The framework of the recent agreement between the six major nations and Iran regarding its nuclear program has led Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to say that this agreement could endangers Israel’s existence, once it is completed.[1] One rarely finds other nations’ leaders claiming that there is a possibility that their country may not survive. Some commentators thus claim that Israel is acting paranoid.[2]

This fear of its future destruction, however, is far from being a fallacious Israeli claim. Palestinian and other Arab leaders have a lengthy record of promoting and announcing the genocide of the Jews in Israel and in British Mandatory Palestine. For many years, the leader of the Palestinian so-called “moderates” was Jerusalem mayor Ragheb bey al-Nashashibi. After the 1929 riots, the non-Jewish French writer Albert Londres asked the mayor why the Arabs had murdered the pious old Jews in Hebron and Safed, with whom they had no quarrel. The mayor answered, “In a way you behave like in a war. You don’t kill what you want. You kill what you find. Next time, they will all be killed, young and old.” Later on, Londres spoke to the mayor again and tested him by saying ironically, “You cannot kill all the Jews. There are 150,000 of them.” Nashashibi answered “in a soft voice, ‘Oh no, it’ll take two days.[3]’” The hard-line Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al Husseini, during the Second World War, developed plans for a Palestinian Auschwitz-like crematorium to kill Jews near Nablus.[4]

Such statements and events reflect a much broader genocidal Arab mindset. Azzam Pasha, secretary of the Arab League, succinctly said during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, “This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades.”[5]    

Nowadays, the Iranian leaders are prominent among those who proclaim a new Holocaust. Its first Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini said about Israel, “This regime that is occupying Quds must be eliminated from the pages of history.”[6] The current Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei has said that, “Israel is a cancerous tumor which must be uprooted from the region.”[7]

Former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said in a 2008 speech, “In the Middle East, they [the global powers] have created a black and filthy microbe called the Zionist regime, so they could use it to attack the peoples of the region, and by using this excuse, they want to advance their schemes for the Middle East.”[8]

In 2005, Ahmadinejad said, “We are in the process of an historical war between the World of Arrogance [i.e., the West] and the Islamic world,” adding that, “a world without America and Zionism” is “attainable.”[9]

Former Iranian President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani said in 2002, “If one day…the world of Islam comes to possess the weapons currently in Israel’s possession [meaning nuclear weapons] – on that day this method of global arrogance would come to a dead end. This…is because the use of a nuclear bomb in Israel will leave nothing on the ground, whereas it will only damage the world of Islam.”[10]

Hamas has taken all this hatred further by promoting the extermination of all Jews in its charter.[11]

In October 2012, a video showed then-Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, of the Muslim Brotherhood, answering “Amen” to an imam who made a genocidal prayer request: “Oh Allah, destroy the Jews and their supporters.”[12]

There are also many examples of such hatred emanating from the West. One incident occurred in 2009, when anti-Israeli demonstrators in Amsterdam shouted, “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas.” Two Dutch parliamentarians of the left-wing Socialist Party, who had participated in the demonstration, claimed that they had not heard these slogans. They did admit, however, that they had shouted, “Intifada, Intifada, Palestine must be free.[13]

Against such a background, which is but a small selection of the existential threats against Israel, it is not surprising that many Israelis have always seen Israel’s future as precarious. This reaction has been explicitly expressed by several of its leaders. Nahum Goldmann, who was the longstanding President of the World Jewish Congress, recounts in his biography how Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, said to him shortly before his seventieth birthday in 1955:

When you, Nahum, ask me whether I will live in a Jewish state and be buried in it, I rather believe that. How long can I live? Ten or twelve years – until then, there will certainly be a Jewish state. If you ask me whether my son Amos…will have the opportunity to die in a Jewish state and be buried there, I would say, at best, 50%.[14]

The late Amos Ben-Gurion, who died in 2008, was indeed buried in Israel.

The late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin told Israeli Ambassador Yehuda Avner, who was a close staff member, why he was in favor of the Oslo Accords. Rabin said that without some kind of peace, there was no way to guarantee Israel’s continued existence. Rabin also pointed out that Israel was the only country whose existence was still publicly debated.[15]

Current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has, for several years, expressed concern about the country’s survival. In 2011 he already said that “Iran is developing nuclear weapons and poses the greatest threat to our existence since the War of Independence. Iran’s terror wings surround us from the north and south.”[16]

Existential threats to Israel are an integral part of the ideology of important factions of Islam. Those who whitewash these threats and call the Israeli reactions “paranoid” are indirect allies and supporters of these genocide promoters.