Israel expected to push Iran concerns during Holocaust forum

Israel is preparing to lobby key world leaders at this week’s 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on what it considers one of the gravest modern threats to the Jewish people: Iran.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will be meeting Russian President Vladimir Putin, Emmanuel Macron of France and top US officials before Thursday’s World Holocaust Forum event at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial center in Jerusalem, where dozens of dignitaries are expected.

Speaking earlier this week, Netanyahu drew a direct link between the Nazi effort to exterminate Europe’s Jews and what he described as the existential threat Israel faces from Iran. “A third of the Jewish people went up in flames (in Nazi death camps). There was nothing we could do,” he said in a YouTube video. “After the Holocaust, the state of Israel was established, and the attempts to destroy the Jewish people have not disappeared… Iran openly declares every day that it wants to wipe Israel off the face of the earth,” he added.

“I think the lesson of Auschwitz is, one, stop bad things when they’re small, and Iran is a very bad thing, it’s not that small, but it could get a lot bigger with nuclear weapons.”

Netanyahu is unlikely to convince European powers, let alone Russia, of joining the US-led “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran during the Jerusalem gathering.

But he might make marginal headway by urging Putin, the main geopolitical backer of the Assad regime in Damascus, to curb Iranian influence in Syria, and lobbying Macron to push back against Iran in Lebanon, where former colonial ruler France remains an influential player.

— AFP