Israel, 2009

Nearly 62 years ago, the

United Nations recognized the right of the Jews, an

ancient people 3,500 years old, to a State of their own

in their ancestral homeland. I stand here today as the

Prime Minister of Israel, the Jewish State, and I speak

to the Assembly on behalf of my country and my

people.

The United Nations was founded after the

carnage of the Second World War and the horrors of

the Holocaust. It was charged with preventing the

reoccurrence of such horrendous events. Nothing has

undermined that mission, nothing has impeded it more,

than the systematic assault on the truth. Yesterday, the

President of Iran stood at this very rostrum spewing his

latest anti-Semitic rants. Just a few days earlier, he

again claimed that the Holocaust was a lie.

Last month, I went to a villa in a suburb of Berlin

called Wannsee. There, on 20 January 1942, after a

hearty meal, senior Nazi officials met and decided to

exterminate my people. They left detailed minutes of

that meeting that have been preserved for posterity by

successive German Governments. I have here a copy of

the minutes of the meeting of senior Nazi officials

instructing the Nazi Government exactly how to carry

out the extermination of the Jewish people. Is that

protocol a lie? Are the German Government and all

German Governments lying?

The day before I was in Wannsee, in Berlin I was

given the original construction plans for the

Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. I now hold in

my hand the Auschwitz-Birkenau plans. They contain

the signature of Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s deputy,

himself. Are those plans for the Auschwitz-Birkenau

concentration camp, where 1 million Jews were

murdered, a lie too? In June, President Obama visited

another concentration camp, one of many — the

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Buchenwald concentration camp. Did President Obama

pay tribute to a lie?

And what of the Auschwitz survivors, whose

arms still bear the tattooed numbers branded on them

by the Nazis? Are those tattoos a lie, too? One third of

all Jews perished in the great conflagration of the

Holocaust. Nearly every Jewish family, including my

own, was affected. My wife’s grandparents, her

father’s two sisters and three brothers, and all the

aunts, uncles and cousins were murdered by the Nazis.

Is that a lie?

Yesterday, the man who calls the Holocaust a lie

spoke from this rostrum. I commend those who refused

to come and those who left in protest. They stood up

for moral clarity and brought honour to their countries.

But to those who gave that denier of the Holocaust a

hearing, I say on behalf of my people, the Jewish

people, and of decent people everywhere: Have they no

shame? Have they no decency? A mere six decades

after the Holocaust, they give legitimacy to a man who

denies the murder of 6 million Jews, while promising

to wipe out the State of Israel, the State of the Jews.

That is a disgrace. It is a mockery of the Charter

of the United Nations. Perhaps some representatives

think that that man and his odious regime threaten only

the Jews. If they believe that, they are wrong — dead

wrong. History has shown us time and again that what

starts with attacks on the Jews eventually ends up

engulfing many, many others.

For this Iranian regime is fuelled by an extreme

fundamentalism that burst onto the world scene three

decades ago after lying dormant for centuries. In the

past 30 years, that fanaticism has swept across the

globe with a murderous violence that knows no bounds

and with a cold-blooded impartiality in the choice of

its victims. It has callously slaughtered Muslims,

Christians, Jews, Hindus and many others. The

adherents of that unforgiving creed, although it is

comprised of different offshoots, seek to return

humanity to medieval times. Wherever they can, they

impose a backward, regimented society where women,

minorities, gays or anyone else deemed not to be a true

believer is brutally subjugated.

The struggle against that fanaticism does not pit

faith against faith, or civilization against civilization. It

pits civilization against barbarism, the twenty-first

century against the ninth, and those who sanctify life

against those who glorify death. The primitivism of the

ninth century ought to be no match for the progress of

the twenty-first. The allure of freedom, the power of

technology and the reach of communications should

surely win the day. Ultimately, the past cannot triumph

over the future, and our future offers all nations

magnificent bounties of hope because the pace of

progress is growing, and growing exponentially.

It took us centuries to get from the printing press

to the telephone, decades to get from the telephone to

the personal computer, and only a few years to get

from the personal computer to the Internet. What

seemed impossible a few years ago is already outdated,

and we can scarcely fathom the changes that are yet to

come. We will crack the genetic code. We will cure the

incurable. We will lengthen our lives. We will find a

cheap alternative to fossil fuel, and we will clean up

the planet.

I am proud that my country, Israel, is at the

forefront of many of those advances in science and

technology, medicine and biology, agriculture and

water, and energy and the environment. Those

innovations in my country and in many others offer

humanity a sunlit future of unimagined promise.

