Israel to push Iran concerns during Holocaust memorial

OCCUPIED-AL-QUDS: Israel will lobby key leaders at this week’s 75’th 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 was meeting Russian President Vladimir Putin, Emmanuel Macron of France and top US officials before Thursday’s event at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial centre in al-Quds, 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.”