Prime Minister of Albania Edi Rama visited the Knesset on Monday, and addressed the Knesset Plenum in a special debate held in his honor. Prime Minister Rama said, “I am quite sure that Albania, which I represent, and the people of my nation—who stood, as few others did, for the Jewish people—truly deserve every respect from the State of Israel. And so did [deserve] the highly distinguished Presidential Medal of Honor that His Excellency President Herzog, a noble and faithful friend of Albania, bestowed on me.”
After quoting from the late Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s historical address to the Knesset, the Prime Minister of Albania said, “I could not find better words with which to begin my own address and to steady my breath against the very real emotion I knew I would feel in this very special place. I can inform you that my knees are trembling. There is another reason my knees are trembling, to be fully sincere with you. I also knew that speaking here would feel like a speech delivery exam, having to deliver it in front of one of the top five speakers in the world, at least in my own chart—Prime minister mk Netanyahu. Allow me to extend to the Speaker of this House, my highest appreciation for his meaningful words, to the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition, my deepest respect and my most heartfelt thanks for the generous words they shared about Albania and about myself. And to this House—my very profound gratitude for welcoming me here today.
“Seventy-three Albanians of all faiths [were] recognized as Righteous Among the Nations, whose memory shines within the walls of human dignity at Yad Vashem. Small Albania was always a safe refuge for Jews, long before our era, and ordinary Albanians made that very small place the only country on Europe’s map to emerge from the Second World War with more Jews than it had when it entered.
“No one else in Europe can claim such a historical clean sheet, with not a single Jew—not one—handed over to the Nazis. And no one better than Albania can bear witness to a simple truth, that being Muslim and being antisemitic are not bound together by faith in God, but by God’s most abhorrent betrayal. And [there is] no greater honor and heavy responsibility than to bear witness to this truth here in the heart of Israel, at a moment in which the heartbreaking war in Gaza—through the unbearable suffering of innocent families, both Israeli and Palestinian—has opened a new window of opportunity for peacebuilding efforts to succeed. Part of this great honor for me is to come here after the Albanian Parliament ratified the decision to join President Trump in his efforts for peace and conflict resolution, and to make Albania a founding member of his Board of Peace, humbly contributing to the monumental task of turning the new window of opportunity into a new horizon of hope and prosperity for the people of Gaza and for the region.
“[I have always felt] sorry for respected and well-meaning international public leaders or associations who rightly described Gaza as an open-air free prison, but failed to identify the true jailer of the people of Gaza. They failed to recognize that the jailer of Gaza is Hamas, no one else but Hamas. Its ideology of terror—against its own people first and foremost, and toward the Jewish nation—that no Palestinian life is worth living until the State of Israel is annihilated. Therefore, until Hamas is fully dismantled, its two million prisoners will never be truly free and no peace can endure.
“There is a profound history that binds our peoples together; the culminating chapter, of course, is the dark time of the Holocaust. But our shared legacy stretches back for centuries. It is better to die than give up your guest. And since Jews happened to be Albania’s guests when the most fearsome machinery of death humanity had ever created reached our land, for Albanians—and first and foremost for Muslim Albanians—the choice was cruelly simple. We would rather die than give up our Jews.
“This luminous chapter of Albanian history carries a message of pressing relevance for today’s world, that must be reminded again and again of what Hannah Arendt taught us—evil is often not demonic or spectacular, but ordinary, and the risk of being it—evil—it is simply banal. The tragedy of the Holocaust was not only the cruelty of a few, it was the passivity of the many. But in one small country, our country, the opposite happened. Our people were poor, they lacked power, they had no army. But they possessed something infinitely more precious for that moment in history—the ability to see a human face and recognize a moral obligation.
“When others delivered their Jews to the authorities, Albanians delivered them to safety. This story is not an ornament, it is a compass we must follow, if we wish to remain worthy of the gift of life granted to us by the same God, and to make something worthy of that gift on this earth, so that our children and their children will not suffer tomorrow because of what we lack the courage to face today or fail to learn from yesterday. That is why Albania was among the first countries in Europe to pass new advanced legislation against antisemitism.
“My question here is this—how is it possible that the global media talks about 30,000 people killed in three days [in Iran], but there is no gathering in any square in Europe against the ayatollahs that calls for the end of that regime?
“I very much wish that the Abrahamic Accords will continue, and I wish that perhaps, by looking at the bloody past through the eyes of a brighter future, rather than the other way around, this region as a whole will reveal not only that peace is possible, but that peace can lift all peacemaking nations, all of us as a miracle, within the realm of the Abrahamic faiths.
“Albania could not feel more blessed than to count both Israel and the Arab countries among its close friends,” said Prime Minister Rama, and went on to quote the late Prime Minister of Israel, Yitzhak Rabin, “We are embarking upon a new path, which could lead us to an era of peace, to the end of wars.”
The Prime Minister of Albania summed up, “May the memory of those who perished be a blessing, may the courage of those who refused to comply remain a compass; may the State of Israel flourish and be safe for eternity; may Palestinians be free and live with dignity in their own state; and may our two small nations, immense in spirit, remain bound not only by history, but by shared commitment to keep humanity human.”