Israeli president speaks of need to face past, shape future

Israeli President Isaac Herzog on Tuesday addressed the Bundestag as part of a visit that coincides with the 1972 murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics.

The visiting president spoke of the need for remembering both Germany's Jewish past and the Holocaust, as well as the importance of shaping the future.

What did Herzog say in the address?

Addressing lawmakers, Herzog said that being on German soil meant remembrance as it was a land of images for the Jewish people: "Images of the highest achievements and the lowest."

"For hundreds of years Germany was a homeland for our people. Germany was a home of leading personalities," he said, listing a succession of leading Jewish personalities to whom Germany was home before the Holocaust. "They contributed to the improvement of Germany."

However, Herzog added, Germany also held a unique place in Jewish history given its responsibility for the Holocaust.

"Here, this country, Germany was the country where the worst atrocities against the Jewish people, indeed against humanity, were committed."

"Only the dead can forgive, and the living have no right to forget," he said, adding that the future also required attention.  

"The past cannot be overcome but the future belongs to us," said Herzog. "We have a great responsibility for it as well."

The Israeli president said it was important "not to turn a blind eye to the voices of hatred be they in the streets, on social media or political centers of power."

Herzog also highlighted the threat posed by Iran, and the need to stop Iran from having access to nuclear weapons.

"If Iran had nuclear weapons it could use them to destroy another country and this cannot be acceptable," Herzog added.

The Israeli president's comments came as Tehran is engaged in negotiations to revive its 2015 nuclear deal with world powers that granted Iran sanctions relief in return for curbs on its nuclear program. Israelis staunchly opposed to the 2015 agreement.

Herzog, Steinmeier visit former concentration camp Bergen-Belsen 

After giving his address to German lawmakers, Herzog was joined by German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier to lay a wreath at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin.

He and Steinmeier, accompanied by their wives, then visited the memorial site of the former concentration camp Bergen-Belsen near the Lower Saxony town of Celle.

More than 52,000 concentration camp prisoners and around 20,000 prisoners of war died at the notorious site. Among them was the Jewish girl Anne Frank, whose diary became world-famous.

Herzog's father Chaim Herzog, who was the president of Israel from 1983 to 1993, was among the British officers who liberated the camp.

The president said his father had "stood on a wooden box, shouting in Yiddish before hundreds of skeletons."

"'Jews, Jews, are there still Jews alive? Are there still Jews alive on this earth?'" the elder Herzog said, according to his son.

Steinmeier said that Germans had needed time to realize that they too had been liberated, not defeated, at the end of the war. He said the country must "never forget the Holocaust," saying that what cannot be allowed to repeat itself also "must never be forgotten."

After arriving on Sunday, Herzog on Monday attended a commemoration to mark 50 years since the Munich Olympic Games massacre.

Eight gunmen from the Palestinian militant group Black September stormed the Israeli team's apartment at the Olympic village on September 5, 1972.

They shot dead two athletes and took nine hostage. West German police responded with a botched operation in which all the hostages and a police officer were killed.

ab, rc/msh (AFP, epd)

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