Yesterday morning, I visited an old-age home for Holocaust survivors. There, I met Idit Yapo, an amazing woman of 104, clear and lucid. Idit fled Germany shortly after Hitler gained power, in 1934.
I met 89-year-old Esther Nadiv, one of Mengele’s twins. She was reading a book, Golda Meir’s biography, and she told me, with a glint in her eye, she said: “I am so proud, so very proud to be a part of the State of Israel which is in constant development.”
I met Hanoch Mandelbaum, an 89-year-old survivor of Bergen-Belsen. Shortly after he came to Israel, as a young carpenter, he helped construct the desk upon which Ben Gurion signed the Declaration of Independence. That is MiSho’a liTkuma – from holocaust to resurrection.
And I met Elisheva Lehman, an 88 year-old Holocaust survivor from Holland, who was a music teacher.
I asked Elisheva if she would play something for us and she did. She enthusiastically played “Am Yisrael Chai” and we all sung together. It was quite emotional.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Am Yisrael Chai [The nation of Israel lives]
Our enemies tried to bury the Jewish future, but it was reborn in the land of our forefathers. Here, we built a foundation for a new beginning of freedom, hope, and creation. Year after year, decade after decade, we built the foundations of our country, and we will continue to yearly strengthen the pillars of our national life.
On this day, when our entire nation gathers together to remember the horrors of the Holocaust and the six million Jews who were murdered, we must fulfill our most sacred obligation.
This obligation is not merely an obligation to remember the past. It is an obligation to learn its lessons, and, most importantly, to apply them to the present in order to secure the future of our people. We must remember the past and secure the future by applying the lessons of the past.
This is especially true for this generation – a generation that once again is faced with calls to annihilate the Jewish State.
One day, I hope that the State of Israel will enjoy peace with all the countries and all the peoples in our region. One day, I hope that we will read about these calls to destroy the Jews only in history books and not in daily newspapers.
But that day has not yet come.
Today, the regime in Iran openly calls and determinedly works for our destruction. And it is feverishly working to develop atomic weapons to achieve that goal.
I know that there are those who do not like when I speak such uncomfortable truths. They prefer that we not speak of a nuclear Iran as an existential threat. They say that such language, even if true, only sows fear and panic.
I ask, have these people lost all faith in the people of Israel?
Do they think that this nation, which has overcome every danger, lacks the strength to confront this new threat?
Did the State of Israel not triumph over existential threats when it was far less powerful than it is today? Did its leaders have any qualms about saying the truth?
David Ben Gurion told the people of Israel the truth about the existential dangers they faced in 1948 when five Arab armies tried to snuff Israel out in its cradle.
Levi Eshkol told the people of Israel the truth in 1967 when a noose was being placed around Israel’s neck and we stood alone to face our fate.
And when they heard these truths, did the people of Israel panic or did they unite to thwart the dangers? Were we paralyzed with fear or did we do what was necessary to protect ourselves.
I believe in the people of Israel – and this belief is based on our experiences. I believe that the people of Israel can handle the truth. And I believe that they we have the capability to defeat those who seek to harm us.
Those who dismiss Iran’s threats as exaggerated or as mere idle posturing have learned nothing from the Holocaust. But we should not be surprised.
There have always been those among us who prefer to mock those who tell uncomfortable truths than squarely face the truth themselves.
That is how Zev Jabotinsky was received when he warned the Jews of Poland of the looming Holocaust.
This is what he said in 1938, in Warsaw:
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“It is already THREE years that I am calling upon you, Polish Jewry, who are the crown of World Jewry. I continue to warn you incessantly that a catastrophe is coming closer. I became grey and old in these years, my heart bleeds, that you, dear brother and sisters, do not see the volcano which will soon begin to spit its all-consuming lava… I see that you are not seeing this because you are immersed and sunk in your daily worries… Listen to me in this twelfth hour: In the name of G-d! Let anyone of you save himself, as long as there is still time, and time there is very little.”
But the leading Jewish intellectuals of the day ridiculed Jabotinsky, and rather than heed his warning, they attacked him.
This is what Sholem Asch, one of our nation’s greatest writers, said about him:
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“What Jabotinsky is now doing in Poland is going too far. His statement is detrimental to Zionism and to the vital interests of our people… It is disgraceful that these are leaders of a nation.”
