Jerusalem—Israel came to a standstill on Thursday, halting the morning bustle for two minutes as sirens blared to honor millions murdered during the Holocaust.
In an annual ritual at 10:00 am (0700 GMT), pedestrians froze in place. Drivers stopped and stood in silence beside their vehicles, honoring the six million Jews killed by the Nazis during World War Two.
At Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said on Wednesday that the Holocaust is the “ultimate, absolute expression of thousands of years of anti-Semitism.”
Bennett also rejected any attempt to draw parallels between the Nazi genocide and current conflicts.
“I take the trouble to say this because as the years go by, there is more and more discourse in the world that compares other difficult events to the Holocaust. But no. Even the most difficult wars today are not the Holocaust and are not comparable to the Holocaust,” he said.
In an address to Israeli lawmakers last month, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who is Jewish, compared Russian aggression in his country to the Holocaust, drawing immediate criticism from some officials in Israel.
About 161,000 Holocaust survivors live in Israel, according to official figures.
The President of the German parliament, Baerbel Bas, said during a visit to Yad Vashem on Wednesday that “a special obligation arises from Germany’s historical guilt.”
“Israel’s security and the fight against all forms of anti-Semitism are part of our national identity. We will not forget,” she said.
In another development, Israel, which withdrew from the UN cultural agency UNESCO with the United States over alleged bias in 2019, has no objections to a US return, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Wednesday.
Questioned by lawmakers, Blinken called on Congress to give President Joe Biden the power to waive a US law that requires an end to US funding to any international organization, such as UNESCO, that recognizes Palestine as a state.
“We believe that having the waiver authority would be important and necessary and I can say with authority that our partners in Israel feel the same way. They would support our rejoining UNESCO,” Blinken told the Senate Appropriations Committee.
Blinken said that the United States has been harmed by its absence, pointing to UNESCO’s role in education and the emerging field of artificial intelligence.
“When we’re not at the table shaping that conversation and so actually helping to shape those norms and standards, well, someone else is. And that someone else is probably China,” Blinken said.
The United States paid about 22 percent or $80 million of the Paris-based agency’s budget until 2011 when its admission of a Palestinian state triggered an end to the contributions.
Previous US and Israeli leaders Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu both fully withdrew from the UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization eight years later.
Israel was angered by decisions that included recognizing the old city of Hebron, home to Jewish and Muslim holy sites in the occupied West Bank, as a Palestinian world heritage site.
Advocates for a US return say that the UN body’s current leader, former French culture minister Audrey Azoulay, has successfully addressed charges of bias.