From the Liveblog of
Friday, November 3, 2023
Erdan set to screen Hamas atrocity footage in LA; defends wearing yellow star at UN
Israel’s Ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan, defends his decision to don a yellow Star of David, bearing the words “Never Again,” when addressing the UN Security Council on Monday.
The move was criticized by the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial museum as dishonoring “both the victims of the Holocaust and the State of Israel.”
“I am aware of the criticism and I respect it,” he says in an interview on Channel 12.
“But I ask people in Israel to understand where I am and what I am dealing with. I am facing the Security Council to build and preserve legitimacy for what the IDF is doing today in the Strip. These are people who have not even condemned Hamas for the terrible slaughter [of 1,400 people in Israel on October 7]. The international front has to be shaken up. They have to be shown that the ideology of Hamas is identical to that of Islamic State and the Nazis. I too am from a family of Holocaust survivors,” he says.
Erdan says he just screened, to ambassadors and other diplomats at the UN, the Israeli government’s compilation of footage from Hamas terrorists’ bodycams and other cameras of the atrocities the terrorists perpetrated.
He says Israel is making a concerted effort to screen the footage to influencers in the US. “The campaign [against Hamas] is being waged mainly in Gaza. But the pictures that Hamas sends out from there to the world, and the lies it disseminates, are starting to turn [public opinion against the war], with calls for ceasefires and pauses… things that would harm our capacity to destroy Hamas.”
Hence, the diplomatic imperative to show “that we are dealing with people… whose only goal is to destroy Israel, with nothing to do with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
Next week, he says, he is set to screen the footage for 150 influencers in Los Angeles, hopefully in Hollywood. “We have to work bottom-up in the US — so that the decision-makers in Congress and the White House are influenced by public opinion, by the understanding that this is not an organization that wants dialogue… and that the operation won’t stop until [Hamas] is never again capable of carrying out such atrocities.”
