Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, along with his wife Sara, met on Sunday with several Holocaust survivors who have been chosen to light torches as part of the Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony on Tuesday.
"Every year, my wife and I make it a point to meet with the torchbearers," Netanyahu told the survivors. "It is an extraordinarily moving moment because you are giants of the spirit. You endured unspeakable suffering, yet you came to the Land of Israel and took part in our great rebirth."
Netanyahu also brought up Operation Roaring Lion, reassuring the survivors that, thanks to Israel's strength in striking Iran, there would not be another Holocaust.
"Today, we are the ones hunting the oppressors. We have prevented them from realizing their plan of destruction with a force that has brought the State of Israel to the peak of its power since its establishment," he said. "Who would have believed 80 years ago that our daring pilots, men and women, would be over the skies of Iran, over the skies of Tehran, and not just alone, but alongside the world's greatest superpower, flying wing-to-wing to strike the oppressor?"
Netanyahu compares Iran, Nazi Germany
In a statement made after the meeting, Netanyahu made his comparison between Iran and the Nazi regime more explicit.
"If we had not acted, if we had not taken our fate into our own hands in the independent State of Israel, with the Israel Defense Forces and our security arms, the names Isfahan, Natanz, Fordow, and Bushehr would be remembered like Auschwitz, Majdanek, and Sobibor," Netanyahu claimed.
"They come to destroy us, and we rise up against them. In every generation, they rise against us; in this generation, we rose against them, and this is a massive change that all citizens of Israel should welcome. This ensures the main thing: Never Again."