I know there are also those who believe that the unique evil of the Holocaust should never be invoked in discussing other threats facing the Jewish people.
To do so, they argue, is to belittle the Holocaust and to offend its victims.
I totally disagree. On the contrary. To cower from speaking the uncomfortable truth – that today like then, there are those who want to destroy millions of Jewish people – that is to belittle the Holocaust, that is to offend its victims and that is to ignore the lessons.
Not only does the Prime Minister of Israel have the right, when speaking of these existential dangers, to invoke the memory of a third of our nation which was annihilated. It is his duty.
There is a memorable scene in Claude Lanzmann’s documentary Shoah that explains this obligation more than anything.
In the harsh existence in the Warsaw Ghetto, Leon Feiner of the Bund and Menachem Kirschenbaum of the General Zionists met with Jan Karski from the Polish World War II Resistance Movement.
Jan Karski was a decent, sensitive man, and they begged him to appeal to the conscience of the world against the Nazi crimes. They described what was happening, they showed him, but to no avail.
They said: “Help us. We have no country of our own, we have no government, and we even have no voice among the nations”
They were right.
Seventy years ago the Jewish people did not have the national capacity to summon the nations, nor the military might to defend itself.
But today things are different.
Today we have an army.
We have the ability, the duty and the determination to defend ourselves.
As Prime Minister of Israel, I will never shy from speaking the truth before the world, no matter how uncomfortable it may seem to some.
I speak the truth at the United Nations; I speak the truth in Washington DC, the capital of our great friend, the United States, and in other important capitals; And I speak the truth here in Jerusalem, on the grounds of Yad VaShem which are saturated with remembrance.
I will continue to speak the truth to the world, but first and foremost I must speak it to my own people. I know that my people is strong enough to hear the truth.
The truth is that a nuclear-armed Iran is an existential threat of the State of Israel.
The truth is that a nuclear-armed Iran is an political threat to other countries throughout the region and a grave threat to the world peace.
The truth is that Iran must be stopped from obtaining nuclear weapons.
It is the duty of the whole world, but above and beyond, it is OUR duty.
The memory of the Holocaust goes beyond holding memorial services; it is not merely a historical recollection.
The memory of the Holocaust obligates us to apply the lessons of the past to ensure the basis of our future.
We will never bury our heads in the sand.
Am Yisrael Chai, veNetzach Yisrael Lo Yeshaker
[The Nation of Israel Lives, and the Eternal one of Israel does not Lie]
the phoenix Said:
Pheonix, Yamit82, or whatever you want to call yourself, when you cannot control your urge to racially abuse someone you don’t like, then you are beneath contempt. When you start to rationalise that racism is not bad, you are on the same path as the nazis.
You may think you fool people by acting even more stupid than you are and changing your name, but you just reveal your true, immature nature. I’m not going to reveal your ‘tells’, in case you cover them up and make it less obvious that you’re just one person.
And as I said to your alter ego already:
I’m not really writing to you, I’m writing about you. As someone who is often called a facist and a nazi, I find many of your beliefs distasteful and would therefore be pleased if you and your alter egos stopped trying to engage me in debate.
I understand I may have caused you some confusion by addressing you by name, so I won’t do that in future.
You can name call all you want, sticks and stones, etc………
@ Tony Jacobs:
Dear tony,
You write ” And yet Yamit82 admits to using the word black in its racist context. Just see his posts below.”
I am really not sarcastic when I ask this, and am TRULY curious in a detached sort of way, what IS it about the word ‘racist’ that it is supposed to send shivers down one’s spine, if called to be one?
When one is PROUD of his heritage and , yes, boasts about it, while simultaneously pointing out to the TRUE deficiencies of others and, statistically, their race, what is SO terrible about that?
Another poster, Arnold Harris has voiced the very same belief !
The point I am trying to make is that more and people with conservative beliefs, are having it TILL HERE with pc-mc liberalism and twisting into weird contortions just not to be called (god forbid!) a racist….
So do you (singularly and plurally) not realize that it is an old weapon that is becoming useless?
yamit82 Said:
I’m not really writing to you, I’m writing about you. As someone who is often called a facist and a nazi, I find many of your beliefs distasteful and would therefore be pleased if you and your alter egos stopped trying to engage me in debate.
