Prime Minister Binyamin Ntanyahu, President Shimon Peres and visiting French President Francois Hollande took part in an Israeli-French technological innovations day on Tuesday.
"What we're seeing here is the future," Netanyahu said. "Radical Islam wants to take us to the past. We are marching towards the future and they are heading towards the dark Middle Ages."
"While we aspire to open our society to all - men, women, minorities, the right to be different - they want suppressing unison, a hard doctrine," he continued. "And they want to support all of that with weapons of mass destruction. We must not allow them to do that."
Cautioning against repeating the mistake done with North Korea, Netanyahu stressed that it would be a grave mistake to give in to Iran's demands "when they have every reason to cave in to the pressure on them."