Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Danon, on Tuesday gave an interview to MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell, in the wake of the fall of Bashar Al-Assad’s regime in Syria.
In the interview, Danon made clear that the State of Israel will take all necessary steps to neutralize threats against Israeli citizens.
“We are not getting involved in the fight within Syria, but we are taking the measures to protect ourselves,” he explained.
“These are defensive temporary measures, and basically what we did is we took over some of the posts that were on the border once the Syrian military abandoned them.”
“We will not allow the Iranians to come back to our border,” Danon clarified. “We learned the lesson from Lebanon. There was chaos in Lebanon, Iran took advantage of that chaos, and we suffered from it for years. We are determined not to repeat that mistake.”
“We will wait to see what is happening today with the regime in Syria, whether they are peaceful or they are radical like we know from the past of those leaders, that they are not peace-loving leaders,” said Danon. “We will have to be patient about it. We have no intention to stay on those positions forever, but we have to ensure that we don’t see radical Iranian groups on our borders again.”