Benito Mussolini addressed the League of Nations. “The League is very well when sparrows shout, but no good at all when eagles fall out,” he said from the dais, his hands reaching out performatively and coming to fists in the air above his head. “We become strong, I feel, when we have no friends upon whom to lean, or to look to for moral guidance.”

The Fascist dictator had ordered the Italian Army into Abyssinia (Ethiopia), the last independent state in Africa and, after Italy’s conquest of Cyrenaica and Tripolitania (Libya) two decades before, the coveted plum in Il Duce’s restored Roman Empire. Abyssinia had resisted Italian aggression in the 1890s in its “scramble for Africa.” But, a half-century later, Mussolini claimed that its independence was a sham, and its new Emperor Haile Selassie was an illegitimate usurper.

Italian troops, tanks, and aircraft stormed into Abyssinia, dropping bombs and poison gas on Emperor Selassie’s infantry and cavalry. By the end of 1935, Mussolini authorized “the use even on a vast scale of any gas and flamethrowers” on civilian as well as military targets. This was a violation not only of the “laws of war” but of all the standards of human civilization. These standards had always observed in the breach in European colonial wars but now, after 1918 and the War to End Wars, the Versailles Treaty, and the creation of the League of Nations, Italy’s behavior was beyond the pale.

Emperor Selassie sailed to Europe to speak to the nations of the world assembled in Geneva in the summer of 1935, to appeal for international action against the Italian genocide and to condemn aggression. Led by the French delegation, the League of Nations approved sanctions against Fascist Italy. Ascending the rostrum of the General Assembly in October, Mussolini smirked, “the League of Nations, instead of recognizing the rights of Italy, dares talk of sanctions… To economic sanctions, we shall answer with our discipline, our spirit of sacrifice, our obedience. To military sanctions, we shall answer with military measures. To acts of war, we shall answer with acts of war.”

“Italy! Italy! entirely and universally Fascist!” The dictator defiantly proclaimed to the world. “The Italy of the blackshirt fascist revolution, rise to your feet; let the cry of your determination rise to the skies and reach our soldiers in East Africa. Let it be a comfort to those who are about to fight. Let it be an encouragement to our friends and a warning to our enemies. It is the cry of Italy which goes beyond the mountains and the seas out into the great world. It is the cry of justice and of victory!”

It didn’t happen that way, of course. Emperor Selassie did fly to Geneva to beg for the League of Nations’s intervention against Italian aggression, and the nations of the world, bar Nazi Germany, did wag their collective fingers at Italy. They passed a solemn resolution that summer imposing sanctions, although they were never enforced and amounted to little more than the proverbial “strongly worded letter.”

But Mussolini himself did not hector his critics from the dais of the League’s General Assembly; he saved his words for a radio broadcast to the Italian people. His biographer Christopher Hibbert suggests that, as late as 1935, the Italian dictator was still cowed and a little afraid of the League of Nations – though this would change as he came increasingly under Adolph Hitler’s influence. In her memoir, Mussolini’s widow Rachele even wrote that he retained a modicum of respect for international forum.

Not so Benjamin Netanyahu, who strode to the front of the United Nations General Assembly and spat in its face this week. Mussolini never berated the League of Nations in person, but the Israeli Prime Minister’s performance at the United Nations in New York on Wednesday was, without a doubt, exactly what it would have been like had Il Duce held the world in so much contempt.

There is probably no great value in detailing Netanyahu’s remarks to the UN. In most respects, it followed the usual pattern of strongman bluster perfected by Mussolini almost 90 years ago, but with, if anything, a sharper edge of derision. “I didn’t intend to come here this year,” Netanyahu said, reminding the UN that he we was doing them a favor. “My country is at war, fighting for its life. But after I heard the lies and slanders leveled at my country by many of the speakers at this podium, I decided to come here and set the record straight.”

Those “lies,” of course, include the documented atrocities committed by the State of Israel in its War on Gaza, the intentional destruction of Gaza’s built environment, the starvation and disease in its wake, and the killing of some 50,000 Gazans, the vast majority of whom were civilian noncombatants. They also include the Mossad’s pager-bomb terrorist attack in Beirut last week and the vast escalation of the IDF bombing campaign in South Lebanon which has already claimed hundreds of lives.

Netanyahu launched into a lengthy self-justification, full of the usual maps and visual aids that stand in for any substantive reasoning – he is truly a world leader for the TikTok age – for Israel aggression. Chief among these is the claim that the State of Israel is fighting a war for survival “on seven fronts” and that the real threat to security in the Middle East is Iran (which has not actually harmed anyone in the State of Israel) rather than the State of Israel (which has killed and injured tens of thousands in Gaza in the last year alone and maintains a brutal system of military oppression and exploitation in the Occupied Territories). It’s the same old song, and one that Mussolini would certainly have hummed along with.

“We don’t want to see a single innocent person die,” Netanyahu intoned. “That’s always a tragedy. And that’s why we do so much to minimize civilian casualties, even as our enemies use civilians as human shields.” You see, the State of Israel (the “most moral state in the world,” according to Netanyahu) and the IDF (the “most moral army in the world”) are profoundly misunderstood. “… No army has done what Israel is doing to minimize civilian casualties… We send text messages!”

It is all those “self-proclaimed Progressives” who want the killing to end who are the real savages here, dontcha know? They are “morally confused.”

Washington spoke of the (“brilliant?”) Israeli strategy of “de-escalation through escalation” as Netanyahu ecstatically began an expansion of the slaughter in Gaza to the entire region, rousing Hezbollah to a full-scale response to the assassination of its leader Hassan Nasrallah, and perhaps provoking Iran to a full intervention. If nothing else, Netanyahu exults in poking the bear. Despite his warnings about Iran’s threat to peace (and it should be noted that Iran has remained remarkably restrained over the years), the Strongman of Jerusalem wants nothing more than war. Forever War.

I remembered a joke from my youth that seemed to fit the moment, even in its sexist profanity: “Fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity.” That, it seems, is the brand that Netanyahu tried to sell to the world in New York this week.

But he doesn’t care. He has nothing but contempt for the world in his pursuit of the State of Israel’s historical mission. After arrogating the long history of antisemitism for the purpose of justifying Israeli violence, Netanyahu proclaimed, “we now have a brave army, an army of incomparable courage, and we are defending ourselves. ‘The eternity of Israel will not falter,’” he declared.

I can only imagine how Mussolini would have brushed the world aside had he held it and the League of Nations in enough contempt to curl his lip in person. But I don’t have to imagine it; I saw it this week. Fortified with the knowledge that Washington might clutch its pearls and moan about “peace” and the “rules-based international order” that the United Nations, and the League of Nations before it, is supposed to defend, but that it will never abandon him, Netanyahu can confidently spew his disdain at the world in person.

After two more years of genocide in Abyssinia and the flaccidly ineffectual response from the international community, Italy walked out of the League of Nations forever. Emperor Selassie was in exile and Italy was knee-deep with its Nazi allies in the Spanish Civil War. Its impotence demonstrated beyond doubt, the League simply withered into historical irrelevance. Global war and genocide on a scale the Mussolini himself could never have imagined would soon follow.