In a U.S. podcast interview, the Israeli prime minister broke decades of cautious silence, calling the Ottoman-era mass killings genocide, a step long avoided for fear of Ankara’s backlash.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has ignited a diplomatic earthquake by recognizing the Armenian genocide for the first time, a move Israel had carefully avoided for decades.
Speaking on the popular American podcast hosted by Patrick Bet-David, Netanyahu was pressed on why Israel had never formally recognized the Ottoman Empire’s slaughter of more than a million Armenians between 1915 and 1923.
“The Holocaust was recognized by 193 nations. But when it comes to the Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek genocides, Israel is absent from that list,” Bet-David challenged.