The Israeli prime minister delivered one of the most charged speeches of his career this Tuesday during the state Memorial Day ceremony at the Mount Herzl military cemetery in Jerusalem. “In every generation they rise up to destroy us. In this generation too”, Netanyahu declared before bereaved families and President Isaac Herzog.

The comparison to the Shoah was explicit and painful. “Had we not acted against this existential threat with determination and boldness, the names Natanz, Fordow, and Isfahan would have joined the names of the extermination camps of the Holocaust: Auschwitz, Majdanek, and Treblinka”. According to the prime minister, Israel and the United States dismantled the Iranian regime’s machinery of destruction in time.

But the ceremony was not fully solemn. Netanyahu was heckled during his speech by protesters who shouted “They died in the tunnels!”, in reference to hostages who perished in Gaza. It is an unprecedented image at a state act of this symbolic weight, and reflects the internal fracture of Israeli society in the midst of the longest war in its recent history.