President Shimon Peres made use of his Remembrance Day address to deliver a message of warning to the Shiite theocracy in Iran Sunday, urging it not to underestimate Israel.
Speaking at the Remembrance Day ceremony at the Kotel in Jerusalem, beneath the place where the Jewish Temples stood millennia ago, he said:
"The strength of Israel comes from the power of its belief. And its greatness comes from the valor of its sons. We cry today over their fall and we are blessed by their heritage. Dear families, you brought them into the world. You shaped their world. Their pictures shall hang on the nation's eastern wall [a reference to the eastern wall of synagogues west of Jerusalem, where the Ark is set – ed.] as miracles, as legends, as heritage. A heritage that flows through the ranks of IDF soldiers today as well.”
This heritage, he said, is one that has "no fear in its heart, no loss of direction."
Message to Ahmadinejad
The 86-year-old Peres said that he remembers the first Independence Day in 1948, when Israel was attacked as soon as it declared statehood. "There are still those who try to annihilate us,” he said. “At their head is a dictatorial Iranian regime that strives to take over the Middle East, to paralyze it with threatening weapons, and to spread hatred of Israel in order to lull Arab world into complacence.
"We must not take the threats lightly. But they must not underestimate our abilities. The threat to the Jewish people is always an opening to the threat to the entire civilized world. To its well-being and its values. We will stand [before the threat] as we know, until the enlightened world wakes up to the danger it is exposed to – no less than we are.”
"We are a small nation. But we have merited sons who drew forth greatness from courage. We alone repulsed seven wars and we emerged stronger and more determined.”
Video: Peres's Speech (Hebrew)