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Source: http://www.pmo.gov.il/English/MediaCenter/Events/Pages/event_synagogue260818.aspx
Netanyahu in Lithuania: Israel Has Saved Many European Lives
(Prime Minister's Office) Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said during a visit to the Choral Synagogue in Vilnius, Lithuania, on Sunday: "I want to thank you [Lithuanian Foreign Minister] Linas [Linkevicius] for standing up for Israel and the truth in European forums, for telling your colleagues the service that Israel performs in saving so many European lives by our resourceful and brave intelligence people. We have saved so many European lives in so many countries. Israel in many ways is the defender of Europe and it's time that Europe understood this." "Yesterday my wife Sara and I walked through the streets of the Jewish ghetto of Vilna....We saw the ruins of some of the 100 Jewish synagogues. We saw the barricade where Yechiel Scheinbaum and his brave colleagues fought to the deaths the Nazi oppressors. We saw Jewish resistance in the heart of the ghetto." "And we saw the courtyards where Jews were assembled before being crated off to Ponar where they were shot by Lithuanian collaborators and the Nazis and then thrown into the death pits. We saw all this. I saw their pictures on the walls of the ghetto. I heard their stories. I wanted to tell them: We are here. We are back. We are alive. Am Yisrael Chai." "For the Jewish people, what has changed in these 75 years? Not the attempts to destroy us. They're still [trying] to destroy us. Iran says so openly. Hamas says so openly and others. What has changed is our ability to defend ourselves by ourselves. We are no longer defenseless. We are no longer helpless. We are a power that controls our own destiny with the State of Israel and the army of Israel." "This is what the Jewish state means - the ability of Jews to defend themselves. With this newfound capacity of self-defense, we've built an extraordinary state in such a short time....We have an example - much maligned in the world but nevertheless shining as a beacon - of what a free people can do once they are given the opportunity to control their destiny."