Using the 40th anniversary of the Allied victory over Nazi Germany. Mr. Peres recalled the special meaning the Second World War had for Jews. In an address to the Knesset, he warned against the rise of new ideologies of hatred. He noted that Israel was not a monument to the Holocaust, but it was the answer to the calamity of the Jews. Text:
When Nazi Germany was defeated forty years ago, we felt as if a dreadful weight had been lifted from human history, that this was the victory of humanity over Satan.
The sense of victory was accompanied by deep grief for the price it exacted. Millions of people fell, slain in their enmity on the battlefields created by the Nazis. Millions of soldiers and millions of civilians; men, women, and children; from Russia, from Europe, and from the United States; Jews and Christians, white and colored, innocent people trampled and massacred by the efficient murder machine of the Hitler regime.
The highest price was paid by the Jewish people - six million Jews, [including] a million and a half Jewish children. How can a holocaust this terrible be comprehended?
For this reason, when we mark the victory and when we recall what preceded it, all of us from all nations must ask ourselves a piercing question: Even now that Nazi Germany has been utterly defeated, has Nazism too been utterly defeated? Have antisemitism, racism and fascism been obliterated in the land of Nazism and its terrible relatives?
Now that the lunatic country has been defeated - has the lunatic policy also been defeated?
Even today, forty years later, even after a wealth of learned explanations, do we really know how such a sickening phenomenon came to be, how it could come into existence?
How could it happen that one insane man could derange an entire people? How could it happen that a total lie could trample every portion of truth? How could it happen that total enmity could gain sway over a country for years and years? How could it happen that soldiers who were not illiterate could lead millions of people to state gas furnaces, after pulling out their hair, their teeth, and undressing their children?
How could it happen that racism could become a philosophy, and gas - its motive power?
And because it is so difficult to grasp this, we must take into account that that which is incomprehensible is not necessarily also impossible. Have madmen indeed disappeared from our world? Have demagogy, lies, and incitement vanished? Has racist hatred, the enmity for a person because he is not white or aryan, or is not similar to you in origin or heritage, vanished? Is antisemitism, both overt and covert, dead and gone, or is it hiding and lurking in places and situations which have not yet been located in full?
These are piercing questions, because - let us not forget this - in the rise of the Nazis and Nazism, a part was also played by those who failed to realize its significance, who were inclined to forgive or to ignore, or who were seized by fear and illusion and believed that hellfire could be extinguished by mere words.
For us, the Jews, this is a difficult victory holiday. The distance does not lessen the pain; the brands [snatched from the burning] do not extinguish the fire, nor are the tears sufficient to beweep what happened. And we don't have enough tears. Our very beings calls us to act so that such a disaster will not recur.
No, we are not proposing to answer hatred with hatred. But even death cannot obscure the difference between those who were buried as murderers and those who were buried as murder victims. Gravestones haven't the power to obliterate the abyss that yawns between those who lead to [others] murder and those who were led.
I believe that President Reagan is a true friend of the Jewish people and the State of Israel. It is precisely for this reason that we feel deep pain at the terrible error of his visit to Bitburg.
There can be reconciliation between peoples. There is no reconciliation between times. There is no reconciliation regarding the past. There is no legitimation for what occurred.
In order to combat the dangers latent in the beast in man - we must be constantly mobilized. In this great struggle against mobilized evil, I should like to say to the members of my people that we must unite and stand on guard, both in our own land and from our land. The lesson of the war against brute force is that we must not get into a situation of powerlessness in a war against this force.
Our brothers' blood cries out from many continents. For us, Europe is also one great cemetery for millions of Jews. Our partisans fought in its forests, and our brethren were massacred in its hidden recesses. But our one real comfort is that here in Israel, our people can proudly and securely wave the banners of the pre-eminence of humanity and the eternity of Israel.
Israel is not a memorial monument. Israel is the great, true answer to the calamity of the Jews, to the heritage of the Jews, to the hopes of the Jewish people.
Let us not be diverted from the main path. The real lesson in all its completeness will have been learned only when all the members of our people come together willingly in their own land. Here we will prove the supremacy of faith over the faith in racial superiority.
The memory is important, and the lesson even more so. Only the lesson for the future will grant a future to memory.
For us, this day is a day of memories and lessons. Our brothers' blood cries out from foreign lands. Our people's hopes cry out from this our land.