On Holocaust day, Netanyahu says its lessons guide him
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu opened Israel’s annual memorial day for the 6 million Jews systematically killed by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during the Second World War by saying the lessons of the Holocaust guide him daily and issuing a warning to Israel’s enemies not to test it.
The Nazis and their collaborators wiped out a third of world Jewry and Netanyahu’s remarks illustrated how decades later the Holocaust is still a central part of
Israel’s psyche. The state of Israel was established just three years after the end of the war and hundreds of thousands of survivors made their way here.
Speaking at the at the main ceremony at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, Netanyahu said Israel’s arch- enemy Iran, as well as the Islamic State group, are “publicly striving to destroy us.”
Netanyahu said the lesson of the Holocaust is that “we must be able to defend ourselves by ourselves against all threats and any enemy.” He said this lesson guides him “every morning and every evening.”
Netanyahu said Israel has transformed itself into a strong nation with one of the “strongest defensive forces in the world” and warned “those that seek to destroy us will put themselves in danger of destruction.”
World powers knew of the mass destruction of Jews already in 1942 and if allies would have intervened by bombing the death camps millions of people could have been saved, Netanyahu said.
He said that although there hasn’t been anything on the scale and scope of the Holocaust since the Second World War, the world has mostly stood by and not intervened in mass killings around the world from Cambodia to Sudan and now Syria.
However, Netanyahu said, “amid the darkness” there are some “points of light.”
Among them he said was U.S. President Donald Trump’s “determined answer to the slaughter of the Syrian children by chemical weapons .” He was referring to the U.S. missile strike earlier this month on a Syrian airbase the U.S. believed to be the launching pad for a chemical weapons attack on civilians that killed dozens.
Syrian President Bashar Assad has strongly denied he was behind the attack in the opposition- held town of Khan Sheikhoun in Syria’s northern Idlib province.