Opinion | Israel’s disingenuous, cynical steps towards recognising the Armeni

There is a deep irony in the situation — that a government committing a genocide in the present recognises one committed more than a century ago.

In 2021, when the US officially recognised the Armenian Genocide, I had been studying in Italy with a variety of people, all from countries in conflict. At that time, my then-Israeli friend came up to me and said: ‘At least the US recognised the Armenian Genocide’ — but my reaction was different.

That day, I saw many posts of gratitude across social media. Yet my thoughts were focused on why now? The genocide had occurred over 100 years ago — nothing was new. The only circumstances that had changed was in regards to US–Turkey relations; the US resolution on the Armenian Genocide came shortly after the US Senate voted to impose sanctions on Turkey. The recognition was never about actual Armenians, the generations of those who survived.

At the same time, alongside the posts thanking the US, many asked: ‘What has this recognition actually given us?’. The same question has resurfaced as Israel appears to be on the verge of recognising the Armenian Genocide, though the vote in parliament has currently been postponed.

As part of previous discussions, many have argued that Israel should never have turned recognition into a bargaining chip to be used in its relations with Turkey or used as a means of ‘punishment’. Others have pointed out that as people who survived their own genocide, Israeli Jews had a moral obligation to recognise the Armenian Genocide long ago.

This time, however, the main emotion, alongside gratitude and scepticism, has been rage, especially among those who had closely followed Israel’s atrocities in Gaza since 2023, those familiar with the broader Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and those from Syria or Lebanon, or with family ties there. This is a feeling I deeply resonate with. After all, as the descendants of genocide survivors, did Israelis not have a moral obligation to not perpetrate another with their own hands?

The question no longer simply why Israel might choose to recognise the Armenian Genocide now — it’s instead about the deep irony of the situation, that a government committing a genocide in the present recognises one committed more than a century ago.

The Armenians who witnessed Palestine’s transformation

When looking at the parallels between then and now, it is worth mentioning the Armenians whose faith brought them to Palestine after the genocide.

In May, an exhibition in Marseille of rare photographs from Gaza drew attention to the archive of Kegham Djeghalian, a photographer who survived the Armenian Genocide and founded the first photo studio in Gaza in 1944. He spent the next four decades documenting everyday life in Gaza.

As his grandson noted in an interview during the exhibition, ‘It’s a Gaza we no longer know. A joyful Gaza, one full of hope, connected to the world, with trains and an airport’.

One image from the archive, as described by France24, shows children forming a human pyramid in the courtyard of a school for Palestinian refugees displaced after the creation of Israel. Djeghalian, himself displaced and rebuilding his life in another society, was documenting the experiences of displacement in his host community decades before 2023.

To complete the collection, his grandson reached out to a Palestinian man, Marwan al-Tarazi, who had preserved part of the archive after inheriting the studio. Part of the exhibition, titled ‘Zoom Call’, included screenshots of conversations with al-Tarazi in 2021. In October 2023, Israeli strikes killed al-Tarazi, his wife, and his grandchild.

This layered history of displacement forms part of a broader Armenian presence in Palestine. British Mandate records estimate that around 10,000 Armenian refugees settled in Palestine after the genocide, residing mainly in Haifa, Jaffa, and Jerusalem.

In the latter city, however, the Armenian presence is far older, stretching back 1,500–1,700 years, making it one of the city’s oldest continuous communities. Therefore, the basic needs of the Armenians who fled to Jerusalem in the early 20th century were largely managed by the Armenian Patriarchate, based at the Cathedral of St James, which functioned as the de facto authority of the Armenian Quarter in the city.

Today, the Armenian community in Jerusalem lives under Israeli control and, like Palestinians in East Jerusalem, holds residency rather than citizenship, leaving them effectively stateless.

In recent years, this legal and political precarity has been accompanied by documented incidents of harassment and violence. The Rossing Centre, which tracks anti-Christian attacks in Jerusalem, recorded around 20 incidents targeting Armenians and church property in 2023 alone, including settlers spitting at clergy and graffiti reading ‘Death to Christians’.

These pressures on the community have unfolded not only on the ground but also in public discourse and media representation. In May 2025, during a live broadcast of the Eurovision Song Contest on Israel’s Kan 11 channel, a commentator said shortly after the Armenian performance: ‘I can’t believe we gave a whole quarter in Jerusalem to these guys’.

The remark was more than an offhand comment. It reflected the ease with which a community’s centuries-long presence could be dismissed, ridiculed, and treated as a political concession rather than as an undeniable historical reality.

