(Jan. 1, 2026 / JNS) Below is text from the remarks delivered by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a JNS event at the Shul of Bal Harbour in Surfside, Fla., on Dec. 31, 2025.

We stand here on the last day of 2025 in Miami, in the great state of Florida. I don’t know of anyone who doesn’t go to Florida these days, and most of them stay. It’s a pleasure to be among proud Jews and proud non-Jewish friends of the Jewish people and the State of Israel, who understand that unity, strength and resolve, are the guardians and guarantors of our future. Unity, strength and resolve, that’s what makes the difference.

Now we were—the tragedy of the history of our people is that having been exiled from our land, we lost strength, unity and resolve, and the consequences were horrific, more than any other afflicted people in history. We were expelled from land to land. We suffered pogroms. We suffered massacres, culminating in the greatest massacre of them all, the Holocaust, in which a third of our people were lost.