I understand I may have caused you some confusion by addressing you by name, so I won’t do that in future.
You can name call all you want, sticks and stones, etc………
BTW, my nationalities are Jew, British and Israeli, in purely chronological order.
the phoenix Said:
And yet Yamit82 admits to using the word black in its racist context. Just see his posts below.
@ yamit82:
SPOT ON!
@ yamit82:
@ Tony Jacobs:
Tell you what. When The Black Guy in the WH orders his Black Attorney General to order the arrest and indictment of the Black Panthers, I will stop using those terms to describe Obama.
If there are any racists around it’s that Black guy in the WH. Should I be more Catholic than the Pope?
@ Tony Jacobs:
Obama injected the race card in his campaign in 2007/8. The Black community who usually produce under 45% in National elections turned out over 60% and of that 60% over 90% went to Obama. They voted black and with other minorities like Jews and Hispanics won going away. It is a safe bet to attribute to high Barrack voting % of minorities to his being a Black man with an appealing smile and a readiness to say what each wanted to hear. In his re-election bid he is not only playing once again his old race card he is pushing a class warfare based campaign because he knows that message appeals to those same minorities Blacks and Hispanics but less with Jews. He doesn’t much care about Jewish votes it’s their money he is after and Jews give over 40% to the democratic party and candidates.
Maybe the term plague upsets you? The damage he is doing to America in such a short time is equivalent to the effects of a plague. ( Read “The Plague”) by Albert Camus No one seemed to mind when he used that metaphor, why should you?
I hate to ask what your definition of a decent human being is, but I can imagine and am proud that I am not included. You are coming across like a little prig. Are you by any chance English?
@ Tony Jacobs:
Dear tony,
Yamit has merely called things by their name.
As you know, The yersinia pestis enterobacteria , was responsible for decimating almost half of the population of Europe, in other words it has left an incredible damage in its wake.
Now, we have this impostor musloid bastard (literally and figuratively) who in the three years that he has usurped the highest position on earth he has managed to raid the treasury, destroy an economy AND successfully instigate class warfare…..this has pretty serious consequences on people’s lives, tony, so, I fail to see why are you so thin skinned when it comes to yamit’s correct description of this TelePrompTer reader….
@ yamit82:
You said “The coward BB got suckered again by the Black plague. If he ever really believed the O, it’s because he wanted to. “If you are going to shoot, SHOOT”, stop with the mouth it’s embarrassing. BB has become a pathetic embarrassment to us all. If his aim was to push Obama into doing the job he has failed and all of us here I believe never thought O would attack in any case.”
The first (and probably the last) comment you’ve made, that I can totally agree with, although the racist name calling really is beneath a decent human being.
@ keelie:
You are correct, Keelie.
None of what I propose can develop unless and until The State of Israel replaces its present leadership with a solid and uncompromising Jewish nationalist political assemblage. I am interested solely in Jewish nationalism. I could not care less whether such an authentic Jewish state were also democratic. Because without such a leadership, carrying out a well-planned and strongly supported multi-century program of active national expansion at the expense of Israel’s neighboring enemies, the long-term outlook for any kind of Jewish state would be dim.
The truth is, Keelie, I never have cared much for the values that most Israelis or most Americans say they take seriously. I see the world as we know it from three separate and distinct standpoints:
First, that all organic matter on this planet is in a perpetual struggle for living space against others of the same or different species, on an endless battlefield that includes microbes, plants, animals and humankind. That is what I got from Robert Ardrey, who, in my judgement, was the most interesting of the generalized theoreticians of anthropology.
Second, that international relationships are permanently dominated by mutually hostile civilizations, as laid out by the late Professor Samuel Huntington.
Third, that the ability to organize, plan and exercise power trumps almost every other consideration of larger-scale human relationships. The United States of America exists today before a large number of Europeans along with certain others settled in this distant continent, robbed the native inhabitants of their lands and way of life, and settled our own race on the stolen lands. The State of Israel exist because it beat off attempts of the neighboring Arabs to kill or our people or drive them into the Mediterranean Sea. Now, it is evident to me that Israel, in order to guarantee its long-term survival, must do the same thing to all the neighboring Arabs that our American ancestors did to the American Indians. Of course there is nothing ethical about that, for the simple reason that ethics are irrelevant to the pursuit of national power.
