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‘The comparison to Amalek has been used throughout the ages to designate those who seek to eradicate the Jewish people, most recently the Nazis.’
By Shula Rosen
The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a response to the claim made at the International Court of Justice in The Hague that Netanyahu’s quote of a biblical verse regarding the destruction of Amalek was a call to genocide.
South Africa charged Israel with genocide in its war against Hamas, and in an attempt to prove the intent to destroy whole or part of a people, Netanyahu’s quoting a biblical verse was presented by South African officials as an argument that Israel’s goal was to destroy the Palestinian people.
Shortly after October 7th, the Prime Minister compared the savagery of Hamas’s crimes to Amalek, a people who in the book of Exodus attacked the Jewish People as they left Egypt and deliberately targeted children and those who were weaker.
Netanyahu quoted the phrase from the bible, “Remember what Amalek did to you.”
The statement from the Prime Minister’s office said, “The Amalekites mercilessly attacked the Children of Israel after the Exodus from Egypt.”
The statement continued, “The comparison to Amalek has been used throughout the ages to designate those who seek to eradicate the Jewish people, most recently the Nazis.”
The Prime Minister’s office pointed out that the verse is often quoted to remember persecution and is not interpreted as a call to commit atrocities.
The statement said, “That is why the words on a banner in a permanent exhibit at Yad Vashem, Israel’s famed Holocaust Museum, urge visitors to ‘Remember what Amalek did to you.”
It continued, “This same phrase appears in The Hague at the memorial for Dutch Jews murdered during the Holocaust. Obviously, neither reference is an incitement to genocide of the German people.”
“So too Prime Minister Netanyahu’s reference to Amalek was not an incitement to genocide of Palestinians, but a description of the utterly evil actions perpetrated by the genocidal terrorists of Hamas on October 7th and the need to confront them.”
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