Chief of Staff: Anyone Who Lies About the Holocaust Can't Be Allowed Lethal Weapons

On Monday, September 19, the Chief of the General Staff, LTG Aviv Kohavi, began his first official visit to the Republic of Poland. The Chief of the General Staff visited the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp alongside a delegation of combat commanders from the operational level of all branches of the IDF.

As part of the tour, the Chief of the General Staff visited Block 27, the Jewish Pavilion. There, LTG Kohavi located the names of his relatives who were murdered during the Holocaust. Following the tour, the Chief of the General Staff participated in a ceremony held by the delegation dedicated to the human spirit and Jewish heroism in Birkenau.

Kohavi said: “You do not need to be a historian or a researcher in order to understand the atrocities of the Holocaust: You need to be a human being! The pits full of skeletons and corpses and the crematoria cry out from the forests and the extermination camps. Any person who lies and denies the truth of this devastating and agonizing history is a person who easily lies today and will continue to do so in the future with no hesitation. This is an additional reminder that such people must not be allowed to possess any sort of capability to develop lethal weapons. We did not come here to be enraged or hateful, but rather to strengthen the remembrance and its outcomes. We came to empathize with the pain and try to decipher meaning from the incomprehensible.”

“If you, the victims of the Holocaust, were given the opportunity to make one final wish before being lined up at the edge of the pit you had just finished digging, if you were given a split second to contemplate, after whispering ‘Shema Yisrael’, you would likely have wished that the Jewish nation have its own defense force, to avert and deflect any enemy on its own. You could not have imagined then that your grandchildren, or at least the neighbor’s grandchildren, would wear the uniforms of the Hebrew Army, and that we, sixteen unit and battalion commanders, would stand here today as this generation’s representatives of that army.” (INN / VFI News)

A corrupt witness mocks at justice, and the mouth of the wicked gulps down evil. - Proverbs 19:28