That kind of dehumanisation does not emerge in a vacuum. It grows in societies where impunity becomes normalised and where violence, once justified, gradually reshapes moral boundaries. In that sense, I would argue that the gravest consequence of the Armenian Genocide, and of more than a century of political hesitation, denial, and impunity, is not only the injustice done to its victims — it is the genocide unfolding before our eyes today.

The cost of silence and inaction

‘Who remembers the Armenians now?’, Hitler supposedly remarked in August 1939, a week before Germany’s invasion of Poland. Whether or not the quote was actually spoken, it has come to symbolise a larger truth: the confidence that crimes will go unpunished creates the conditions for new ones. The connection between the Holocaust, the profound trauma it inflicted on Jewish communities, the fear and victimhood that became embedded in parts of Israeli society, decades of occupation and apartheid, and ultimately the dehumanisation of Palestinians. Pain that remains unaddressed does not simply disappear. It returns in new forms, repeating itself until it is confronted with honesty and care.

As the British–Jewish actress Miriam Margolyes put it: ‘My heart is broken, and the terrible thing I have to face is that Hitler won. He changed us. He made us like him’.

During the 2025 Golden Apricot International Film Festival in Yerevan, I watched Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid’s film Yes.

‘Israelis, who grew up asking, “How can people who committed such horrific atrocities go on living their lives?” have themselves become the answer to their own question’, says the narrator’s voice, heard intermittently throughout the film, which could just as easily have been set in fascist Germany of the 1930s and 1940s, depicting the ruling fascists and their jesters, complete with the aesthetics of that era.

Yes is about the half-step from ‘patriotism’ to villainy and moral degradation, and about a society that crossed that line long ago. Its style, rhythm, aesthetics, and content all speak of the madness of a society, of those who have given their silent consent to the most horrific atrocities. People walk down the streets, cars pass by, buses drive through the city, and from every horn, every street corner, you can almost hear that single word: ‘Yes’.

But in reality, this silent ‘yes’ goes beyond Israeli society. Living at a time when we witness a genocide unfold online, day after day, changes the way we relate to it. It ceases to be a distant horror that occasionally appears in the headlines of a newspaper. Instead, it becomes an inseparable part of our social media feeds. And with that constant exposure comes a dangerous normalisation: even one of humanity’s gravest crimes begins to feel disturbingly ordinary.

Once we begin explaining atrocities primarily through geopolitics, their moral dimension gradually fades. What remains is the language of political realism: strategic interests, alliances, calculations of power, and expediency. I have seen many people, including in Armenia, justify what is happening in Gaza through precisely these arguments. Yet, these are the very arguments we have long rejected when they were used to excuse the Armenian Genocide. We have criticised governments that placed political interests above moral responsibility, insisting that genocide must be recognised and condemned regardless of geopolitical calculations.

I believe that one day, the world will condemn what is happening in Palestine. Governments that remain silent today may eventually recognise the Palestinian genocide, if geopolitical interests align with recognition, or in an act to ‘punish’ Israel. Whether the current Israeli government is ever held accountable before international courts may ultimately depend less on the gravity of the atrocities than on shifting international alliances. If our current world order remains unchanged, this is the uncomfortable reality we are left with. Yet regardless of whether states choose to recognise atrocities or ignore them for political convenience, the trauma does not disappear. It lingers, it is carried across generations, and it continues to fuel new cycles of violence elsewhere in the world.

In recent days, as I have spoken about recognising the Palestinian genocide, I have repeatedly been asked: Why should we do that? What would it give Armenia? Why should we follow a ‘radical left’ agenda? But perhaps these questions reveal how deeply we have accepted political realism as the only legitimate way of thinking. We have already seen where that logic has brought us as a global community. Should morality really be dismissed as a partisan or ideological position? Is it too much to imagine a world that sees atrocities, speaks about them, and acts before they become irreversible?

As descendants of genocide survivors, do we not bear a particular moral responsibility to condemn what is happening and to speak out? We ask the world to show moral clarity when it comes to our own history, yet too often we hesitate to extend that same clarity to others.

This is why the question is not only political, it is profoundly human. Perhaps one day, the political and the human will no longer stand in opposition.

As the Jewish-Hungarian trauma specialist and Holocaust survivor Gabor Mate put it regarding what is happening in Gaza: ‘It’s impossible to have your eyes open and not to have your heart broken. So I hope your hearts are broken, and I hope they are broken every day, because what’s going on happens every day’.