Blog

A lone protester outside my embassy raised an obvious question: How would replacing the Middle East’s only free country with yet another authoritarian Arab state advance the cause of freedom?

As I drove back to the embassy today, one man stood outside alone in the rain, holding a “Free Palestine” flag.

It takes real commitment to stand alone in the rain for hours with a flag. It also takes, in this case, a fair amount of ignorance.

“Free Palestine” is the ultimate oxymoron.

Israel is the only country in the Middle East rated “Free” by Freedom House. Arab citizens of Israel vote in free elections, form political parties, sit in parliament and serve on the bench, demonstrate against the government, and express their opinions openly.

Had the Jewish people vanished from the face of the Earth, and had they not recovered their national freedom in the twentieth century, no “free Palestine” would have emerged. The territory would almost certainly resemble most of its neighbours: another authoritarian and dysfunctional Arab state whose rulers export grievance and instability while their own people pay the price.

When people proclaim “Free Palestine,” which freedom do they have in mind?

No Arab state bordering Israel is rated “Free.” Egypt is an authoritarian military regime. Jordan is a monarchy in which political competition and civil liberties remain tightly constrained. Syria remains unfree after decades of dictatorship and civil war. Lebanon is crippled by sectarianism, corruption, weak institutions and the armed power of Hezbollah.

The governing models already provided by Palestinian nationalism are even less encouraging. Hamas is a jihadist dictatorship that murders political opponents, crushes dissent and tortures critics. The Palestinian Authority is a corrupt and authoritarian regime that arrests and tortures dissidents and rules without a renewed democratic mandate. Neither has held national elections since 2006.

The idea that freedom will be advanced by creating yet another Arab state modelled on its neighbours is contradicted by every available example. It would produce another regime, not another free society. And if “Free Palestine” means replacing Israel, it proposes eliminating the Middle East’s only free country in the name of freedom.

There are broadly two categories of people who proclaim “Free Palestine.” The first consists of jihadists and far-left activists who knowingly misuse the word “freedom” as a euphemism for the elimination of Israel. The second consists of those who repeat the slogan without understanding what it means. The old term for them is “useful idiots.”

The political mythology of “Palestine” has nothing to do with freedom.

The Roman Emperor Hadrian did not invent the name. But after the Bar Kokhba revolt, the Roman authorities replaced the name Judaea with Syria Palaestina, a decision widely understood as an attempt to erase the association between the Jewish people and their homeland.

Centuries later, British imperial rule replaced Ottoman imperial rule and gave Mandatory Palestine its modern administrative form. From 1939 onward, the British Empire restricted Jewish immigration and land purchases and opposed the establishment of a Jewish state, precisely when the Jews of Europe most desperately needed refuge and national independence.

The Palestine Liberation Organization was established in 1964, when the West Bank was controlled by Jordan and the Gaza Strip by Egypt. Its original charter explicitly disclaimed sovereignty over those territories. Its purpose was not to “liberate” them from Israel, since Israel was not there. Its purpose was to eliminate Israel.

After the 1967 Six-Day War, the Soviet Union, itself an immense colonial empire stretching from the Baltic to the Pacific, packaged Palestinian rejectionism as an “anti-colonial struggle.” The hypocrisy was monumental. The propaganda was remarkably successful. Jewish national liberation was recast as colonialism, while Soviet clients and terrorist organizations were marketed as freedom fighters.

That ideological package, which I call Palestinism, fused historical revisionism, hatred of Israel and the familiar utopian promise of redemption through revolution. The Soviet Union has disappeared, but much of the language it manufactured survives.

Several important Arab states have discarded this charade, made peace and normalized relations with Israel. Ignorant ideologues have not. They continue to chant Soviet-era slogans while imagining themselves to be rebels.

The caravan of history passes them by.

Today, so did my car.

My first official duty as Israel’s ambassador-designate became an encounter between memory and diplomacy

In Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Museum, I learned that the Iranian ambassador was walking through the same rooms, only meters away.

I had landed in Japan barely a day earlier. There was no gradual transition: the next morning, I left Tokyo for my first official duty.

Almost overnight, I had gone from private citizen to Israel’s representative under unusually heavy protection. The Iranian ambassador’s presence made that transformation tangible: representatives of two hostile states were walking through rooms devoted to the price of war. The tensions outside had followed me into a museum dedicated to peace.

