Statement by Ambassador Gad Yaacobi Permanent Representative of Israel to the United Nations

on the "COMMEMORATION OF THE FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF THE END OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR"

(Agenda Item 150)

49th Session of the General Assembly
United Nations

2 December 1994
New York

Mr. President,

At the outset, allow me to express our appreciation to the Russian Federation for taking the initiative of bringing this issue before the United Nations General Assembly. Israel has lent its wholehearted support to the Russian initiative to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War. We are also proud to cosponsor the draft resolution on the Commemoration.

Commemorating the end of the Second World War is our moral obligation not only to the fallen soldiers, to the civilian victims and to the honored veterans. It is also our obligation to the generations to come, so that they might learn from the past: The lessons of the Second World War are eternal lessons always pertinent, always worthy of attention.

Mr. President,

When we consider the bloodshed and slaughter that has taken place since the end of World War Two, we must ask if the world has fully learned the lessons of that war.

One of this century's greatest world leaders, Winston Churchill, once said, "An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last." Appeasement and isolationism have not disappeared from the world. Rather, these sentiments have become loud and clear in many places. Such shortsightedness enabled fascism and Nazism to rise in the years before the Second World War. The terrible cost has to be a lesson for us all, especially today.

The price of appeasement, aggression and conflict in the Second World War is staggering. Tens of millions of soldiers and civilians dead, in the largest bloodbath in history. A generation of young men sacrificed. Cultural centers of the world ravaged; the intelligentsia massacred; art, architecture, beauty and lifedestroyed.

The war launched by the Nazis shattered the entire world, and directed special fury against the Jewish people. Not only was the systematic annihilation of European Jewry unique in the history of the Second World War it was, and remains, unique in the history of humankind. The Nazis mobilized every sector of society in a national effort to destroy all Jews. The government, the military, science, academia, business, the arts all collaborated to first dehumanize and then destroy. The Nazis did not intend to conquer or enslave, but to annihilate an entire nation. Jews were murdered because they were Jews. They were guilty of nothing other than being born to Jewish parents. One of the survivors of the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel, put it best: "Not all victims were Jews. But all Jews were victims."

The years between 1939 and 1945 marked the final and darkest days of Jewish statelessness. The systematic extermination of the civilian Jewish populations of Nazi-occupied areas became one of the Nazis' main war goals. Six million Jews, one-third of the world's Jewish population, were wiped out.

The Jewish people's role in the Second World War was not only that of victim. Jewish soldiers joined in the fight against the Nazis. They fought as Jews in the Resistance armies and undergrounds all over Europe. Jews in Mandatory Palestine fought proudly in the Jewish Brigade of the British army. Those who were citizens of Allied countries fought as Russians, Americans, Canadians, British, French, and others.

Mr. President,

We all owe a debt of honor and gratitude to the nations which fought to end the war, to liberate the occupied countries and to give new hope to the people and nations of the world. It was their finest hour. I hope that we all act in a manner befitting the memory of the millions who sacrificed their young lives to save others to save humanity.

We have an obligation to build a world based on tolerance and mutual respect. But let us never be tolerant of fanaticism, fascism or dictatorship. All these still plague the world today.

Our mission is perhaps greater than it was immediately following the end of the Second World War. We cannot change the past. But we can learn its lessons. We have responsibility to shape the future wisely. This has to be the outcome of the fiftieth anniversary commemoration.

Mr. President,

The United Nations was established on the ruins of a world destroyed by hatred and violence, in order "to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war." The dangers of bigotry, prejudice and discrimination are one of the enduring lessons of that dark period in human history. The United Nations has a special mission to ensure that such evil never rears its head again. As it carries out this task, may its Member States always remember its roots, and may they faithfully chart its course into the future.

Thank you, Mr. President.