; there is a right of self-determination, enshrined in the United Nations Charter; there is a state of Palestine, recognized by a majority of the General Assembly's membership; and there are legal obligations, enforceable through the mechanisms of international accountability, that determine what must be done without reference to theology, without reference to covenantal narrative, without reference to the civilizational categories within which Netanyahu's address operates. This legal-institutional framework does not refute Netanyahu's theological claims; it renders them irrelevant — a more radical operation than refutation, because refutation acknowledges the interlocutor's categories as meaningful even while contesting their application, whereas rendering them irrelevant excludes those categories from the field of legitimate discourse altogether, treating them not as wrong but as simply beside the point.
The incommensurability thus disclosed is not a failure of communication — not a problem that might be solved by better translation, more empathetic listening, or more skillful diplomacy. It is a structural feature of the international order, a feature that manifests not only in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but wherever the claims of theological-civilizational meaning-systems encounter the claims of secular-legal-institutional frameworks, wherever the categories within which sovereignty is theologically grounded confront the categories within which sovereignty is procedurally constituted, wherever, in short, the question of what a state is and why it has the right to exist admits of answers that cannot be translated across the meaning-systems within which they are respectively articulated. The General Assembly, as the institutional site where these incommensurable claims are performatively enacted in closest proximity, does not resolve this structural feature but manages it — manages it through the procedural universality that gives each speaker the same podium and the same time, through the choreography of sovereign address that maintains the appearance of dialogical exchange, and through the structuring absences and mutual non-engagements that prevent the full articulation of incommensurability and thereby preserve the possibility of continued institutional coexistence.
The argument of ‘Reading in Three Dimensions’ — that "the General Assembly produces the appearance of shared meaning, and this appearance is itself the principal achievement of multilateral diplomacy" — is both confirmed and complicated by the present analysis. The cross-reading of Netanyahu and Abbas provides the most vivid and structurally revealing instance of that phenomenon: the two speakers share a vocabulary ("peace," "security," "justice," "the international community"), an institutional frame (the General Assembly address), and a set of referent events (the conflict in Gaza, the question of Palestinian statehood, and the role of the United States), yet they deploy this shared apparatus in the service of meaning-systems that are not merely divergent but incommensurable. The appearance of shared meaning is sustained by the impossibility of its realization. The finding is also complicated because the appearance of shared meaning depends not only on common vocabularies with divergent significations but also on a structural distribution of presence and absence — of what can be said and what must remain silent, of who can be present and who must be excluded, of which dimensions of meaning can be articulated and which must be suppressed — that is a constitutive feature of the multilateral institutional framework itself.
The method of layered reading, like the Gemara from which it draws its metaphorical authority, is never finished. Each layer that is disclosed reveals the conditions under which previous layers were constituted and simultaneously creates the conditions for further layers to emerge; each addition to the corpus repositions the existing texts within a more complex field of significance and opens new dimensions of analysis that the previous configuration could not have anticipated. The present essay has added two voices to the corpus of the original four and has applied the seven-layer architecture to these additions; but the analytical field is not thereby exhausted, for there remain voices that have not been heard (the voices of the peoples themselves, as distinct from their governmental representatives; the voices of the non-state actors — Hamas, Hezbollah, the settler movement — that the governmental speakers simultaneously invoke and suppress; the voice of the international institutional apparatus itself, with its procedures, its precedents, and its own semiotic architecture), and there remain layers that have not been fully excavated (the economic register, the gendered register, the register of ecological and environmental signification that increasingly penetrates the discourse of international relations). The Talmudic method is never complete because the text is never exhausted — and the text is never exhausted because each reading creates conditions for further reading that the text itself did not anticipate.
What the present analysis has disclosed — what the layered reading of Netanyahu and Abbas against the semiotic architecture of Reading in Three Dimensions has brought into view — is not a conclusion but an opening, not a resolution but a more precise articulation of the conditions under which resolution remains structurally impossible, not an answer to the question of what these addresses mean but a richer, more troubled, and more consequential understanding of the dimensions along which meaning is produced, contested, and managed within the institutional framework of multilateral diplomacy. The analysis is offered, in the spirit of the Talmudic metaphor that animates it, not as the last word but as a repositioning for the next encounter — an encounter that will disclose further dimensions of the architecture of shared meaning and structured silence that the General Assembly simultaneously produces and conceals, and that constitutes not merely the context within which international political discourse takes place but the very substance of which it is composed.
