[6][1] Belief that Jews are threatened by another existential event, like the Holocaust, is an important element in support for the Israeli state and its military.
He also justified Operation Opera, the 1981 bombing of an Iraqi nuclear reactor, by stating that by ordering the strike he had prevented another Holocaust.
[7] For example, in 2017 President Reuven Rivlin said that he disagreed with Begin's invocation of "another Treblinka": "According to this approach, the justification for the existence of the State of Israel is the prevention of the next Holocaust.
[18][19] Its signatories included Irwin Cotler, former Attorney-General of Canada; the organiser of the letter was Dan Eldad, former acting State Attorney of Israel.
[18] The same argument was made by Jens David Ohlin, dean of Cornell Law School, in a post on the Opinio Juris group blog.
[21][22] The coining of the label "genocide bombing" is sometimes attributed to Irwin Cotler, in remarks he made in the Canadian Parliament in 2002;[23][24] however, the phrase was used by the UK's ambassador, Stephen Gommersall, during an April 1996 meeting of the UN Security Council.