Foreign Ministry honors diplomats killed in service
The Foreign Ministry held its annual ceremony in honor of the 16 diplomats killed in service on Monday, the day before Remembrance Day, in keeping with this week’s lockdown precautions to prevent the spread of coronavirus.
Diplomats’ course cadets lit memorial fires at the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem at the same time as diplomats in the 11 countries in which representatives of Israel were murdered, who attended the ceremony via video link.
The first diplomat honored was Edna Pe’er, who was murdered in Asunción, Paraguay, on May 4, 1970, when three Palestinian terrorists entered the Israeli embassy and shot at the people present. Edna was wounded and died on the same day at age 33, leaving behind a husband and three children. Her murderers were Palestinian from Gaza who were aided by Palestinians living in Paraguay.
The final diplomat mentioned in the memorial was Shlomo Argov, a Palmach veteran of the War of Independence. The Foreign Ministry website says former US secretary of state
Henry Kissinger once called Argov Israel’s most effective spokesperson ever in Washington. When he was Israel’s ambassador to the UK, he was injured in an assassination attempt on June 3, 1982.
He was paralyzed from the neck down for 21 years and died in Jerusalem in 2003. The terrorist who shot him was a Jordanian university student.
SPEAKING IN a live video message, Foreign Minister Israel Katz acknowledged the difficulty for the families to attend the ceremony from afar.
“Seventy-two years after the establishment of the state, we would hope to live in a world without hatred for Jews and their state; in a world without terrorist organizations on our borders and states that wish to destroy us,” he said.
“But that is not the world that we live in.”
Katz said that antisemitism is on the rise again, threatening Jewish communities around the world that are already reeling due to the coronavirus pandemic and its economic reverberations.
“We must join hands with the Jewish communities in the Diaspora and [with] Jewish organizations to uproot this plague [of antisemitism] wherever it rears its head.
“The eternal answer… [to] antisemitism was and remains Israel,” he stated.
Israel’s diplomatic status is part of its security, Katz added, which allows it to remain independent and guarantee its existence and its prosperity.
Katz concluded his remarks by thanking the members of Israel’s foreign service for representing the country around the world to protect Israel from diplomatic attacks and promote Israeli cooperation with the nations, while endangering themselves and their families.