I have been accused, by one of the well-known commenters on this blogsite, of being a fascist. To which I can only respond by smiling.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
@ yamit82:
Absolutely right on all of these points.
Well done Yamit 82 – Its like Netanyahu is following in Sharon’s footsteps!
However with Iran there can be no mistakes!!
yamit82 Said:
I find myself agreeing with everything you’ve said. Commemorating dead Jews is cheap and costs nothing. Defending living Jews takes courage and means defying the entire world.
Israel’s leaders have either have failed to register the lessons of the Holocaust or drawn the wrong ones from them.
Dealing with Israel’s challenges will not happen by mouthing platitudes every Yom HaShoah but by actively confronting them and overcoming them.
Obama ready to yield on Iran’s nuclear transparency. Israel:Tehran will cheat
The coward BB got suckered again by the Black plague. If he ever really believed the O, it’s because he wanted to. “If you are going to shoot, SHOOT”, stop with the mouth it’s embarrassing. BB has become a pathetic embarrassment to us all. If his aim was to push Obama into doing the job he has failed and all of us here I believe never thought O would attack in any case.
@ ArnoldHarris:
Good thinking, but:
That’s been the problem: the Jews doing what they are told. Such as the “Western Powers” stopping wars just at the point where Israel’s total victory was in sight. And when you think of it, all the terrorism we in the West are now experiencing is the result of this premeditated failure for Israel to achieve total victory.
@ ArnoldHarris:
This Novel Technology Could Unlock a Saudi-sized Oil Find
To put the sheer volume of Israel’s reserves in perspective, take a look at the chart below.
CHART
As the chart shows, that’s roughly the same as Saudi Arabia, which is the 13th largest country in the world and almost exactly 100 times larger than Israel. If oil is worth $100 a barrel, then Israel has the ability to tap into $25 trillion worth of crude. Trapped beneath Israel’s famed Shefla basin, rests a special type of shale called kerogen. Kerogen contains bitumen, the petroleum-rich substance that the Canadians extract from the tar sands to make oil.
Like the bitumen in the oil sands, the shale in Israel is not particularly deep, and that’s the rub. Were Israel’s kerogen further below the surface, where the Earth’s crust reaches 160 to 340 degrees Celsius, it would have been crock-potted into crude by now.
Had this happened, drilling a Saudi-scale gusher of a well would be about as challenging as digging an artisan well in a very shallow aquifer. But, alas, the kerogen is not quite deep enough, so it holds onto its bitumen like an oyster holds a pearl, and thus one of the largest petroleum deposits in the world has sat unmolested for 70 million years. Until now.
The plan? Expand on a procedure that Royal Dutch Shell (NYSE: RDS-B) created in 1997 called the in-situ conversion process (ICP).
Shell’s ICP basically creates a giant oven beneath the earth, encircling the petroleum-laden shale. Once the shale is hot enough (650 degrees Fahrenheit), given enough time, the shale oil and gas will be released from the rock whereby it can be extracted and refined into fuel.
Now you may be thinking this recovery method sounds expensive… but you’d be wrong.
Thanks to the engineer heading the project, Harold Vinegar, Ph.D, the ICP is cheap. By using the formation’s own natural gas to generate heat, Vinegar and his crew have made the process relatively clean and inexpensive. The cost of extracting the crude could be as little as $35 a barrel.
If Israel’s system is successful then the USA is sitting on 2 trillion barrels of shale oil and we sell the technology for a piece of the American action which could be as much as Israels shale potential and without having to export our own production guaranteeing we will always be energy self sufficient.
Other Jews spend one day per year focusing on the German Nazi Holocaust that put to death approximately one-third of the Jewish nation.
This particular Jew spends part of each day thinking about how “Never Again” can be more a hardened fact than a well-meaning slogan. And I think that only can be accomplished by changing the basic calculus of power — military, industrial, political, geographical and demographic — available to the Jewish state which is at least the secular embodiment of the Jewish nation. . That calculus of power alone, and what must be regarded as the certitude that Israel and the Jews have no permanent allies, will determine the fate of the Jewish nation and state. Because without such power, what are we, other than latter-day Leon Feiners of the Bund and Menachem Kirschenbaums of the General Zionists, explaining again and again to sympathetic but otherwise powerless Jan Karskis that we have no voice among the nations?
