Israel, US flay Iran at Holocaust meet
World leaders descend on Jerusalem to mark 75 years since Auschwitz camp was liberated
Jerusalem, Jan. 23: Israel and the United States on Thursday called for action against Iran in front of world leaders marking 75 years since the liberation of Auschwitz, comparing the Iranian threat to that once posed by Nazi Germany.
“There will not be another Holocaust,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the Jerusalem gathering of more than 40 heads of state and government, pointing to what he called “the tyrants of Tehran”.
He lamented that “we have yet to see a unified and resolute stance against the most antiSemitic regime on the planet, a regime that openly seeks to develop nuclear weapons and annihilate the one and only Jewish state.”
In a similar vein, US Vice President Mike Pence urged the international community to “stand strong” against Iran, calling it the only country where Holocaust denial is “state policy”.
French President Emmanuel Macron, however, rejected such parallels, telling the gathering -without mentioning Iran, Israel or the US by name -that “no one has the right to invoke (those killed by the Nazis) to justify division or contemporary hatred”.
Russian President Vladimir Putin proposed a summit of leaders of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council to “defend peace” in the face of global instability.
Tehran denies it is trying to build a nuclear bomb and accusations of antiSemitism, insisting that while it opposes the Jewish state and supports the Palestinian cause, it has no problem with
Jewish people, including its own Jewish minority. The leaders of former Allied powers were at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial centre for the biggest international diplomatic gathering ever held in Israel, to remember the liberation of the World War II death camp where the Nazis killed more than 1.1 million people, most of them Jews.
While the main focus was on the Holocaust, its haunting legacy and the resurgence of antiSemitism, modern geopolitics quickly overshadowed the event, held at a time of soaring USIranian tensions. Netanyahu said the main lesson of the Holocaust was that “Israel will do whatever it must do to defend our state, defend our people, and defend the Jewish future”.
He added: “I call on all governments to join the vital effort of confronting Iran.” Israel fiercely opposed a 2015 deal between Iran and world powers that offered Tehran sanctions relief in return for curbs to prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons.
Netanyahu applauded when US President Donald Trump in 2018 pulled out of the accord and has pushed European powers to follow Washington's lead. He said Thursday that Israel “salutes” Trump “for confronting the tyrants of Tehran that subjugate their own people and threaten the peace and security of the entire world”. Aside from Iran, a key theme of the event was the resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe and North America, in the speeches at the memorial centre for the six million Jews that Nazi Germany killed in gas chambers, and forced labour camps.