Following are Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's remarks at the start of the weekly Cabinet meeting today:

"This week we will mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day.  The UN decided to mark this day at the initiative of the Israeli government and then Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom, and it was an important decision.  It created an international framework for discussion of the Holocaust, certainly in several countries – not in Europe – for which it is important to do so.

I was in the Netherlands last week and I was impressed that while this issue is being dealt with, it must be dealt with on a deeper level.  Israel has decided to mark during the same week, the struggle against anti-Semitism, a struggle which is being led by [Public Diplomacy and Diaspora Affairs] Minister Yuli Edelstein, in new, creative and important ways.

Yad Vashem Council Chairman Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau and Yad Vashem Directorate Chairman Avner Shalev are here today.  Their work is making waves around the world, as is the assistance in the overall struggle given by the Jewish Agency led by our friend Natan Sharansky.

We are also marking 70 years since the Wansee Conference.  Seventy years ago at a luxurious villa on the shores of a pastoral lake in one of the suburbs of Berlin, ten senior officials of the German Third Reich met and, over breakfast, decided to annihilate the Jewish People.  They also decided on the ways to how they would do this.
 
Our friend Yossi Peled – a Holocaust survivor, former GOC Northern Command in the IDF and now a minister in the Israeli Government – attended the ceremony this week.

Seventy years ago, the Jewish People were helpless.  It had no ability – neither political, nor military nor diplomatic – to organize its defense, and one-third of our people were annihilated.  The difference between 1942 and 2012 is not the absence of enemies, that same desire to destroy the Jewish People and the State that has arisen, this desire exists and has not changed.  The difference is our ability to defend ourselves and to do so with determination.

The Jewish People and the Government of Israel have the obligation and the right to prevent another annihilation of the Jewish People or attack on its state."