Local Armenian leaders were disappointed that President Reuven Rivlin carefully avoided speaking of “genocide” when he officially marked the centennial of the killing of nearly 1.5 million Armenians this week, but he did in fact call it a “genocide” earlier this month, The Times of Israel reports.
Briefing foreign journalists at his official Jerusalem residence on April 13, Rivlin recalled that he was the first Israeli president to speak about the issue at the United Nations in January, and that he quoted Zionist leader Avshalom Feinberg speaking about the Armenians’ fate 100 years ago.
“There is a saying that the Nazis used the Armenian genocide as something that gave them permission to bring the Holocaust into reality, according to their belief that they have to discriminate against the Jewish people. ‘Never again’ belongs to every one of you, all the nations. We cannot allow something like that to happen,” he said.
Rivlin was one of Israel’s most outspoken advocates for recognition of the Armenian genocide. But since he became president last year, he has been careful not to use the word “genocide” in describing the events in Armenia in official speeches and declarations, in accordance with Israel’s official policy not to refer to the events as genocide.
But at the April 13 briefing, Rivlin congratulated Pope Francis on having called the mass killings of Armenians the “first genocide of the 20th century,” adding that this was an important issue for all human beings. “We cannot allow any kind of racism, any kind of anti-Semitism, any opportunity of acting in wars that can be defined as genocide,” Rivlin said. “It is really a value that should be mentioned to everyone, in order to avoid that the words ‘Never Again’ would not only be two words but would mean something,” Rivlin said.
The fact that Israel’s President did utter the word “genocide” two weeks ago might have been a slip of the tongue that revealed his true thoughts on the matter. The President’s Residence did not respond to a request for comment by The Times of Israel.