The irony went deeper. At a press conference in Hiroshima, the Iranian ambassador had placed side by side a photograph of children killed in the atomic bombing and one of 168 Iranian schoolchildren whom he said had been killed by two American missiles in 2026. He thereby turned Hiroshima’s memory into an indictment of the American and Israeli campaign against Iran.

Every child’s death is a tragedy and must be mourned. But the comparison was cynical. The American and Israeli strikes were not atomic attacks designed to annihilate cities. They targeted the nuclear and military infrastructure of a regime that had accumulated uranium enriched to 60 percent and obstructed international inspections, and that actively pursued nuclear weapons while its leaders repeatedly called for Israel’s elimination. Those operations were meant to prevent another Hiroshima, not to cause one.

Yet what stayed with me most deeply was the city itself. The trauma of 6 August 1945 remains present in Hiroshima as a careful preservation of memory.

The museum evoked Yad Vashem for me, not because the histories are equivalent, but because personal objects, photographs, and testimonies restore immense tragedy to its human dimensions.

At the Peace Memorial Ceremony, I laid a wreath and met the mayor. Local high-school students spoke of their commitment to peace. I explained that the Hebrew word shalom is both a greeting and the word for peace. For a Jew, remembrance is an obligation toward the dead and a responsibility toward the future. We must remember tragedy without allowing it the final word.

The most powerful moment came that evening, when two violins bearing memories of the Second World War were played together.

One had belonged to Sergei Palchikoff, a Russian musician who settled in Hiroshima in 1923, taught music there, and survived the atomic bombing. His violin survived as well and was eventually entrusted to Hiroshima Jogakuin University.

The other had belonged to Walter Vetter, a musician murdered at Auschwitz in 1944. Restored as part of the Violins of Hope project, it carries the memory of a Jewish life extinguished in the Holocaust.

As Japanese musicians played, the instruments resonated together without merging the distinct memories they carried. Two violins that had passed through two of the darkest chapters of the twentieth century were producing beauty once more.

For me, as a Jew and as Israel’s representative, the symbolism was overwhelming. The violin carrying the memory of Auschwitz was no longer silent; the violin that survived Hiroshima was not an object behind glass. Both had been returned to life through human hands. Their music offered neither explanation nor consolation. It made a quieter but stubborn assertion: destruction need not have the last sound.

Later, Sima and I joined the lantern-floating ceremony. On our lantern, we wrote a Hebrew prayer for the souls of the victims. As it drifted among thousands of other lights, I felt the intimacy of individual mourning within the immensity of collective remembrance. Each lantern carried its own prayer; together, they formed a river of memory.

During those days, I glimpsed what the Japanese call gaman: enduring the unbearable with patience, restraint, and dignity. In Hiroshima, it meant bearing the past without surrendering to hatred or despair.

It was a solemn way to begin my ambassadorship, but perhaps the most meaningful one. Hiroshima reminded me that diplomacy is not only about interests and negotiations. It is also an encounter between memories.

Those memories need not be merged for those who carry them to recognize one another’s humanity. Sometimes they can remain distinct and still resonate together. In Hiroshima, two violins did exactly that.

The Israel–Lebanon agreement exposes two opposing strategies: defeating Iran’s proxies to restore sovereignty, or appeasing them while pressuring Israel.

The framework agreement signed in Washington between Israel and Lebanon is more than a bilateral security arrangement. It is a strategic test that reveals the choice facing governments that claim to seek regional stability: either roll back the Islamic Republic of Iran and its proxies, or accommodate them while pressing Israel for concessions.

Lebanon’s tragedy has not been a lack of international sympathy. It has been the absence of sovereignty. No state can be sovereign when an armed militia, financed and guided by a foreign power, controls territory and decides matters of war and peace. No government can restore national authority while a terrorist army stronger than its official forces drags the country into wars its citizens did not choose.

That is why Hezbollah’s rejection of the agreement is so revealing. Hezbollah does not oppose it because it weakens Lebanon. It opposes it because it weakens Hezbollah. The logic is simple: Israeli withdrawal must be linked to the removal of the threat that forced Israel into Lebanon in the first place. Withdrawal while Hezbollah remains armed on the border would not be peace. It would be a countdown to the next war.