The temporary existential issue before the Jewish state directly and the Jewish nation indirectly is the threat of an Iranian state whose leadership and their intentions toward Israel in particular. It must be equally clear to the government and people of Israel, and to Jews wherever they live, that the presidential leader of what is supposed to be Israel’s key ally is doing nothing about the Iranian existential threat to Israel, other than to jolly the Jews into becoming the permanent Czechoslovakia of the Middle East; to be carved up by repetitive threats of aggression while Washington stands aside with arms folded.
There is no answer for that but for Israel to do whatever it can to destroy Iran’s military nuclear capabilities before their nuclear materials have been refined for weapons-grade use. We must assume that no help is forthcoming, and that could well be the case under any and all US presidential administrations, not must Obama’s.
But in the longer term, Israel will still be subject to growing threats from the surrounding and nearby Arab states and their large armed gangs. Most of them never will make true peace with Israel, partly because their Islamic religion forbids Muslims to treat non-Muslims on such equal terms, and especially not Jews, whom their culture has taught them to despise as well as hate.
Any sign of weakness on the part of Israel, possibly combined with ravaging mobs which of late have begun tearing down their governments in the name of the theory and practice of purified Islam, will generate pressure on any and all of them to break whatever peace treaties the USA had been bribing them to adopt with Israel, in order to present to American voters at least an illusion of “peace in the Middle East”.
There is only a single line of long-term strategic defense against the Arabs of the Middle East. And that strategic defense is to use the Arab cultural trait of permanent aggression as justifications for warring upon them, conquering strategically significant parts of their lands, using these lands both as lands for the Jewish nation to settle and exploit, and as bases for what may well be needed as a the next defensive border line needed by expanding Jewish state. In the long-term, an Israel of about 10,000 square miles, assuming Shomron and Yehuda both are annexed and settled with Jews, will not even be nearly large enough to stand against a Middle East solidly controlled by Israel’s Arab enemies. But taking both the Sinai peninsula with its 25,000 square miles, Trans-Jordan with its 35,000 square miles, the Lebanon south of the Litani River gorge, and possibly about 25,000-35,000 square miles of the raw desert of in the northwestern corner of Saudi Arabia, would create an Israel of 100,000 square miles or more, with mostly deserts, seacoasts and sea-channels such as Suez surrounding Israel.
What about the Jews who will be part of this far greater Israel? Professor Yoram Ettinger’s well-considered demographic studies indicate rapid doubling of the Jewish population of Israel. Until now, Israel has enjoyed a population doubling every 35 years, more or less. There is no reason to expect this trend will not continue. And as time goes on, Israeli population increases will be dependent less upon Jewish immigration than on a healthy and growing Jewish specialized industrial economy. And not to be ignored is the likelihood that Israel will be a significant producer of fossil-fuel energy. These new and growing generations of the Jews born and raised on the soil of Israel and well as those who shall immigrate there from abroad, will be the new Jewish nation — ready for true peace, but irrespective of that, prepared for wars in which a future Israel will keep whatever it wins in those wars.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
@ Marty:
Thanks
Ted you may wish to edit your text of the speech – I assume the text was meant to read “89 year old Esther Nadiv was one of Mengele’s twins”.
My Bubbie (of blessed memory) used to call me Mendele (my Yiddish name is Mendel)
@ Paul:
BB always gets a B+ for speeches and an F- for implementing the basic stipulations he addresses.
It is more than painful to see that our leadership, while mouthing recognition of how we need to remember, fails to remember.
To negotiate our homeland with modern day Nazis is a failure to remember.
To throw Jews out of any part of the Jewish homeland is a failure to remember.
And to punish a Jewish soldier for standing up to anti-Semites is an unforgivable failure to remember.
There is also an excellent speech at the Prime Minister’s YouTube site:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_DlUlhgxso&feature=my_liked_videos&list=LLoWPSTxk0LVrbP3SbzVeA3Q