Netanyahu: ICJ’s handling of false genocide claims against Israel shows Holocaust lessons not learned

Speaking at a televised press conference, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu eulogizes the many soldiers who fell in Gaza this week and says Israel must achieve all the goals of the war in their memory — destroying Hamas, bringing all the hostages home, and ensuring that Gaza does not again constitute a threat to Israel.

Noting that today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, he says Israel will never forget the October 7 massacres and atrocities and abductions, and “we will never forgive what the Hamas monsters did to our sons and daughters.”

There is “no alternative to complete victory,” he says.

He says it was outrageous that South Africa went to The Hague and falsely accused Israel of genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza, and that it is Hamas that seeks genocide against Israel and the Jewish people. South Africa, he says, went to The Hague “on behalf of Hamas.”

He holds up a volume of Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” in Arabic, found in Hamas-run Gaza, and says this is how “the new Nazis” educate their children.

He denounces The Hague for failing to summarily reject the genocide allegations against Israel.

“The readiness of the court” to even hear the “ridiculous” case, he says, “proves that many in the world have not learned a thing from the Holocaust.”

“But we have learned,” he says, and “the main lesson of the Holocaust is that only we will defend ourselves by ourselves. Nobody will do it for us.”

Israel needs to be strong and determined, and fight back, he says.

“The Jewish state rose from the ashes of the Holocaust to ensure defensive power for the Jewish people,” he says, stressing Israel’s basic right to defend itself. “Nobody will take [that right] from us,” he adds, saying there is no war more just than this one and no army more moral than the IDF.

The war was imposed on Israel by a despicable enemy that openly declares that it wants to destroy all Jews, he says. On October 7, “If they could have, they would have slaughtered us all.”

If Israel does not destroy Hamas, “the next slaughter is only a matter of time.”

Israel will continue the war for as long as it takes to destroy Hamas, he vows.

He also says he has told the defense and finance minister to draw up a “huge plan” to strengthen our security industries for the decades ahead, and promises substantial financial investment in Israel’s defense industries “to ensure our security independence and freedom of action.”

“There are those among us who doubt our determination and capacity” to destroy Hamas, Netanyahu says, citing various “ex” senior officials “sowing doubt and pessimism.”

“They are a small minority,” he says, and “they are wrong. We will achieve complete victory.”