However, if the most primitive fanaticism can

acquire the most deadly weapons, the march of history

could be reversed for a time and, like the belated

victory over the Nazis, the forces of progress and

freedom prevail only after a horrific toll of blood and

fortune has been exacted from mankind. That is why

the greatest threat facing the world today is the

marriage between religious fundamentalism and the

weapons of mass destruction.

The most urgent challenge facing this body today

is to prevent the tyrants of Tehran from acquiring

nuclear weapons. Are the Members of the United

Nations up to that challenge? Will the international

community confront a despotism that terrorizes its own

people as they bravely stand up for freedom? Will it

take action against the dictators who stole an election

in broad daylight and then gunned down Iranian

protesters, who died on the sidewalks and in the streets

choking in their own blood? Will the international

community thwart the world’s most pernicious sponsor

and practitioner of terrorism? Above all, will the

international community stop the terrorist regime of

Iran from developing atomic weapons and thereby

endangering the peace of the entire world?

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The people of Iran are courageously standing up

to this regime. People of goodwill around the world

stand with them, as do the thousands who have been

protesting outside this Hall throughout the week. Will

the United Nations stand with them?

The jury is still out on the United Nations. Recent

signs are not encouraging. Rather than condemning the

terrorists and their Iranian patrons, some here in the

United Nations have condemned their victims. This is

exactly what a recent United Nations report on Gaza

did, falsely equating the terrorists with those they

targeted.

For eight long years, Hamas fired rockets from

Gaza on nearby Israeli cities and citizens — thousands

of missiles and mortars hailing down from the sky on

schools, homes, shopping centres and bus stops. Year

after year, as these missiles were deliberately fired on

our civilians, not one single United Nations resolution

was passed condemning those criminal attacks. We

heard nothing — absolutely nothing — from the

Human Rights Council of the United Nations, a

misnamed institution if ever there was one.

In 2005, hoping to advance peace, Israel

unilaterally withdrew from every inch of Gaza. It was

very painful. We dismantled 21 settlements, really

bedroom communities and farms. We uprooted over

8,000 Israelis; we just yanked them out of their homes.

We did this because many in Israel believed that it

would win peace. Well, we did not get peace. Instead

we got an Iranian-backed terror base 50 miles from

Tel Aviv. But life in the Israeli towns and cities

immediately adjacent to Gaza became nothing less than

a nightmare. The Hamas rocket attacks not only

continued after we left, they actually increased

dramatically. They increased tenfold. And again, the

United Nations was silent — absolutely silent.

Well, after eight years of this unremitting assault,

Israel was finally forced to respond. But how should

we have responded? There is only one example in

history of thousands of rockets being fired on a

country’s civilian population. This happened when the

Nazis rocketed British cities during the Second World

War. During that war, the Allies levelled German cities,

causing hundreds of thousands of casualties. I am not

passing judgement; I am stating a fact, a fact that is the

product of the decisions of great and honourable

men — the leaders of Britain and the United States —

fighting an evil force in the Second World War.

It is also a fact that Israel chose to respond

differently. Faced with an enemy committing a double

war crime — firing on civilians while hiding behind

civilians — Israel sought to conduct surgical strikes

against the rocket-launchers themselves. That was no

easy task because the terrorists were firing their

missiles from homes and schools, using mosques as

weapons depots and missile caches, and ferreting

explosives in ambulances.

Israel, by contrast, tried to minimize casualties by

urging Palestinian civilians to vacate the targeted

areas. We dropped countless flyers over their homes.

We sent thousands and thousands of text messages to

the Palestinian residents. We made thousands and

thousands of cellular phone calls urging them to

vacate, to leave. Never has a country gone to such

extraordinary lengths to remove the enemy’s civilian

population from harm’s way.

Yet faced with an absolutely clear-cut case of

aggressor and victim, who do you think the United

Nations Human Rights Council decided to condemn?

Israel. A democracy legitimately defending itself

against terror is morally hanged, drawn and quartered,

and given an unfair trial to boot. By these twisted

standards, the Human Rights Council would have

dragged Roosevelt and Churchill to the dock as war

criminals. What a perversion of truth! What a

perversion of justice!

The delegates to the United Nations and the

Governments that they represent have a decision to

make. Will they accept this farce? Because if they do,

the United Nations would revert to its darkest days,

when the worst violators of human rights sat in

judgement against the law-abiding democracies, when

Zionism was equated with racism and when an

automatic majority could be mustered to declare that

the Earth is flat. If you had to choose a date when the

United Nations began its descent, almost a freefall, and

lost the respect of many thoughtful people in the

international community, it was the day in 1975 it

decided to equate Zionism with racism.