The agreement exposes two competing doctrines.

The first says that pacifying the Middle East requires defeating, isolating, and containing the Islamic Republic and the militias it has armed across the region. In Lebanon, this means disarming Hezbollah. In Gaza, it means ending Hamas rule. In Yemen, it means stopping the Houthis from threatening shipping. More broadly, it means restoring the monopoly of force to sovereign states.

The second doctrine says the opposite. It assumes that Iran and its clients are permanent features of the region and must therefore be accommodated. It treats Tehran as indispensable, Qatar as a useful channel to Islamist movements, and Israel as the party most easily pressured. Diplomacy, in this view, means managing radical actors rather than defeating them.

That approach has failed wherever it has been tried. In Lebanon, it produced a Hezbollah state within the state. In Gaza, it turned aid and reconstruction into instruments of war for Hamas. In Yemen, it enabled Houthi attacks on global trade. It confused de-escalation with stability and temporary quiet with peace.

Governments now have to choose. They cannot support Lebanese sovereignty while tolerating Hezbollah’s arsenal. They cannot defend international law while accepting that Iranian-backed militias decide when sovereign states go to war. They cannot claim to support stability while asking Israel to make concessions to the forces that made stability impossible.

French President Emmanuel Macron has chosen the second path. His Middle East diplomacy increasingly rests on the belief that stability can be achieved by engaging or rehabilitating actors that helped destabilize the region. The reported preparations for a presidential visit to Damascus, together with France’s growing convergence with Qatar’s regional diplomacy, illustrate that choice.

France is entitled to pursue its own policy. But it should be honest about its meaning. Pressuring Israel while rehabilitating Damascus and moving closer to Doha is not realism. It is appeasement.

The Lebanon agreement points toward a different path. It says that sovereignty matters; that militias cannot hold states hostage; that Israel’s security requirements are not obstacles to peace but preconditions for peace; and that the Iranian project can be rolled back when democratic governments and sovereign Arab states act with clarity.

This lesson matters beyond the Middle East. Countries dependent on Middle Eastern energy, open sea lanes, and freedom of navigation have a direct stake in whether the region is stabilized by restoring sovereignty or destabilized further by rewarding armed proxies. For Japan and other responsible democracies, this touches energy security, maritime order, and the credibility of rules against coercion.

Diplomacy works only when anchored in reality. And the reality is that the Islamic Republic and its proxies have been the main engines of war, terrorism, and fragmentation in the Middle East.

The Lebanon agreement will not implement itself. Hezbollah will resist it. Iran will try to sabotage it. Some governments will try to dilute it in the name of de-escalation. Others will argue that Israel must move first, withdraw first, concede first, and trust that its enemies will moderate later.

That logic has already been tried. It produced rockets, tunnels, militias, and war.

The alternative is to restore sovereignty, disarm militias, isolate the Islamic Republic, and make peace possible by removing the forces that make peace impossible.

That is the choice facing the Middle East. It is also the choice facing every government that claims to support peace in the region.

Speech delivered in Monaco on April 29, 2026, during the celebration of the 78th anniversary of Israel’s independence organized by the Monaco-Israel Friendship Association

I would like to speak this evening about a war that is widely misunderstood—because it is viewed from too close a distance.

Since October 7, 2023, people have been commenting on events, analyzing operations, reacting to images. But they forget to ask the essential question: where does this war come from?

The answer is clear.

The primary source of violence and instability in the Middle East today is the Islamic Republic of Iran.

For more than forty years, this regime has pursued a structured project: to eliminate the State of Israel and to impose a regional domination based on a radical Shiite religious ideology.

To understand this project, one must take its ideological foundation seriously.

The doctrine of the Twelfth Imam—the Mahdi—is central.

According to this belief, his return will inaugurate an era of universal Islamic domination.

In this perspective, chaos is not an accident. It is seen as a catalyst.

And the elimination of Israel is conceived as a step toward that end.

This vision does not remain at the level of ideas. It translates into strategy.

Iran has built a network of militias and armed groups: Hezbollah in Lebanon, Shiite militias in Iraq, the Houthis in Yemen, Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza.

It finances them, arms them, trains them, and coordinates them.

It is developing long-range ballistic missiles, drones, cyberattack capabilities, and pursuing a military nuclear program.

