PM Netanyahu’s Speech at the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Conference
Publish Date: 27.05.2025
PM Netanyahu’s Speech at the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Conference, Chaired by Israel, at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Jerusalem:
“ In the darkest days of the Roman empire, there was a particularly cruel emperor. And he had a way with captives. He would starve a lion and then he would put a captive in the arena. And you know what happens. And this happened time after time until one day he brought in a Jewish captive from Judea. And the lion had been starved for many days, went into the arena, saw the Jewish captive, started scratching the sand. And then, just as the lion was about to pounce, the Jewish captive rushed to the lion and whispered something in his ear. And the lion slinked away with his tail…Slinked away.
And the audience, the crowd, they went wild. And the emperor, he was very curious. He called the Jewish captive in and he said, “What did you tell him? tell me what you told him?” And the Jewish captive said, “I told him he’d have to give a speech after dinner.”
Now, you’re about to have dinner. And I’m not going to hold you for very long, so I want to speak as briefly as I can because I have to go to other business but I think it’s very important that we address this business.
And I thank you, Gideon Sa’ar, for convening this important meeting and I thank you for coming. And the key issue that I want to address is the consequence of antisemitism, not only for the Jewish people but for human society.
Now, we’ve been facing this disease, it’s a virulent disease that’s going on for several millennia. And of course, we paid a horrible price in the journey of our nation for antisemitism. But so have other countries. That is very clear. Not only in the history of the greatest antisemitic burst of violence which is the Holocaust. Six million Jews died in the Holocaust but 60 million died during the war that it inspired. My father was 23 years old. He was an historian, among many other things, of antisemitism, and when Hitler rose, he said, “That the threat that racial antisemitism poses for the world, is a threat not only for the Jews, but a threat to all of humanity.” Because, if I paraphrase what he said in 1933, he said, “What starts with the Jews will not end with the Jews.” And unless we inoculate, and convince, the rest of free societies of the danger to them of this antisemitic virulence, then it will spread and claim many, many, many millions of lives.
I think the history of the world would have been different if these and other warnings had been heeded in time. Well, we have now a surge of antisemitism as we speak, and those who expected, after the tremendous antisemitic savagery of Hamas on October 7th, the greatest…the most savage attack on the Jews since the Holocaust, that it would cause a decline of antisemitism, well, people who harbored those hopes have been widely disappointed because what we see is the exact opposite. We see demonstrations, protests, in the capitals of the West and other countries that celebrate, celebrate these murderers, these rapists, these baby burners, these hostage takers. Celebrate.
We see not only the burning of Israeli flags, and this is consequential, you see the burning of American flags, British flags, Canadian flags, French flags. That’s not an accident. Because the people who are leading this charge are basically challenging Western civilization or free societies as we understand them. When you celebrate these killers, you’re celebrating the complete breakdown of civilized society as we understand it.
So what Israel is fighting here is not merely a seven-front war, which I’ll have to attend to it in a few minutes, but an eight-front war. It’s the war, ultimately, of civilization against barbarism. Now, how does this war proceed? There are certain patterns of antisemitism that we’ve seen down the ages. It’s always accompanied, and usually, it’s preceded by vilification and dehumanization. So, you’re familiar with these… were leveled at the Jewish people: we poisoned the wells in medieval times, we take Christian children, the blood of Christian children and bake matzahs for Passover with them, we spread vermin.
By the way, these last right into modern times. If you look at Nazi propaganda they say exactly the same thing. So you dehumanize a group of people in human society and you prepare them for the kill, for the butcher. That is always the case. You always demonize before you annihilate or before you seek to annihilate and that’s essentially what happened to us right up to the worst pogrom of them all: the Holocaust. What we saw recently here was an attempt to recreate the Holocaust. Chancellor Scholz of Germany visited me shortly after the October 7th massacres and he visited the sites, many of you may have seen them as well. And he said, “They’re just like the Nazis.” True, with one difference. The Nazis tried to hide their crimes. These people went with GoPro cameras and they publicized it for the whole world to see. They were very proud of what they were doing.
