Roughly 100 people were arrested by the NYPD on September 24 outside the United Nations. They had gathered to do what the institution inside refused to: confront Benjamin Netanyahu with the consequences of his war on Gaza. Among those led away in cuffs were actors Hannah Einbinder and Susan Sarandon, and the images spread across social media in the minutes before Netanyahu took the podium.
The protest was organized by Jewish Voice for Peace, which accused the UN of “playing host to a war criminal.” That is not hyperbole. It is a factual description of a leader whose military campaign has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, flattened entire neighborhoods, and starved a civilian population under deliberate siege. The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu. The UN’s own courts and investigators have documented war crimes. And yet the General Assembly rolled out the carpet, and the NYPD rolled out the zip ties for anyone who objected loudly enough.
Let us be clear about what happened here. The police did not detain these protesters to keep the peace. They detained them to keep the optics clean for a speech. The machinery of a major American city was deployed to silence dissent so a foreign leader accused of war crimes could address the world body without the inconvenience of visible opposition. That is not public safety. That is complicity, laundered through bureaucracy.
Netanyahu used his platform to demand of departing delegates, “Where were you when the Iranian tyrants butchered and maimed tens of thousands of unarmed Iranian civilians?” The audacity is staggering. A man presiding over the destruction of Gaza, standing at a lectern built on the ashes of the postwar promise of “never again,” weaponizing the suffering of Iranians to deflect from the suffering he has inflicted. He then pivoted to attacking New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and streamer Hasan Piker, because apparently a head of state addressing the world body now reserves time to settle scores with a Twitch broadcaster. The man has a country to answer for and he chose to punch down at a content creator.
Jan van der Wolf / PexelsBoth Einbinder and Sarandon have paid real costs for their solidarity. Einbinder said at Cannes, “The cost of not speaking is higher. There is a greater toll in not speaking, and you just gotta have your priorities straight. I am under no impression that my one small career could ever measure up in comparison to even one human life.” Sarandon said at Venice that agencies are still telling producers not to hire her, that movies have been taken away. “But that’s the power structure,” she said. “Within the people, certainly internationally, I feel welcome.”
That power structure is exactly what was on display Wednesday. The NYPD, the UN security apparatus, the diplomatic protocol, the media framing that treats 100 arrests as a footnote and a war criminal’s speech as the headline. The system is not broken. It is working exactly as designed: to protect the powerful and punish those who refuse to look away.
One hundred people stood up. One hundred people were arrested. In a city of eight million, in a country of 330 million, that is a scandal of a different kind. Not that they were detained, but that so few stood with them. The question is not whether Hannah Einbinder and Susan Sarandon were brave. They were. The question is what the rest of us are waiting for.