When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke at the Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony, saying, "If Israel is forced to stand alone, we will stand alone, and will continue to smite our enemies until we achieve victory," he was throwing sand in Israelis' eyes. When he "pledged" to the public that "no pressure and no resolutions from any international forum will prevent us from defending ourselves from those who want to destroy us," he was leading the public astray.
Because the truth is that Israel has no ability to defend itself without support from the world, first and foremost the United States. And it certainly couldn't do so without becoming a twin of North Korea.
This should have been clear to everyone after the night of the Iranian drone and missile attack. Israel managed to block that attack thanks to cooperation with America, Britain, France, Jordan and, apparently, Saudi Arabia as well. Moreover, the cost of that aerial defense operation is estimated at 2 billion to 5 billion shekels ($540 million to $1.3 billion) – for a single night. This proves that the idea that Israel is capable of "standing alone" and "smiting our enemies until we achieve victory" is a hallucination.
What drives a leader to instill such a dangerous delusion in his people? And here's a no less important question: What enables such large swaths of the public to believe it, even after we have learned that it's only because we didn't stand alone that we succeeded in blocking that attack?
Any decent leader would have used this opportunity to thank the countries that stood beside Israel against the Iranian attack. Any leader with self-respect and national honor would have publicly expressed his gratitude precisely on Holocaust Remembrance Day, precisely at Yad Vashem, to which every visiting world leader is dragged to have it drummed into him that Iran is Nazi Germany.
For 20 years, perhaps 30 – I've lost count – he has been making this comparison. For years he has preached from every possible platform that the year is 1938 and the place is Munich, while mocking and scorning the Neville Chamberlains of the world.
And yet, on the day the Nazis attacked the Czechoslovakia of the Middle East, they were all there. Is an event of the magnitude of blocking a Nazi attack on Israel not worthy of mention at a Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony?
Don't make him laugh. Iran, which always starred in his Holocaust speeches, has lost its luster and been downgraded to the level of a "fanatical regime" with "terror proxies." A weakling.
Now the Gazan town of Rafah is Berlin. And here's the proof: "In a nursery in Gaza, which was used as a terror base of operation by Hamas, our soldiers found a copy of Hitler's slanderous book, 'Mein Kampf,' translated into Arabic. In another house, they found a girl's tablet with a picture of Adolf Hitler as the wallpaper."
What can I say, Netanyahu? I have a Hebrew-language copy of "Mein Kampf" at home. Does this prove Israel is a Nazi state?
A leader who was interested in strengthening his people and freeing it of its collective trauma, or at least easing its symptoms, on that day would have highlighted the moving cooperation we saw that night to try to calm them down and dispel a little of the anxiety that has intensified since October 7. He would have tried to show Israelis that the world didn't stand idly by, and that even if everything seems frightening and black and sad and endlessly recurring, we aren't alone. Yet.
A true leader would have explained to his people that the only way for Israel to extricate itself from the hole into which it has fallen is by cultivating its existing alliances and expanding them. He would have addressed his people in their pain, their humiliation, their mourning and their anger and explained to them that we need the world, that a people that dwelleth alone won't dwell anywhere, certainly not in the Middle East.
And he would have led them, step by step, to the unavoidable conclusion that Israel must put the goal of solving its conflict with its neighbors back at the top of its agenda. Otherwise, we won't survive.