References
Abdullah II ibn Al Hussein. 2026. Statement at the General Debate of the 81st Session of the United Nations General Assembly. New York, September.
Abbas, Mahmoud. 2026. Statement at the General Debate of the 81st Session of the United Nations General Assembly (pre-recorded video). New York, 24 September.
Ahmad, Muhammad Mushtaq. 2008. ‘The Notions of Dār al-Ḥarb and Dār al-Islām in Islamic Jurisprudence with Special Reference to the Ḥanafī School.’ Islamic Studies 47(1): 5–37.
Backer, Larry Catá. 1998. ‘Religion as Object and the Grammar of Law.’ Marquette Law Review 81: 229–293.
Backer, Larry Catá. 2008. 'God(s) Over Constitutions: International and Religious Transnational Constitutionalism in the 21st Century.' Mississippi College Law Review 27: 11–65.
Backer, Larry Catá. 2009. 'Theocratic Constitutionalism: An Introduction to a New Global Legal Ordering.' Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 16(1): 85–172.
Backer, Larry Catá. 2024. 'Cognitive Rifts and Semiotic Contests: Reading Conflict Through Competing Meaning-Structures.' Law at the End of the Day.
Backer, Larry Catá. 2025. 'They Shoot Horses, Don't They?: The General Assembly as Seraglio.' Law at the End of the Day.
Backer, Larry Catá. 2026a. 'Reading in Three Dimensions: The 81st UN General Assembly Addresses as Sites of Layered Meaning, Concealed Theology, and Competing Legalities.' Working Paper.
Backer, Larry Catá. 2026b. ‘The Wandering Marx: Denaturing Marxism from its Jewish Genealogical Origins in Chinese Socialist Internationalism.’ Working Paper.
Backer, Larry Catá, and Joshua Buser. 2025. 'Debating Genocide: Shifting Frameworks for Ordering Facts, Theory, Significance, and Consequence.' Law at the End of the Day.
Biden, Joseph R. 2023. 'Address on Israel and Ukraine.' Washington, DC, 20 October.
Erdoğan, Recep Tayyip. 2026. Statement at the General Debate of the 81st Session of the United Nations General Assembly. New York, September.
Eris, Ismail. 2000. ‘The Dar al-Islam and the Dar al-Harb: A Discourse on the Crafting of a Muslim State.’ MA Thesis, University of Texas at Austin.
Framework Agreement between Israel and Lebanon. 2026. Signed June.
Hamas. 1988. ‘The Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas).’ 18 August.
Hallaq, Wael B. 2003. 'Muslim Rage and Islamic Law.' Hastings Law Journal 54: 1705–20.
Hirschl, Ran. 2008. 'The Theocratic Challenge to Constitution Drafting in Post-Conflict States.' William and Mary Law Review 49: 1179–1211.
Mao Zedong. 1937. ‘On Contradiction.’ In Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, vol. 1. Peking: Foreign Languages Press.
Mao Zedong. 1949. ‘On the People’s Democratic Dictatorship.’ In Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, vol. 4. Peking: Foreign Languages Press.
Netanyahu, Benjamin. 1996, 2011, 2015, 2024. Addresses to the United States Congress. Washington, DC.
Netanyahu, Benjamin. 2026. Address at the 81st Session of the United Nations General Assembly. New York, 24 September.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1889. Twilight of the Idols. Leipzig: C. G. Naumann.
Pezeshkian, Masoud. 2026. Statement at the General Debate of the 81st Session of the United Nations General Assembly. New York, September.
Trump, Donald J. 2025. 'Address to the Knesset.' Jerusalem, October.
Trump, Donald J. 2026. Statement at the General Debate of the 81st Session of the United Nations General Assembly. New York, September.
Twain, Mark. 1899. 'Concerning the Jews.' Harper's Magazine, March.
No comments:
Post a Comment