But other than that, he was exactly right. Had they had their way, they would have slaughtered every man, woman and child in this state and every Jew around the world. They openly say that. Their patron Iran openly says that. As you have these talks now with Iran, between Iran and the United States, Ayatollah Khamenei tweets, he’s a great tweeter by the way, he tweets: Israel has to be annihilated. The cancer, the cancer of the Jewish state has to be uprooted. He’s open about it.
This is the scourge that we’re dealing with. And of course, many of them are taken in by these protestors or they’re cowed by them. More than anything is they’re cowed by them, they fear them. They want to control the rampant attacks that are then directed at them for having relations with Israel, for having contacts with them. What you try to do is try to corral your victim when in fact, your countries are the victim. Because what is being done is an attempt to deny Israel, and in fact, to deny all free societies the ability to fight these barbarians.
How do they do that? Well, the first thing they say is you’re slaughtering people deliberately. That’s a complete destruction, a complete annihilation of the laws of war. If I had to say what are the laws of war, if I had to boil it down to one idea, that idea is that you divide the world into two: on one side are combatants, on the other side are non-combatants. And you can go after the combatants but you don’t deliberately cross the line against non-combatants.
Well, the terrorists have figured that out, the radicals have figured that out, so what they do is they hide behind civilians. They use them as human shields. And when you go after the terrorists, because otherwise, you know, you’ll give them immunity and they can do anything. They can fire rockets at our cities, try to kill our civilians and hide behind their civilians. That is what’s called a double war crime. And when you try to target civilians, you invariably hit civilians. That is when you try to hit the terrorists, you invariably hit non-combatants. In 1944, the Royal Air Force, the British air force tried to take out the Gestapo headquarters in Copenhagen, perfectly legitimate target. But the British pilots missed their target and they hit a children’s hospital nearby and I think 70 or 80 children were horribly burned to death. That’s not terrorism. That’s not a war crime. That’s the incidental casualties of civilians that accompany any war.
But what the terrorists do and what the war criminals do is deliberately use civilians as a human shield. That’s basically the tactic of Hamas. That’s what they do. It’s in a very tight arena in Gaza, which is closed. It’s a closed arena. There is nothing like that in the world. You don’t see it in other war theaters. Millions move. They move from the Ukraine war arena, they move from the Syrian civil war arena. They move. In Gaza, it’s locked, not because we locked it, it’s locked. I’m in the foreign ministry right now so I have to be a diplomat.
You explain later, Gideon, why the southern border is locked. We didn’t lock it. People want to leave but they can’t. So it’s the biggest open jail, open-air jail in the world. As far as we’re concerned, we’ll let anybody leave. If you want to leave, leave. But they can’t. And within that locked arena, it’s a very small place, it’s like one of your big towns, big metropolises. Okay? Within that, there are war zones, combat zones. And Hamas is trying to lock the Palestinian civilian population within the place where we conduct the war. That’s what they do. How do they lock them in? They shoot them if they want to leave. That’s how the war began. They just shot them.
We eventually were able to create safe zones to get the population out. By the time we got to Rafah, 1.4 million of Gaza’s 2.2 million people were in Rafah. And we were told by the entire international community, including our good friends in the United States, don’t go into Rafah. And I said, well, we have to go into Rafah. It’s like the allies finishing 80 percent of the German army and they’re told, don’t go into the last part, don’t go into Berlin and don’t finish the last 20 percent. We have to do that. Otherwise, Hamas will be there and they’ll murder again, and kidnap again, and rape again and behead again. And they say so. That’s what they intend to do. They said, don’t go in there because if you go in there will be thousands…somebody said 20,000 civilian casualties. They had nowhere to go. I said, of course they have a place to go. That place is on the beach. It’s two kilometers away. On the beach. And we went in. And they all went to the beach within six days. And the number of civilian casualties we had in Rafah was practically zero. Practically zero. Because they all left.
