This is a suggested address by President Herzog to the nation on the 80th anniversary of the bombing of the King David Hotel

A brief note: I live in Canada and certainly don’t presume to speak for Israel’s president, but the below is a speech I thought appropriate for this week’s important anniversary.

The eve of Tisha b’Av, 8 Av 5786 · 22 July 2026

My brothers and sisters. Citizens of Israel.

Eighty years ago tonight, in this city, a wing of the King David Hotel came down in fire and dust. Ninety one people were killed. They were British and Arab and Jewish. The explosives had been carried in milk churns and set beneath the offices of the Mandate. And when the smoke cleared, something more than a building had fallen.

I do not stand here to relitigate that day. Others have argued for eighty years about the warnings that were or were not given, about who bore the guilt and who bore the grief. I leave that to the historians. I want to speak about the wound underneath it, because the King David was never really a story about the British. It was a story about us. In those years we were a people learning, painfully, whether we could act as one. There had been the season we do not like to name, when Jews handed other Jews to the authorities, brother informing on brother. There would come, two years later, the guns of the Altalena, fired by Jews at Jews within sight of these shores. On the night of the King David, a resistance that had briefly stood together came apart, each faction certain it alone held the future in its hands.

We are marking this on the eve of Tisha b’Av. That was not my choosing. It was the calendar’s. And I have come to believe the calendar is trying to tell us something tonight, if we are willing to sit still long enough to hear it.

Tomorrow we sit on the floor and read Lamentations. We mourn two houses of stone. And our sages, when they asked why the second of those houses fell, gave an answer we should read very slowly this year.

They said the second house did not fall for idolatry. The people of that generation studied Torah day and night. They kept the commandments. They gave charity to the poor. By every visible measure they were devout. And still the house fell. The reason our sages gave was one thing only. Sinat chinam. Baseless hatred, one Jew for another. And they said something that should stop the breath in our chests: that on the scale of heaven, baseless hatred weighs as much as idolatry and bloodshed and every forbidden thing, all of them together.

Hold that in your hand for a moment. A generation that kept every law, and hated the brother standing beside it, lost everything. Their piety did not save them. Their learning did not save them. Nothing saves a house that has gone to war with itself.

For two thousand years since then we have prayed for a third house. And I want to say something tonight that some of you will hear as close to heresy, and I ask you to stay with me to the end.

I do not believe the third house is waiting to be built. I believe we are standing inside it.

I do not speak of stones on the mountain. I do not speak of what some would raise on the Temple Mount, and God keep us from lighting that fire. I speak of the house we already live in. The sovereign home of the Jewish people, restored after two thousand years of exile, gathered out of the ash of Europe and the courtyards of Baghdad and the villages of the Atlas mountains and those new Olim from the Western world. The prayer we say in every synagogue on every Shabbat calls this state reishit........

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