Israel’s President Warns Against Using The Holocaust To Justify Israel
Reuven Rivlin Image by Getty Images
By Naomi Zeveloff April 24, 2017
Israeli President Reuven Rivlin spoke against using the Holocaust as the only lens through which to understand Jewish history, warning that such an approach could damage Israel’s relations with the world community.
“We need to ask ourselves: Whether, when we are involved only in preventing a Shoah, are we capable of most effectively meeting the various challenges that face us?” he said in a speech on Sunday ahead of Holocaust Remembrance Day. “The Shoah is permanently branded in our flesh. Each of us has a number on our arm. Nevertheless, the Shoah is not the lens through which we should examine our past and our future.”
Rivlin said he disagreed with other Israeli leaders who invoked the Holocaust in modern warfare, such as former Prime Minister Menachem Begin who framed Israeli military ventures in Lebanon in 1982 in terms of preventing another Holocaust.
Rivlin said that the challenge of the Jewish people is to both remember the Holocaust as a unique event that specifically targeted Jews and at the same time to not let it justify modern-day decisions.
Contact Naomi Zeveloff at [email protected] or on Twitter @naomizeveloff
This is a moment of great uncertainty. Here’s what you can do about it.
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news this Passover. All donations are being matched by the Forward Board - up to $100,000.
This is a moment of great uncertainty for the news media, for the Jewish people, and for our sacred democracy. It is a time of confusion and declining trust in public institutions. An era in which we need humans to report facts, conduct investigations that hold power to account, tell stories that matter and share honest discourse on all that divides us.
With no paywall or subscriptions, the Forward is entirely supported by readers like you. Every dollar you give this Passover is invested in the future of the Forward — and telling the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
The Forward doesn’t rely on funding from institutions like governments or your local Jewish federation. There are thousands of readers like you who give us $18 or $36 or $100 each month or year.
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