Now this body has a choice to make. If it does

not reject this biased report, it would vitiate itself, it

would recommence the process of vitiating its own

relevance and importance. But it would also do

something else. It would send the message to terrorists

everywhere that terrorism pays: all you have to do is

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launch your attacks from densely populated areas, and

you will win immunity.

A third point: in condemning Israel, this body

would also deal a mortal blow to peace. Let me explain

why. When Israel left Gaza, many hoped that the

missile attacks would stop. Others believed that, even

if they did not stop, at the very least Israel, in having

made this extraordinary gesture for peace, would have

international legitimacy to exercise its right of self-

defence if peace failed. What legitimacy? What self-

defence?

The same United Nations that cheered Israel as it

left Gaza and promised to back our right of self-

defence now accuses us — my people, my country —

of being war criminals? And for what? For acting

responsibly in self-defence? For acting in a way that

any country would act, with a restraint unmatched by

many? What a travesty!

Israel justly defended itself against terror. This

biased and unjust report provides a clear-cut test for all

Governments. Will the Assembly stand with Israel or

will it stand with the terrorists? We must know the

answer to that question now. Now, not later. Because if

Israel is again asked to take more risks for peace, we

must know today that the Assembly will stand with us

tomorrow. Only if we have the confidence that we can

defend ourselves can we take further risks for peace.

Make no mistake: all of Israel wants peace. Any

time an Arab leader genuinely wanted peace with us,

we made peace. We made peace with Egypt led by

Anwar Sadat. We made peace with Jordan led by King

Hussein. And if the Palestinians truly want peace, my

Government and I, and my people, will make peace.

But we want a genuine peace, a defensible peace, a

permanent peace.

In 1947, this body voted to establish two States

for two peoples — a Jewish State and an Arab State.

The Jews accepted that resolution. The Arabs rejected

it and invaded the embryonic Jewish State with the

hopes of annihilating it.

We ask the Palestinians to finally do what they

have refused to do for 62 years: say yes to a Jewish

State. It is as simple, as clear and as elementary as that.

Just as we are asked to recognize a nation-State of the

Palestinian people, the Palestinians must be asked to

recognize the nation-State of the Jewish people. The

Jewish people are not foreign conquerors in the Land

of Israel. It is the land of our forefathers.

Inscribed on the walls outside this building is the

great Biblical vision of peace: “Nation shall not lift up

sword against nation. They shall learn war no more.”

These words were spoken by the great Jewish prophet

Isaiah 2,800 years ago as he walked in my country, in

my city, in the hills of Judea and in the streets of

Jerusalem.

We are not strangers to this land. This is our

homeland. But as deeply connected as we are to our

homeland, we also recognize that the Palestinians also

live there and they want a home of their own. We want

to live side by side with them — two free peoples

living in peace, living in prosperity, living in dignity.

Peace, prosperity and dignity require one other

element: we must have security. The Palestinians

should have all the powers to govern themselves except

a handful of powers that could endanger Israel. That is

why the Palestinian State must be effectively

demilitarized. I say “effectively” because we do not

want another Gaza, another south Lebanon, another

Iranian-backed terror base abutting Jerusalem and

perched on the hills a few kilometres from Tel Aviv.

We want peace. I believe that with goodwill and

with hard work such a peace can be achieved. But it

requires that all of us roll back the forces of terror led

by Iran that seek to destroy peace, that seek to

eliminate Israel and to overthrow the world order. The

question facing the international community is whether

it is prepared to confront those forces, or will it

accommodate them.

Over 70 years ago, Winston Churchill lamented

what he called the “confirmed unteachability of

mankind”. By that he meant the unfortunate habit of

civilized societies to sleep and to slumber until danger

nearly overtakes them. Churchill bemoaned what he

called the

“want of foresight, unwillingness to act when

action would be simple and effective, lack of

clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the

emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes

its jarring gong …”.

I speak here today in the hope that Churchill’s

assessment of the “unteachability of mankind” is for

once proven wrong. I speak here today in the hope that

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we can learn from history, that we can prevent danger

in time.

In the spirit of the timeless words spoken to

Joshua over 3,000 years ago, let us be strong and of

good courage. Let us confront this peril, secure our

future and, God willing, forge an enduring peace for

generations to come.

(spoke in Hebrew)

May God bless his people with peace; may God

give strength to his people; may God bless his people

with peace.