From the Liveblog of
Sunday, May 5, 2024
Lapid on Yom HaShoah: If Israel sinks into hate and fear, then our enemies have won
Sam Sokol is the Times of Israel's political correspondent. He was previously a reporter for the Jerusalem Post, Jewish Telegraphic Agency and Haaretz. He is the author of "Putin’s Hybrid War and the Jews"
Just as the Jewish people emerged from the Holocaust to establish the State of Israel, Israelis should come out of October 7 “with a firm decision to establish a new, stronger, better society here,” Yair Lapid declares.
Addressing a Holocaust Day ceremony at Kibbutz Yad Mordechai in southern Israel, the opposition leader recalls thinking about his father, Tommy Lapid, as he hid in the basement of his home while “rockets were exploding outside” during the Hamas attack.
“I thought of my father in another basement, the basement of the ghetto, a 14-year-old Jewish boy who knew there was no one to cry out to. There is no army that will come to save him. But it was precisely there, precisely in the ghetto, that hope did not die — it was born.
On this Holocaust Remembrance Day, in this place, I came to remind you not of the despair and horror, but of what happened only three years after the Holocaust,” Lapid says — recalling how only three years later, his father landed in Israel and enlisted in a Jewish army.
“Where will we be in three years? Wherever we choose. If the State of Israel sinks into hatred and fear, then our enemies have won,” he says, insisting that “the Holocaust didn’t just teach us that the Jews needed to have a state and an army.”
“The Holocaust also taught us that this country should be good. You don’t fight hate with hate. We will not be like them. We will not give them the pleasure,” Lapid continues.
“The Jewish people came out of the Holocaust and chose to establish the State of Israel. The Jewish people should come out of the seventh of October with a firm decision to establish a new, stronger, better society here, which will be worthy of the memory of our parents and even more than that — which will be worthy of the lives of our children.”
