1.
"And when your children ask you, 'What does this service mean to you?'" Why do you gather at memorial ceremonies and recount memories, light torches and invite the elders of the nation to hear their testimony firsthand? We will tell them: "We were slaves" in foreign lands to which we were exiled thousands of years ago, left at the mercy of other nations. When they expelled us, we wandered on, found refuge for a generation or two, and were expelled again, told: You are Jews, and this is not your place.
Not only were we expelled, we were massacred generation after generation, community after community, each with its own fate, in all four corners of the earth.
Then came the most terrible catastrophe of all, in which more than a third of our people were cut down: millions of Jews, among them some 1.5 million children, tortured, starved and murdered in cruel ways, their bodies burned and their smoke rising to the heavens from the chimneys of the death camps built for us by Nazi Germany, the embodiment of global evil in that era.
2.
The Holocaust was the bitter essence of exile, Galut, of our being without a national home to protect us. "Why were the Jews of Italy deported to the death camps?" I was once asked while serving as ambassador, and I answered immediately: "Because they could do it to us." Simple and chilling.
When I was invited to Holocaust-related events, my condition was that I be allowed to speak, because I was the representative of the solution to the Holocaust: the independent Jewish state. It was impossible, in my view, to speak of the horrors of that period without also naming the answer to the catastrophe. Jewish political sovereignty is the answer to the blood-soaked volcano under which we were almost buried.
In his testimony before the UN Special Committee on Palestine in 1947, David Ben-Gurion said: "What happened to us in Europe would not have happened if we had even one dunam of our own ... Our independence is the only cure for the disease of exile. Without the power to defend ourselves, our fate will always be in the hands of others. The state is not only a right; it is an existential necessity rising from the ashes of the crematoria."
3.
Indeed, the familiar lesson of the Holocaust, the one we have repeated since the beginning of our consciousness as Israelis, is "Never again": never again defenseless, never again led like sheep to slaughter, never again will Jews be trampled and murdered without response.
Eighty-two years ago, Jews spent Passover in the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp without matzah or wine, but with the Ten Plagues visited upon them, including the most terrible tenth plague of all. This past Passover, by the grace of God, their descendants pursued the heirs of the Nazis in Iran, Lebanon and Gaza and struck them with plagues of our own. This is the miraculous generation in which we live.
The war against Iran has a supreme moral dimension: We will no longer accept a reality in which a state entity, organization or people repeatedly declares its desire to destroy us, and acts accordingly through the funding of terrorism and the murder of Jews, while we are expected to accept this as fate or as some force of nature against which nothing can be done. We learned through blood and fire that declarations about murdering Jews do not remain mere words. Therefore, we must act before they strike us.
4.
But the second lesson, the one that has been somewhat forgotten and that should be repeated again and again and proclaimed throughout the Jewish world with a great blast of the shofar, is this: "No more exile!"
There is no hope for our future outside the Land of Israel. Jews are clinging to the altar horns of France, Belgium, London and Canada while the world around them is changing rapidly and their existence there is no longer secure. When we remember the Holocaust and its horrors, we must also remember the causes and draw the necessary conclusions.
Dear Jews, where do you want your children to grow up? As free people in the Jewish state, with an independent national consciousness, or as dependent Jews in a foreign land that will never truly be your country?
5.
Here is Ze'ev Jabotinsky's call from the second half of the 1930s, and it sounds more relevant today than ever: "For many years I have appealed to you, the Jews of Poland, with this call ... Eliminate the exile, or else it will eliminate you. The Land of Israel is the only place where we will be masters of our own fate, and only there can we secure the future of our children. Whoever does not see the volcano beneath our feet in exile is willfully shutting his eyes."
Most Polish Jews were not saved. About 3 million of them were murdered, to our eternal disgrace. By contrast, millions of Jews around the world today are uncertain about their future and their security in the countries where they live. Will we learn?
Our brothers and sisters in the Jewish diaspora, the State of Israel is waiting for you. We in Israel are waiting for you. Come home.
