JERUSALEM -- Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday warned enemies against testing his country, in remarks opening Israel's annual memorial day for the 6 million Jews systematically killed by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II.
Speaking at the main ceremony at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, Netanyahu said the lesson of the Holocaust is that "we must be able to defend ourselves by ourselves against all threats and any enemy." He said that lesson guides him "every morning and every evening."
Netanyahu said Israel has transformed itself into a strong nation with one of the "strongest defensive forces in the world," and he warned that "those that seek to destroy us will put themselves in danger of destruction." He cited Iran and the Islamic State militant group as being among those that are "publicly striving to destroy us."
The Nazis and their collaborators wiped out a third of the world's Jews. The state of Israel was established three years after the end of World War II, and hundreds of thousands of survivors made their way to Israel.
Netanyahu said world powers knew by 1942 of the mass killings of Jews, and that if allies would have intervened by bombing the death camps, millions of people could have been saved.
He said that although there hasn't been anything on the scale and scope of the Holocaust since World War II, other nations mostly have not intervened in mass killings around the world, from Cambodia to Sudan and now Syria.
However, Netanyahu said, "amid the darkness" there are some "points of light."
Among them, he said, was U.S. President Donald Trump's "determined answer to the slaughter of the Syrian children by chemical weapons." He was referring to the U.S. missile strike earlier this month on a Syrian air base the U.S. believed to be the launching pad for a chemical-weapons attack that killed dozens of civilians.
Syrian President Bashar Assad has denied he was behind the attack in the opposition-held town of Khan Sheikhoun in Syria's northern Idlib province.
Netanyahu said Israel is not apathetic to the suffering in Syria. He noted that his country has helped thousands of wounded Syrians who reach Israel's northern frontier, providing them with medical treatment in Israeli hospitals.
Israeli President Reuven Rivlin took a different approach in his remarks. He said that although the Holocaust is "permanently branded in our flesh," it "is not the lens through which we should examine our past and our future."
The Israeli flag was lowered to half-staff at the beginning of the ceremony Sunday evening as a military honor guard stood nearby. Psalms and the Jewish prayer for the dead were recited. Six survivors lit six symbolic torches to commemorate the 6 million Jews who were killed.
The annual memorial day is one of the most solemn days on Israel's calendar. Restaurants and places of entertainment shut their doors, and TV stations either cease broadcasting or dedicate programming almost exclusively to Holocaust documentaries, interviews with survivors and melancholy music.
This morning, Israel will come to a standstill as sirens wail for two minutes. Pedestrians typically stop in their tracks, and cars and buses halt on the streets while drivers and passengers step out of their vehicles to stand with their heads bowed.
Other ceremonies include the public reading of names of Holocaust victims at Israel's parliament and elsewhere around the country.
Message from Trump
In a video message taped for Sunday's meeting of the World Jewish Congress Plenary Assembly in New York, Trump noted the murder of Jews during the Holocaust.
"The mind cannot fathom the pain, the horror and the loss. Six million Jews, two-thirds of the Jews in Europe, murdered by the Nazi genocide," Trump said. "They were murdered by an evil that words cannot describe, and that the human heart cannot bear."
Trump, who is scheduled to visit the Holocaust Museum in Washington this week, spoke at length in the video Sunday about the bravery and sacrifice of the Jewish people who were killed and the families who suffered during the Holocaust.
He pledged that the U.S. will "stand strong with Israel."
"We must stamp out prejudice and anti-Semitism everywhere it is found," Trump said.
The Trump administration was criticized in January for its International Holocaust Remembrance Day statement, which referred to "the victims, survivors, heroes of the Holocaust" but did not specifically mention Jews. White House officials defended the decision, saying they sought to take into account all who suffered.
Anti-Semitism report
A report by Tel Aviv University on worldwide anti-Semitism, traditionally released a few hours ahead of the annual ceremony, said violent attacks on Jews dropped for a second-straight year in 2016, but that other forms of anti-Semitism are on the rise worldwide, particularly on U.S. university campuses.
Campuses experienced a 45 percent rise in anti-Semitic incidents, mostly insults and harassment of Jewish students, the report said. These were usually connected to increased anti-Israel activities by pro-Palestinian groups on campus, said Dina Porat, a historian who leads the team of researchers behind the report.
While the report dealt only with cases through the end of 2016, Porat said there were no indications that the increase was connected to the tense U.S. election or to Trump's presidency.
Researchers said vandalism, global assaults specifically targeting Jews, and other violent incidents fell 12 percent last year. They recorded 361 cases compared with 410 in 2015, which had already been the lowest number in a decade.
The figure reported Sunday is the lowest since 2003, when 360 incidents were recorded.
The report attributed much of the drop to increased security measures in European countries
Jewish leaders who commented on the report praised the increased security measures, but they warned that anti-Semitism was becoming more mainstream and acceptable, especially on the far left and right of European politics.
"We see a dramatic growth in the number of parliamentarians who allow themselves to express anti-Semitic views," said Moshe Kantor, president of the European Jewish Congress, an umbrella group representing Jewish communities across the continent. Kantor cited the dispute over anti-Jewish remarks made by some members of Britain's Labor Party who support Palestinian statehood.
Jewish leaders also note the close defeat of the far-right candidate in last year's Austrian presidential election as well as the popularity of Marine Le Pen, who will enter a runoff for the French presidency next month. Although Le Pen has promised to be the protector of French Jews against Muslims and migrants, her National Party has historically denied the Holocaust, and some of her policy proposals are seen by many as anti-Semitic.
"We are very, very close today to a situation in which anti-Semites will come to executive power," Kantor said.
Information for this article was contributed by Ariel David of The Associated Press.
A Section on 04/24/2017