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Israeli President Herzog: "Casting Doubt on the Nation-State of the Jewish People's Right to Exist Is Not Legitimate"
(Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs) Israeli President Isaac Herzog addressed the European Parliament on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 26, 2023: "I stand before you today as the President of the State of Israel, the democratic nation-state of the Jewish People, but my heart and thoughts are with my brothers and sisters killed in the Holocaust, whose only crime was their Jewishness." The story of the Holocaust is "the story of the monstrous, deranged obsession to totally exterminate a nation with roots stretching deep into history....Existence was a crime punishable by death." "The Holocaust was not born in a vacuum. We must never forget that the Nazi death machine would not have succeeded in realizing its nightmarish vision had it not met soil fertilized with Jew-hatred....Nazi ideology intensified traditional antisemitism and...fanned the flames of hatred....Even before a single extermination camp was built, in the minds of the masses, the Jew was already human dust, sub-human." "I wish to underscore the fine line between criticism of the State of Israel and negation of the State of Israel's existence. It is, of course, OK to criticize the state that I head....Israeli democracy certainly excels in fierce and penetrating internal criticism." "However...criticism of the State of Israel must not cross the line into negation of the very existence of the State of Israel....Casting doubt on the nation-state of the Jewish People's right to exist is not legitimate diplomacy! It is antisemitism in the full sense of the word, and it must be thoroughly uprooted."