‘You will not force us into ghettos again’: Israeli ministers hit out at Europe on eve of Yom HaShoah

"It has much to learn from us, especially the essential lesson of the clear moral distinction between good and evil, which in moments of truth demands that we go to war for the sake of what’s good, for the sake of life.

"Israel, on the other hand, doesn’t forget that eternal responsibility.

"Together with the US, and together with other countries with which we are forging alliances that will be discussed later, we are defending ourselves, in fact we are defending the entire world.”

The prime minister also sought to invoke the occasion to cast the war against Iran as an existential struggle for the Jewish state.

"Together [with the US] we crushed the evil regime in Iran to the core. The ayatollah regime sought to develop nuclear bombs and produce tens of thousands of deadly ballistic missiles designed to annihilate us. It financed and armed its terrorist sympathisers, who sought to suffocate us in a ring of fire,” he went on.

"At the same time, it spread its fanatical ideology to all continents - while defining the West as an "existential threat". It thought it would do so without hindrance. But no more. Our people learned the lesson. Year after year, I pledged at the Holocaust Remembrance Day rally - 'We will not allow Iran to develop nuclear weapons’.

"If we hadn’t acted [against Iran’s nuclear, missile, and other military targets] the names Natanz, Fordow, Isfahan, and Parchin would likely have been remembered with eternal dread, precisely like Auschwitz, Treblinka, Majdanek, and Sobibor.”

Hours later, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich engaged in a social media spat with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, after the latter stated that he was “deeply concerned about developments in the Palestinian territories”, particularly the prospect of “de facto annexation of the West Bank”.

In response, Smotrich called on Merz to “bow his head and apologise a thousand times on behalf of Germany, rather than daring to preach morality to us on how to conduct ourselves against the Nazis of our generation – who murdered, raped, slaughtered, and burned women, the elderly, and children in the most horrific massacre perpetrated against the Jewish people since the terrible Holocaust”.

"We will not accept instructions from hypocritical leaders in Europe, a continent that is once again losing its conscience and its ability to distinguish between good and evil,” he continued.

"Mr Chancellor, the days when Germans dictated to Jews where they were permitted or forbidden to live are over and shall not return. You will not force us into ghettos again, certainly not in our own land.

“Our return to the Land of Israel – our biblical and historical homeland – is the answer to anyone who tried or tries to destroy us, and we do not apologise for it for a single moment. Am Yisrael Chai.”

However, Smotrich’s comments earned him a public rebuke from Israel’s ambassador to Germany, claiming the minister’s rhetoric “erodes the memory of the Holocaust and presents it in a completely distorted way”.

He told Kan Radio: “It is entirely possible and legitimate to argue with the Germans… Political disagreement exists all the time, but Germany is a great friend of Israel.

"Many things Germany does are not acceptable to us, and things we do are not acceptable to them... [but] Germany has proven, especially amid all the criticism of Israel in Europe, that it is our number one friend.”