President Shimon Peres told the European Union Parliament Tuesday, “In the past thousand years, more Jews lived in Europe than in any other continent. Alas, more Jews were murdered in Europe in the last hundred years than in the preceding two thousand years.”
The first Israeli president to address the current arrangement of the EU Parliament, he recalled his childhood in Europe, where his family escaped in 1934 while “in 1942, most of the inhabitants of my town were burned alive.”
He extolled the accomplishments of Israel, from making the desert bloom to Israel’s becoming a ”start-up nation.”
President Peres praised Europe for having “divorced its past” and for having “converted the divided Europe of the last thousand years, to the united Europe of today. “
“For us, the Europe of the Shoah is becoming a Europe supporting our renaissance,” he added.
He thanked Europe for its close ties with Israel and pleaded with the Parliament to declare Hizbullah a terrorist organization.
“Today, Hizbullah, supported by Iran, is destroying Lebanon. Hizbullah is a terror organization. Not a political movement,” he stated. “They collect missiles. They are trigger-happy. They hide missiles in peaceful towns and villages. By doing so, they turn them into a war target. Hizbullah divided Lebanon politically, religiously and ethnically. It turned the land of the cedar tree into a scorched and barren land.”
The President also said that Iran not only denies the Holocaust but also calls for a Holocaust. “A nuclear bomb in the hands of an irresponsible regime is an imminent danger to the world,” he said.
He repeated his dream of peace between the Palestinian Authority and Israel but pointed out that the PA used Israel’s withdrawal of Jews and the IDF from Gaza to create a terrorist base instead of building peace.