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Source: https://jcpa.org/article/holocaust-memorial-day-2021/
The First Lesson of the Holocaust: The Jewish People Will Never Allow Anyone to Do This to Us Again
(Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs) Amb. Dore Gold - Five years ago when I served as Director-General of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Israel, I stood in the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp in Germany on Yom Hashoah. Jews from all over the Nazi Empire in Europe and North Africa were forced into Bergen-Belsen, where thousands died. What has the modern state of Israel learned from the horrors of Bergen-Belsen, and the Holocaust? Chaim Herzog served as an officer in the British forces that entered Bergen-Belsen in 1945. In April 1987 he went back, as Israel's sixth president, and declared that the victims bequeathed a responsibility to later generations to ensure that the Jewish people would never again be helpless. That meant, first, that we will never allow anyone to do this to us again. In modern times, there is a real physical threat to the Jewish people that emanates from a regime in the Middle East that parades missiles in its capital nearly every year and fastens to its launchers the words, "Israel must be wiped off the map." You cannot wipe a country off the map without posing an existential threat to the people who live there. Israel will deter and defend against any state or political movement which poses a threat to the Jewish people. This is not an obsession, but a sacred trust handed to us by the people buried under the rubble of the Second World War. Amb. Dore Gold, President of the Jerusalem Center, addressed a Holocaust Memorial Day commemoration in Bahrain (via Zoom) on April 7, 2021.