NEW YORK – At perhaps the most divisive and uncertain moment between the Biden administration and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, and a year into Israel’s multifront war, Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Herzog offered public praise for the United State’s wartime support.
Herzog spoke on Monday morning during the American Jewish Committee’s (AJC) October 7 memorial commemoration in Washington, DC, beginning his remarks by speaking about the “geopolitical and human stories of this war.”
He explained why, since October 7, Israelis have said that this war did not simply represent another round of hostilities, but was rather an “existential” battle.
“This is existential because what happened on October 7, and in the aftermath of October 7, is that we, the State of Israel, were hit hard to the point of bleeding, and our enemies, all our enemies in the region and globally, smelled the blood, sensed the weakness and vulnerability and rose to hit us,” Herzog said.
“Their appetite to destroy us was fed by the October 7 massacre. This explains how we found ourselves fighting not only Hamas in Gaza but the whole Iranian axis,” Herzog detailed.
This explained Iran’s direct, massive missile strikes on Israel, according to Herzog, as Iran would “never contemplate such an attack were it not for October 7 and its perception that Israel was weak and vulnerable and that they can get away with it.”
Herzog said this perception also explained the unprecedented wave of antisemitism that erupted in the United States and around the world after October 7, “assaulting both the Jewish state and the Jewish people, denying the right of the Jewish people to self-determination and denying the right of the Jewish state to self-defense.”
According to Herzog, Israel understood that if it did not prevail in its war, it would never be able to lead a “normal life as a free nation” in its homeland, and so, “the people of Israel rose to fight back.”
He added that the story of this war was also the story of how Israelis were “gradually turning the tide, restoring our deterrence, and dismantling the Iranian ring of fire that it built around us.”
“We are weakening that axis,” he stipulated.
Herzog then went on to say that Israel “did this all on our own” and asked no one to “fight for us.”
“We invested blood, sweat, and tears of our own,” Herzog stressed.
However, he quickly followed this by saying that he wanted to take the opportunity to announce loud and clear that without the support of the United States, Israel would not have been able to reach this moment.
“The support we receive from our closest ally, who withstood the pressure of this war in material and political ways, is meaningful, and we don’t take it for granted,” Herzog said.
“Support from the US administration, from the Congress on both sides of the aisle, from the American people, and notwithstanding all the noise that we hear outside,” was much appreciated, he explained.
“The majority of the American people, I am convinced, stand with us,” Herzog added.
He said that the American people understood what was at stake and that Israel’s enemies were, for the most part, the enemies of the United States.
“They understand that if we win this war, we also serve the interest of the free world and the United States,” Herzog explained.
Addressing the hostages
Before he spoke, Jonathan Dekel-Chen, father of dual US-Israel hostage Sagui Dekel-Chen, addressed the AJC. He slammed Netanyahu’s government for failing to prioritize the return of the hostages by leveraging Hamas in favor of a ceasefire agreement and for “asking for the world’s support as a victim.”
Dekel-Chen said that while he did not know if the desire to deflect Israel and the world’s attention from the stalled hostage negotiations with Hamas factored into Netanyahu’s decision to escalate the conflict with Hezbollah, the escalation and its ripples into Iran and Yemen have made it even more difficult for the hostage families to keep the international media’s, community’s, and global decision-makers’ attention on the hostage crisis, regardless of the military and intelligence achievements of the past couple of weeks.
Although “some of them were spectacular,” he added.
“I don’t know if the Israel that we all knew before October 7 can ever return. I do know that Israeli society will never recover if the hostages don’t come home, as many as possible, alive,” Dekel-Chen underscored.
Dekel-Chen continued with lambasting the Netanyahu government, and greater Jewish advocacy establishment, for focusing on the wrong issues instead of returning the hostages.
Dekel-Chen concluded his remarks with an acknowledgment that his words were perhaps not what attendees were expecting hearing.
“I apologize to the AJC if some of it seems, perhaps, a little inappropriate on this solemn day,” he said. “I do appreciate the platform for saying them."
Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff was also in attendance at the AJC event. He read a short prayer but did not make any other comments.