Israel is a lighthouse in a stormy sea — a beacon of democracy, diverse by design, innovative by nature and eager to contribute to the world despite being in the toughest neighbourhood on Earth. We are an ancient nation of people who have returned to our ancient homeland, revived our ancient language and restored our ancient sovereignty.
Israel is a miracle of Jewish revival. Am Yisrael Chai — the nation of Israel is alive — and the State of Israel is its beating heart. For far too long, Israel has been defined by wars with our neighbours, but that is not what Israel is about. That is not what the people of Israel are about. Israelis do not wake up in the morning thinking about conflict. Israelis, like everyone else, want to lead a good life, take care of our families and build a better world for our children.
That means that, from time to time, we might need to leave our jobs, say goodbye to our families and rush to the battlefield to defend our country — just as my friends and I have had to do ourselves from time to time. They should not be judged for it. Israelis remember the dark horrors of our past but remain determined to look ahead to build a brighter future.
There are two plagues that challenge the very fabric of our society at this moment. One, of course, is the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed more than 5 million people around the globe. The other has also shaken the world as we know it. It is the disease of political polarization. Both the coronavirus pandemic and polarization can erode public trust in our institutions. Both can paralyse nations. If left unchecked, their effects on society can be devastating. In Israel we faced both but, rather than accept them as a force of nature, we stood up. We took action, and now we can already see the horizon.
In a polarized world, in which algorithms fuel our anger, people on the right and on the left operate in two separate realities, two separate spheres, each in their own social media bubble. They hear only the voices that confirm what they already believe. People end up hating each other. Societies are torn apart because people do not hear each other. Countries that are broken from within can get nowhere.
In Israel, after four elections in two years and with a fifth looming, people yearned for an antidote — calm, stability and an honest attempt at political normalcy. Inertia is always the easiest choice, but there are moments in time when leaders have to take the wheel just before reaching the cliff, face the danger and drive the country to safety. That is exactly what we did.
Approximately 100 days ago, my partners and I formed a new Government in Israel — the most diverse Government in Israel’s history. What started as a political accident can now turn into a purpose, and that purpose is unity. Today we sit together around one table. We speak to each other with respect. We act with decency and carry a message: things can be different. Although we harbour extremely different political opinions, we sit together for the good of our nation.
It is okay to disagree. It is okay — in fact, I would say it is vital — that different people think differently. It is even okay to argue, as healthy debate is a basic tenet of the Jewish tradition. I can also say that it is one of the secrets to the success of the start-up nation. We just need to enter one of the companies to see that debate under way. Debate is the power of innovation. What we have now proved in Israel is that even in the age of social media, we can debate without hate.
The second great disease we all face is the coronavirus pandemic, which is sweeping the world. To overcome it, we will need to make new discoveries, gain new insights and achieve new breakthroughs. That all begins with the pursuit of knowledge. The State of Israel is on the front lines of the search for that vital knowledge.
In Israel we developed a model that fuses the wisdom of science with the power of policymaking. The Israeli model has three guiding principles. First, the country must stay open. We all paid a huge price: an economic price, a physical price and an emotional price — we just have to ask our kids — for bringing life to a standstill in 2020.
But, my friends, to bring economies back to growth, children back to school and parents back to work, lockdowns, restrictions and quarantines are not the way forward: they cannot be sustained in the long term. Our model, rather than locking people down in
passive sleep-mode, recruits them to the effort. They can be part of the effort. For example, a few weeks ago we asked Israeli families to carry out home-testing of all children so we could keep schools open — and indeed schools stayed open. I can now tell the General Assembly that we are going to distribute dozens of those self-tests to all Israeli parents. They can be part of the fight.
The second rule is to vaccinate early. Right from the start, Israelis were quick to get vaccinated. We are in a race against a deadly virus, and we must try to be ahead of it. In July, we were the first to learn that the vaccines were waning, getting weaker, which is what brought about a surge in Delta cases in Israel. It was then then that my Government decided to administer a third dose of vaccine — the booster — to the Israeli public. It was a tough decision, given that at the time the Food and Drug Administration had not yet even approved it.
We faced a choice: to either drag Israel into yet another set of lockdowns and further harm our economy and society or to double down on vaccines. We chose the latter. Israel pioneered the booster shot. Now, two months later, I can report that it works. With a third dose, we are seven times more protected than with two doses, and 40 times more protected than without any vaccine. The booster works. As a result, Israel is on course to escape the fourth wave, without a lockdown and without doing further harm to our economy. Israel’s economy is growing, and unemployment is declining. I am glad that our actions have inspired other countries to follow up by administering the booster.
The third rule is to adapt and move quickly. We formed a national task force that meets every day; I lead it. The task force is intended to bypass slow governmental bureaucracy, make quick decisions and act on them right away. A trial-and-error approach is key. Every day is a new day, with new data and new decisions. When something works, we keep it. When it does not, we discard it and move on.
Running a country during a pandemic is not only about health; it is also about carefully balancing all aspects of life that are affected by the coronavirus disease, especially jobs and education.
While doctors provide an important input, they cannot be the ones who run the national initiative. The only person that has a good vantage point of all of consideration is the national leader of any given country.
Above all, we are doing everything in our power to provide people with the tools needed to protect their lives. The ancient Jewish text, the Talmud, says: “Whoever saves one life, is as if he saved an entire world”, and that is what we aspire to do.
