ISRAEL’S Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu left hours after Yom Kippur Wednesday night for New York to address the UN, pledging to give a fitting response to Iran’s desire to “sentence us to death.”
In an unusual letter to the Israeli public before leaving for the US, Netanyahu wrote that history showed that those who desired to wipe the Jewish people “off the map” failed, while the Jewish people persevered and overcame all obstacles.
Netanyahu – referring to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s speech to the UN on Wednesday – said that while “we prayed to be inscribed in the Book of Life, a platform was given to a dictatorial regime in Iran that strives, at every opportunity, to sentence us to death.”
“This is a bad day for those who chose to stay in the hall and listen to these words of slander,” Netanyahu said of Ahmadinejad’s speech to the UN Wednesday.
Only the Israeli, Canadian and US delegations absented themselves from the hall during his speech. Israel’s delegation was not present in any event at the UN meeting Wednesday because of Yom Kippur.
Netanyahu wrote that on the day before Yom Kippur, Ahmadinejad – in comments to the US media – said Israel would be eliminated.
“As the prime minister of Israel, the state of the Jewish people, I am working in every way so that Iran will not have nuclear weapons,” he wrote, one of the few times he has penned an open letter to the public.
The themes Netanyahu touched upon in his letter are expected to be woven into his speech that, according to sources in his office, will focus on Iran, even though Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas will deliver his speech to the UN’s General Assembly some 15 minutes prior to Netanyahu and is expected to call for the UN to admit “Palestine” as a non-member observer state in the General Assembly.
While Netanyahu, who is known to change his speeches up to the last minute, is likely to make reference to the Palestinians, his address will be dominated by the threat of a nuclear Iran. Jerusalem Post