So the first lie that is put against us is that we are deliberately killing civilians. We are texting civilians by the millions. Millions of text messages, millions of phone calls, cellphone calls, millions of pamphlets, “Please get out.” Because we are going to come in. And that’s why the ratio of non-combatants to combatants killed in the most dense urban warfare arena in modern history is the lowest in the Gaza war. Not only do I say that but John Spencer, who is the foremost expert on this at West Point in urban warfare, says there has never been anything like this. Anything like this.
The Israeli army, that is so malign, has gone out of its way in ways that no other ways that no other army…and Israel has gone in a way of no other country, more than any other country and more than any other military, to prevent civilian casualties. And Hamas has gone out of its way to create civilian casualties because they want to harness and promote the antisemitic sentiments that you see in the West.
That’s the first lie. Here’s the second one. The second one is we have a policy of starvation. Did you hear that? You didn’t? That’s the current fad, the current lie. Well, that’s false too. From day one, or the early days of the war, we decided on a policy: we’re going after Hamas, we’re not going after the civilian population. Both in allowing it to leave the theaters of combat but also with supplying them with essential requirements: food, water, medicine. That’s what international law and common sense requires. So we did. So we supplied them with 1.8 million tons, 1.8 million tons of food and aid. That’s an enormous amount. And that’s why people didn’t…you didn’t have mass starvation at all. In fact, I’ll give you one simple indication of that.
We take thousands of prisoners, sort them out into civilians and combatants and we photograph them. You can see those photographs, those videos. What’s the first thing you do when you take a prisoner in Gaza? The first thing you do is you tell them, “Take your shirt off. We want to see that there is no suicide vest.” Thousands and thousands of prisoners taking their shirt off and you don’t see one, not one emaciated from the beginning of the war to the present. In fact, you see quite the opposite because you don’t get that much exercise, certainly not in tunnels but you get food. And we are accused of starvation.
So what happened? As we were supplying these aid trucks, Hamas looted them. They took a good chunk for themselves and the remainder they sold to the civilian population at exorbitant prices. And thereby, they funded their own recruits, new recruits because we were able to kill a lot of terrorists. They have to replenish their war machine, their terrorist machine, their terrorist army. So they used the aid to continue the war. And we said, that has to stop. And in the last ceasefire, which we got the hostages which I’ll talk about in a minute, we had…we made a decision: let us put the aid in such a way that we separate the aid from Hamas.
We give it to the civilians and not to the terrorists. And we worked out a plan with our American friends to have controlled distribution sites where an American company would distribute the food to Palestinian families. It’s not a truck with flour bags, it’s a package for food for a family for a week. You come and you get it. It’s very hard for Hamas to steal it, especially because we guard these positions. Well, we tried the first one, we’re going to put many today. There was some loss of control momentarily happening. We brought it back under control. We’re going to put many more of these. And the idea is basically to take away the humanitarian looting as a tool of war of Hamas to give it to the population. Eventually to have a sterile zone in the south of Gaza where the entire population can move for its own protection.
And then we basically, how shall I say this? We leave the fish without the water. We leave the Hamas terrorists without the tool for governance which they use, and that’s basically, that’s basically…sorry, the humanitarian aid that they loot.
This is another lie. It just spreads like wildfire. Just spreads like wildfire because in this media age, you can put out a lie and it spreads throughout the globe and you have a hard time putting it out. The best way that we can win the information war, and win the war against antisemitism, is winning the war quickly. You win the war quickly. That’s what we’re trying to do. Win the war quickly, free our hostages, destroy Hamas. The two go hand-in-hand. Because you don’t get the release of hostages unless you apply military pressure. And then, of course, make sure that Gaza doesn’t pose a threat to Israel in the future. This is ongoing.