And in some cases, it exercises direct control over states. Lebanon is the most obvious example. In Iraq, this influence is deeply embedded in the security apparatus and in political life.

What Iran calls the “axis of resistance” is in reality an axis of aggression.

A system of encirclement that we in Israel call the “ring of fire.”

And this ring does not target Israel alone.

The Iranian regime is part of a broader vision, influenced in particular by the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood: the idea that the disappearance of Israel would be a step toward a broader victory of political Islam over the West, including in its Christian dimension.

Israel is the immediate target. But it is also a frontline.

In this context, one must be very clear on a key legal point.

Israel’s military actions against Iran and its regional militias fall under the right of self-defense, as recognized by Article 51 of the United Nations Charter.

This right is not limited to responding to an ongoing invasion.

It applies in the face of a continuous, structured, cumulative threat.

State practice shows that a country does not have to wait to be struck in a decisive way when it is confronted with a persistent and organized threat.

Israel faces repeated attacks, military encirclement, and a declared intention of destruction.

Under these conditions, claiming that its actions would be illegal is legally false.

The question, therefore, is not whether Israel has the right to defend itself. It does.

The real question is whether democratic countries choose to recognize this reality—or to ignore it.

Western governments must decide: confront the Iranian threat—or attempt to appease it.

Supporting Israel and the United States does not mean agreeing with everything. It means recognizing the nature of the conflict and taking a stand on a matter of principle.

On this point, many European governments have failed.

Under the pressure of internal politics: migration, the importation of Middle Eastern conflicts into public debate, and electoral calculations.

But also under the effect of a systematic campaign to delegitimize Israel.

This campaign is largely financed by Qatar, amplified by social media, and aims to isolate Israel, to normalize hatred against it, and to deny its right to defend itself.

And it has direct consequences: by demonizing Israel, it legitimizes hatred of Jews and puts Jewish communities in Europe and in America at risk.

The facts are documented.

The Wall Street Journal revealed that the former prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, had been activated and supported by Qatar in his actions targeting Israel.

At the same time, Qatar supported South Africa’s initiative before the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide—even as the South African president supported Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, accused of war crimes and genocide in Sudan.

And today, it must be said plainly: Israel is accused—wrongly—of genocide.

This is a grave accusation. And it is a reversal of reality.

This extremely serious accusation is used as a political weapon.

Genocide is a crime defined precisely in international law. It requires the intent to destroy a group as such.

That intent does not exist on Israel’s side.

It does exist, however, explicitly on the side of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Iranian regime, which openly call for Israel’s destruction.

Accusing Israel of genocide while it is fighting organizations that themselves claim genocidal intent is a reversal of reality.

And it is a deliberate reversal that forms part of a strategy of delegitimization.

This is exactly what Natan Sharansky described as the “three Ds.”

Delegitimization—denying Israel’s right to exist.
Demonization—portraying Israel as inherently criminal.
Double standards—judging Israel according to criteria not applied to any other state.

When these three elements are present, one is no longer in the realm of criticism. One is in the realm of defamation.

If one wishes to assess the conduct of a war seriously, one must look at the facts.

The work of John Spencer—former officer in the U.S. Army, director of the Urban Warfare Program at the Modern War Institute at West Point, and one of the most recognized experts in the world in this field—is particularly illuminating.

Spencer shows that in NATO operations against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, the ratios between combatants and civilians killed are comparable—and often less favorable—than those observed in Israel’s war against Hamas.

He notes that in intense urban warfare, a ratio of 1 combatant to 9 civilians can be considered, tragically, unavoidable.

According to his analyses, the ratios observed in Gaza are below that threshold.

And above all, he emphasizes that no Western army has faced a comparable situation: extreme density, systematic use of human shields, and a tunnel network extending hundreds of kilometers.

These elements do not make war less tragic. But they show that the accusations made against Israel ignore both the reality on the ground and the fact that this war is conducted within the framework of international law.

In this context, some Western analyses are mistaken.

A recent article in The Economist claims that Israel has abandoned its traditional doctrine of short, decisive wars, that it has become entangled in open-ended conflicts without a clear political outcome, and that it now depends on the United States to bring them to an end.

This reading is mistaken. It describes the symptoms, but it confuses symptoms with the cause. Israel did not choose long wars. It was forced into them.

