Reuven RivlinVerified account

The responsibility that Germany bears is heavy. It is particularly heavy because today, Europe - like parts of the world at large- is again changing, pursued by the ghosts of the past. Conceptions of superiority, nationalist purity, xenophobia, ugly and blatant antisemitism.

Let me immediately make it clear: we are not in the 1930s. We are not on the brink of a second Shoah or anything like it. But we cannot ignore the old-new antisemitism, the racism and xenophobia directed particularly against Jews Muslims and foreigners once again raising its head

Human rights, liberty and human solidarity also went up in smoke from the crematoria at Auschwitz. And that is the most central and jarring message of the Shoah: that Shoah – destruction - can happen.

This is a war that we must sign up for generation after generation. To uproot the weeds, wherever they grow, day after day. We must not relent. Germany must not fail.

If Germany fails trying to prevent the disaster, others everywhere are likely to fail. If, in the place that the Holocaust of the Jews was born Jews cannot live freely, they cannot live free of fear anywhere in Europe.

I believe and wish that the people of Germany and its leaders will continue, in the coming decades, to repel hatred and incitement and continue to set an example of leadership for whom historic commitment, responsibility, moderation and toleration, are its guiding lights.

We do not have the privilege of ignoring either the Iranian leadership’s policy or its rhetoric. We all know well how rhetoric that preaches hatred, hatred of Israel, to destroy it, how dangerous it is. We all know its power.

The threat posed today by the Iranian leadership is not theoretical. For us, it is existential. We are not the ones to describe it like this, but rather the Iranian leadership, which definitively claims that it aims to destroy the State of Israel as its political-diplomatic goal