Israeli President Reuven Rivlin has reportedly decided not to renew his signature on an annual petition calling for Israel to officially recognize the Armenian genocide.
According to Channel 10, Rivlin was apparently concerned not to further harm Israel’s strained relations with Turkey.
The president’s official residence confirmed that Rivlin had not signed the petition, Channel 10 said. It said unnamed Foreign Ministry officials welcomed the president’s “statesmanship.”
Throughout his lengthy political career, Rivlin has been a staunch and vocal advocate of official recognition as genocide of the mass killings of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire in 1915.
Last year, as a Likud member of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, he highlighted the differences between the Holocaust and the murder of the Armenian people. But without blurring those differences, Israel must find a way to “fulfill its moral obligation of remembering wrongs done to others,” he said.
He added it was "inconceivable that the Knesset would ignore this tragedy, the historical facts of which are so well established. We find it hard to forgive the disregard of other peoples and unfortunately for us we should not ignore other people's misfortunes."
Estimates suggest that approximately 1.5 million Armenians (as well as hundreds of thousands of other Christian minorities) were killed by Ottoman Turks during and after World War I.
Turkey denies that the deaths of large segments of its minority populations were the direct result of genocidal policies, and maintains that those killed were victims of war and civil unrest in the Ottoman Empire.
Israel has avoided formally recognizing the Armenian genocide in the political arena for years, for fear of straining diplomatic ties with Turkey, which was Israel’s closest ally in the Muslim world until the deterioration under the leadership of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, an open supporter of Hamas who has issued a stream of highly critical statements about Israel.
Ties have been all but frozen in recent years as a consequence of the 2010 killing of nine Turkish activists by Israeli naval commandos when when they intercepted the Turkish ship Mavi Marmara that sought to break Israel’s security blockade of Hamas-run Gaza.
But despite low political ties, Turkish-Israeli economic ties have grown steadily.