October 13, 2025

Source: https://youtu.be/K2LRK4frOk4?si=rCvq21huW-_WHfpL

Yair Lapid, Israel’s centrist opposition leader since January 2023 and the 14th prime minister (July to December 2022), hailed President Donald Trump for brokering the October 2025 agreement that freed the remaining 20 living Israeli hostages and ended two years of war. Speaking to the Knesset with emotion and gratitude, he declared that Trump had “saved worlds,” had restored hope and deserved the Nobel Peace Prize.

Lapid called the moment redemptive and transformative, urging Israelis to honor their fallen by rebuilding a democratic, values-based Israel and extending peace to Arab neighbors. Rejecting accusations of genocide in Gaza, he insisted that Israel fought terrorists, not civilians, and framed the struggle with Hamas and its supporters as one between good and evil. The war’s end, he said, offers Israel a chance for moral renewal, innovation and partnership with the United States in shaping a new Middle East.

In a message for the protesters on the streets of Europe and the campuses of North America, as well as to enemies such as Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and the Iranian regime, Lapid declared that Israel is not a temporary entity that can be wiped off the map. “We are here to stay.”

— Ken Stein and Michael Jacobs, October 24, 2025

Opposition leader Yair Lapid: Mr. Speaker, members of Knesset, ministers, President Herzog, Prime Minister Netanyahu, distinguished guests, your excellency President Trump, for two years, we waited for this moment. Two years of sleepless nights, two years without air in our lungs. Our eyes are filled with tears today. Our hearts are filled with gratitude. Our children are coming home.

In the Babylonian Talmud, a sacred book of the Jewish people, it is written, “Whoever destroys one life, it is as though you destroyed an entire world. And whoever saves one life, it is though as he has saved an entire world.” Mr. President, you have saved the lives of our hostages. But you saved so much more. You have saved the souls of the bereaved whose loved ones now will be brought home for burial. You have saved thousands of soldiers who will now not fall in battle, and you have saved millions from the horrors of war. You have saved more than one life, and each life is an entire world.

This is a historic moment and a reminder that history is shaped by people. It is shaped by those who know the past but have the vision to change the future. When you were elected, you declared that you would be the president of peace. You have kept your word. The fact that you were not awarded the Nobel Peace Prize is a grave mistake by the committee. But they will have no choice, Mr. President. They will have to award it to you next year.

Peace will not come by waiting. It will come by building, by reaching out and by daring once again to believe. You, Mr. President, have done the unimaginable. We will be eternally grateful. But we also need to take responsibility. The destiny of Israel will always be written by the people of Israel. We must now prove ourselves worthy of what has been achieved.

From its founding, Israel has said to the world that our strength, our power, rests upon our values. Israel is the strongest country in the Middle East because we are the only democracy in the Middle East, because we believe in the principles laid in our Declaration of Independence, which says Israel will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants, irrespective of religion, race or sex. It will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture. It will safeguard the holy places for all religions. Those are our values. That is who we are as people, as a country.

Our neighbors must understand one more thing about us: We are not going anywhere. The Middle East is our home. We are here to stay. Our story did not end in the Bible. It began there. It continues in our laboratories and universities, in our innovation hubs.

Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran and the Houthis, they all read the wrong intelligence reports. The real intelligence report on Israel’s intentions is found in the Book of Genesis: “And I will give you and your descendants after you the land of Canaan for an everlasting possession.” We call upon the nations of the Islamic world and all our neighbors, Saudi Arabia, Syria, others: We are here to stay. We can do great things together; come and talk to us.

Mr. President, you are the one who can make it happen, as you did with the historic Abraham Accords. Then, too, no one believed it was possible. Then, too, you imposed your vision on everyone. While others spoke of difficulties, you created opportunity. You can be the one to bring the next wave of peace.

The people of Israel support this. They want this. We are ready.

And you can later today in Egypt with your unbelievably talented team, my friends Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner, Marco Rubio, Peter Hegseth, forge a regional alliance that will change not only the Middle East, but the entire world. After two years of war the peoples of this region should look around and ask themselves whose situation is better: those who chose the path of peace or those who chose the path of war, those who invested in their people, in the education of their children, in science and technology, or those who invested in hate and in violence.

From here, I say to all those who demonstrated against Israel these past two years on the streets of London and Rome, in Paris and in Columbia University — I do not represent the government, as you know; I am the leader of the opposition — and I tell you then you were deceived. You were deceived. Propaganda experts funded by terror money manipulated you. Now that the war has stopped, you have time and a chance to go and learn the facts.

The truth is, there was no genocide, no intentional starvation. The truth is, there was an army and a country fighting in the most complicated conditions imaginable against terrorists who send their own children to die for a photo op, who use their own children as human shields. The truth is that the democratic state was attacked by a fanatical terrorist organization; 1,200 people were killed in one day. Women were raped. Babies were burned alive. And all that, and all the while, they played with your minds, selling you the absurd idea that supporting Islamic terror is somehow a liberal value.

There is good and evil in this world. When you stand with Hamas, you stand with evil. When you stand with Hezbollah, you stand with evil. When you stand with the Iranian regime, you stand with evil. When you stand with Israel, you stand on the side of justice.

Last week I attended the 7th October memorial ceremony. An inspirational woman called Galit Dan spoke onstage. Galit had a daughter, Noya, a 13-year-old girl who was autistic like my daughter. And Noya was full of light. She loved Harry Potter. On that dark day, Noya was sleeping at her grandmother Carmela’s house in Kibbutz Nir Oz. Carmela was 80 years old. Their bodies, grandmother and granddaughter, were found embraced. They were murdered together. Onstage at the ceremony, Galit said a sentence that moved us all. “We don’t want revenge,” she said. “We want redemption.”

Today the redemption begins. Israel has endured two terrible years on the battlefield and in the international arena. But in those two years we also rediscovered our own greatness. We remembered how good we can be. Our pilots who took control of the skies over Iran. Our industries leading the world in technology. Our civil society, which reached out to help every victim of the war.

We will move forward toward a different future. Our heroic soldiers who saved us all will fold away their uniforms and rise as teachers and engineers, scientists and innovators, investors and small-business owners. We will never be able to repay the debt to those who sacrificed everything these past years, to those who, as President Lincoln said, gave the last full measure of devotion. We can only be worthy of them, worthy of their sacrifice.

Mr. President, allow me to speak also to the businessman in you, the dealmaker who understands value. If there were one stock in the world I would invest in today, it is the State of Israel. If there were one nation that deserves unrestricted access to GPU [graphics processing unit] chips, to AI [artificial technology] and SMR [small modular (nuclear) reactor] technologies, to American markets, it is the State of Israel. Israel’s future is intertwined with our eternal alliance, our strategic and moral covenant with our greatest friends, the United States of America.

This war is over. We will always need to stay vigilant, to guard against those who seek our destruction. But the State of Israel is about to reinvent itself. The challenges ahead demand not only strength, but a new vision. It’s time to take a new path, to be a nation that is advanced and thriving and peace-seeking. We have waited for this moment, for the end of the war, for the return of the hostages, for the chance to re-channel our grief and loss into the energy needed to rebuild our nation.

Thanks to you, Mr. President, thanks to our soldiers’ alliance, thanks to the millions of great Israeli patriots who filled the streets and the square and never, not for one moment, gave up on the hostages, thanks to all of them, the strength within us can now rise, succeed and build for our future and for our children.

Thank you very much. God bless the United States of America. Am Yisrael chai [the people Israel live].