It realized that its traditional doctrine—deterrence, early warning, and decisive victory—was no longer sufficient in the face of a messianic and genocidal regime prepared to sacrifice entire populations, including its own.

The question, therefore, is not whether Israel “prefers” long wars. The question is whether a democracy can still rely on deterrence against an adversary that turns chaos, militias, tunnels, missiles, and nuclear ambitions into instruments of a strategy of annihilation.

Israel has therefore decided to dismantle the architecture of the threat—the “ring of fire.”

This is a strategic necessity.

And it implies a long war.

A war that requires time, consistency, and solidarity.

Yet this solidarity is insufficient.

It is insufficient in certain Western capitals.

To say, as Catherine Vautrin, France’s Minister of the Armed Forces, recently did, that “France cannot accept either Hezbollah or the IDF” is outrageous. This statement reflects a profound moral confusion: the inability to distinguish between a terrorist organization and the army of a democratic state that defends itself within the framework of international law.

To place on the same level those who deliberately target civilians and those who seek to protect them is not a position of balance. It is an error of judgment.

Western solidarity is also largely absent at the United Nations.

The United Nations was founded by democracies. It is now dominated by autocracies.

Russia—which invaded Ukraine—and China—which challenges the international order and threatens Taiwan—hold veto power. They support Iran.

The Human Rights Council includes among its members regimes such as Iran, China, Cuba, and Eritrea.

Mass violators of human rights sit in a body meant to defend them—and lecture democracies.

Under these conditions, demanding a Security Council resolution to act against Iran makes no sense.

Faced with these challenges, Israel acts.

In the Western world, its main allies are Washington and Berlin.

In Asia, Israel’s two major partners are Tokyo and New Delhi.

India is a leading strategic partner.

Japan is evolving rapidly.

And it is in this context that I will have the honor of serving as Israel’s next ambassador to Japan.

Israel is also developing a strategy that challenges certain assumptions.

The “Global South” is not a homogeneous bloc. It is a fiction.

Israel demonstrates this by developing strategic partnerships with countries such as India and Argentina.

And by taking bold diplomatic initiatives, such as recognizing Somaliland.

The Abraham Accords, for their part, have demonstrated their solidity.

The alignment between Israel and the Gulf monarchies is holding.

Normalization with Saudi Arabia is a realistic prospect.

And this opens the way to concrete projects.

For example, a pipeline project linking the Gulf to the Mediterranean via Israel and Saudi Arabia, in order to reduce dependence on the Strait of Hormuz and limit the risks of energy blackmail.

Israel is also playing a growing role in critical minerals—essential for defense technologies, semiconductors, and the industries of the future.

And Israel is a key actor in the IMEC corridor—India–Middle East–Europe—designed as an alternative to China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

It is a strategic project, supported by the United States and its partners. And Israel occupies a central position within it.

Beyond these strategic considerations, allow me to take a step back before concluding.

In 1942, Stefan Zweig, an Austrian Jewish writer among the most famous of his time, took his own life in Brazil.

He had lost faith in the future.

He believed the world he had known would not survive.

Others before him saw the danger coming—but made a different choice.

Theodor Herzl, at the end of the nineteenth century, understood that Jews could not simply hope.

They had to act.

It was this choice—action rather than resignation—that made possible the rebirth of Israel.

And it is this choice that still obliges us today.

In Israel, we carry on our shoulders more than 3,500 years of history.

This implies a responsibility: to be worthy of that heritage.

Thirty-three years ago, I made aliyah—that is, I chose to leave my country of birth and settle in Israel to take part in building the Jewish state.

I did not know what the future would hold.

But I knew that this was where I had to be.

Today, I have the honor of serving my country—and soon as Israel’s ambassador to Japan.

It is a privilege.

But above all, it is a responsibility.

Because what we defend goes beyond our individual trajectories.

And what we defend goes beyond the Middle East.

What we defend is part of a broader confrontation between the United States and China, between two visions of the international order.

In this confrontation, Iran is not an isolated actor.

It is aligned with Russia and China, which support it politically, economically, and militarily.

Hence the importance of positions and principles.

Every state has a voice, regardless of its size.

And on matters of principle, it is courage and moral clarity that count.

Because at the end of the day, what is at stake is the defense of the free world.