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Netanyahu's rhetoric brings same old message

For dozens of years, Benjamin Netanyahu has been delivering the same speech to the UN General Assembly — once it was the PLO, today it’s Hamas — and the Israeli center still insists on asking whether Netanyahu has changed.
Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu talks about a photograph as he addresses the 69th United Nations General Assembly at the U.N. headquarters in New York September 29, 2014. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid (UNITED STATES - Tags: POLITICS) - RTR4886J

In a video clip from 1978 that was uploaded to YouTube in recent years, Benjamin Netanyahu was documented as presenting the Israeli standpoint in the conflict with the Palestinians in a debate that took place in Boston. At the time, Netanyahu was called Ben Nitay and, at 28 years old, he served as economic consultant in an American company. He was introduced by the debate presenter as a young Israeli graduate of MIT. In fluent, self-confident American English, the young Netanyahu ably presented the Israeli viewpoint as he saw it. He talked about Arabs who refused to recognize the Jewish state, about Palestinians who would prefer to throw the Israelis into the sea and the PLO’s plans to destroy the Zionist movement.

This was probably the first photographed documentation of Netanyahu to be broadcast on television, and it was already clear that we were witnessing a rising political and media star. Netanyahu loved the camera and the camera loved him. He used this skill, together with his political ability, to associate himself with the right person (senior Likud and former Minister Moshe Arens) to win an appointment seven years later (1984) as Israeli ambassador to the United Nations. To this very day, Netanyahu is viewed as the best ambassador Israel has ever sent to the UN.

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