So far we have liberated 197 hostages, of them 147 are alive out of a total of 255. There are still 20 live hostages there. That we know for certain. Twenty live hostages. And the family of one is here with us today. This is Idit and Kobi Ohel, they are the parents of Alon Ohel. He’s a gifted musician. I think they brought a piano here today in his honor. That’s a moral conjunction for us to get him out, to get him and his friends out. And we also have here Tal Shoham, who I met after we secured his release in the last release. And he showed exceptional, exceptional behavior in impossible circumstances. True human courage. And we also secured the release of his wife, Adi, and his son and his daughter. We got them out and we intend to get them all out.
So these are war aims. And the way we do it is a combination of military action and the deprivation of humanitarian looting from Hamas. You don’t know this, if you’re watching the international media, if you listen to the protestors, you don’t know this. The protestors themselves, many of them don’t even know what they’re chanting. When they’re chanting, “Free Palestine,” they’re saying really, “Destroy Israel. Destroy the Jews.” It’s the modern equivalent of heil Hitler. That’s what it says. When they say, “From the river to the sea,” the river is a few kilometers here and the river is a few kilometers there. It means the end of Israel. That’s what they’re chanting. So they bought the demonization, they bought the vilification. The one democracy that is fighting a just war with just means.
And here’s what happens when this spreads and it goes to the ICC. The ICC, the court that was established really after the Holocaust in order to prevent another Holocaust, and the ICC declares that I and the former defense minister, effectively the State of Israel, they’ll issue more decrees, we’re the war criminals. What does it say to democracies? What does it say to free societies? It imperils the right to self-defense. It means that this tactic of implanting yourself in a civilian population while sending rockets and murderers to murder civilians as you hide behind your own civilians, you’re given effective immunity. And once this idea is implanted, it will spread and spread and spread. It will spread to your own societies. So for the future of civilization, we can’t have that.
I think Pope John Paul once said that the greatest threat of terrorism is that it murders man’s sense of sin. It just says everything is allowed. Everything is allowed and you can victimize and demonize anyone. You can say it’s just. You can do this. No, you can’t. You can’t deliberately target civilians. You can’t deliberately murder men, women and children. You can’t come and execute in cold blood in Washington the other day, this beautiful young couple, beautiful couple, I met them when I visited Washington.
And they were killed only because they were Jews, that’s okay, because Israel is doing the same. No we’re not. We’re not doing the same. We take pains to not do the same. We go out of our way to create safe zones, to give humanitarian aid, to clear out areas from…to make sure that civilians leave. That’s what we try to do. And the ones who are trying to impede it is Hamas and their patron Iran who calls out for the annihilation of Israel, as do the Houthis, as do the other proxies.
But when they say that they’re going to murder us, we’re just a frontline. We’re just the front position. By the way, they say it. They say, “Death to Israel, death to America.” But they also intend to deal with everything in between. They’re quite open about it.
And so this is a battle not merely for the physical survival of the Jewish state, and we will not be destroyed, that I assure you. We have the power and the means to protect ourselves and we do so. But it’s also a battle for the protection of all free societies. Don’t succumb to the vilification, don’t succumb to the demonization, don’t succumb to the lies, don’t succumb to this complete aversion of morality. Because you once you do, there’s no end to it, but once you do, your societies are in great, great danger.
I urge you to fight antisemitism not only because it’s right, I urge you to fight antisemitism because it will save you.
That’s all I have to say and unfortunately, I have to go back to other things. But I really want to thank you for coming here, giving of your time from various countries and from various Jewish communities. And the last thing I want to do is to address the leaders of Jewish communities who came to us from around the world. The most important thing you have to do in fighting antisemitism is to stand up and not be cowered. People value and respect people who stand up for their own rights. Do not be afraid to speak up. Speak up, stand up for the truth, stand up for the Jewish people, stand up for civilization. And I ask that all of you do the same. Thank you”.
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