Israeli Finance Minister Yair Lapid said Wednesday at Platform 17, the Holocaust memorial site in Berlin:
- What would I do if I was a German in Berlin on October 18, 1941, when the first train left this platform, heading east and on it 1,013 Jews - children, women, the elderly - all destined for death.
- The Holocaust taught us that we must be able to defend ourselves at any price. The security of the State of Israel and its citizens must forever be in our hands alone. We must not, and we cannot, rely on anyone but ourselves. The need to survive teaches us to strike hard to defend ourselves.
- In the past weeks, thousands of rockets were fired at our citizens, and armed terrorists dug tunnels next to kindergartens with the aim of killing or kidnapping our children. Hamas wants to kill Jews. Young or old, men or women, soldiers or civilians, they see no difference. We are Jews and that is reason enough to murder us.
- Here in Europe, people sit in their comfortable homes, watching the evening news, and tell us that we are failing the test of morality because in Gaza people suffer more. When we explain to them that Hamas uses the children of Gaza as human shields, that Hamas sacrifices the lives of the young to win its propaganda war, people refuse to believe it. Why? Because good people always refuse to recognize the totality of evil until it's too late.
- The leaders of Hamas, an anti-Western, anti-Semitic terrorist organization, cannot be safe while they continue to target innocent civilians. Just as every European leader would do, just as the U.S. did with Osama Bin Laden, so we will pursue every leader of Hamas.
- This is the evil which we all face and Israel stands at the front. Europe must know, if we will fail to stop them, they will come for you. We must do everything to avoid suffering and the death of innocents, but we stand in the right place from which to say to the entire world: We will not board the train again. We will protect ourselves from total evil.