While Israel strives to do good, we cannot lose sight for one moment of what is happening in our neighbourhood. Israel is quite literally surrounded by Hizbullah, Shia militias, Islamic Jihad and Hamas — on our borders. Those terror groups seek to dominate the Middle East and spread radical Islam across the world.
What do they all have in common? They all want to destroy my country, and they are all backed by Iran. They get their funding from Iran, they get their training from Iran, and they get their weapons from Iran. Iran’s great goal is crystal clear to anybody who cares to open their eyes: Iran seeks to dominate the region — and seeks to do so under a nuclear umbrella.
For the past three decades, Iran has spread its carnage and destruction around the Middle East, country after country. Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Gaza — what do all those places have in common? They are all falling apart, their citizens are hungry and suffering and their economies are collapsing. Like the Midas touch, Iran’s regime has the Mullah touch: every place Iran touches fails.
If anyone thinks Iranian terror is confined to Israel, they are wrong. Let me share some news. Just this year, Iran made operational a new deadly terror unit — a start-up with swarms of killer unarmed aerial vehicles (UAVs) armed with lethal weapons that can attack any place at any time. They plan to blanket the skies of the Middle East with that lethal force. Iran has already used those deadly UAVs — known as Shahed-136 — to attack Saudi Arabia, American targets in Iraq and civilian ships at sea, most recently killing a United Kingdom citizen and a Romanian. Iran plans to arm its proxies in Yemen, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon with hundreds, and eventually thousands, of those deadly UAVs. We can ignore that, but experience tells us that what starts in the Middle East does not stop there.
In 1988, Iran set up a death commission that ordered the mass murder of 5,000 political activists, who were hanged from cranes. That death commission was made up of four people; Ebrahim Raisi, Iran’s new President, was one of them. Raisi also oversaw the murder of Iranian children. His nickname is the butcher of Tehran,
because that is exactly what he did: he butchered his own people.
One of the witnesses to that massacre stated in her testimony that, when Raisi would finish a round of murder, he would throw a party, pocketing the money of those he had just executed minutes earlier, and then would sit down to eat cream cakes. He celebrated the murder of his own people by devouring cream cakes. And now this very Raisi is Iran’s new President. That is who we are dealing with.
Over the past few years, Iran has made a major leap forward in its nuclear research and development, production capacity and enrichment. Iran’s nuclear- weapons programme is at a critical point. All red lines have been crossed, inspections ignored and all wishful thinking proven false.
Iran is currently violating the International Atomic Energy Agency safeguard agreements — and it is getting away with it. They harass inspectors and sabotage their investigations — and they are getting away with it. They enrich uranium to the level of 60 per cent, one step short of weapons-grade material — and they are getting away with it.
Evidence has been ignored that clearly proves Iran’s intentions with respect to nuclear weapons in secret sites in Turquz Abad, Tehran and Marivan.
Iran’s nuclear programme has hit a watershed moment, and so has our tolerance. Words do not stop centrifuges from spinning. There are those in the world who seem to view Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons as an inevitable reality and as a done deal, or else they have just become tired of hearing about it. Israel does not have that privilege. We cannot tire. We will not tire. Israel will not allow Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon.
I want to tell the Assembly something. Iran is much weaker and much more vulnerable than it seems. Its economy is sinking. Its regime is rotten and divorced from the younger generation in Iran. Its corrupt Government fails even to bring water to large parts of the country.
The weaker they are, the more extreme the actions they take to hide their weakness. And I am telling everyone: if we put our minds to it, if we are serious about stopping it and if we use all our resourcefulness, we can prevail. And that is exactly what we are going to do.
Not everything is dark in the Middle East. Alongside worrisome trends, there are also rays of light. First and foremost are the growing ties that Israel is forging with Arab and Muslim countries — ties that began to be established 42 years ago through Israel’s historic peace agreement with Egypt, continued 27 years ago through Israel’s peace agreement with Jordan and more recently continued further through the Abraham Accords, which normalized our relations with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco. More such ties will follow.
At the ripe young age of 73, Israel’s value and unique place in the world are coming to be understood by more and more nations. Some friends have stood with us since our founding. The United States of America is a long-time, trusted friend of Israel, as we saw yet again just a few days ago in the United States Congress.
Alongside our old friends, we are gaining new friends — in the Middle East and beyond. Last week, that manifested itself with the defeat of the racist, anti-Semitic, Durban Conference. That Conference had originally been intended to oppose racism, but over the years had turned into a conference that promotes racism against Israel and the Jewish people. The world has had enough of that. I want to thank the 38 countries — 38 — that chose truth over lies and skipped the Conference. And to those countries who chose to participate in that farce, I can say only that attacking Israel does not make them morally superior; fighting the only democracy in the Middle East does not make them “woke”; and adopting cliches about Israel without bothering to learn the basic facts is just plain lazy.
Every Member State in this Hall has a choice, not a political choice but a moral one. It is a choice between darkness and light — between the darkness that persecutes political prisoners, murders the innocent, abuses women and minorities and seeks to end the modern world as we know it and the light that pursues freedom, prosperity and opportunity.
Over the past 73 years, the State of Israel — the people of Israel — have achieved so much in the face of so much. And yet I can say with full confidence: our best days are ahead of us. Israel is a nation of great hope, a nation that has brought the heritage of the Torah to life in modern-day Israel, a nation of an unbreakable spirit.
“A bit of light dispels much darkness.” The lighthouse amid the stormy seas stands tall, stands strong and her light shines brighter than ever.