Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar on Sunday plans to propose a cabinet resolution to officially recognize the Armenian Genocide, his office said, according to an article in The Times of Israel on Thursday.
This move will no doubt provoke diplomatic row with Turkey.
Israel has long avoided recognizing the killings as genocide due to the diplomatic sensitivity of the matter, but the sharp deterioration of relations with Turkey under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has repeatedly accused Israel of genocide in Gaza, has led it to take certain steps toward recognition in recent years. Last August, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said for the first time that he recognized the genocide.
“Despite extensive and unequivocal historical documentation, the Armenian Genocide remains the subject of an organized campaign of denial and minimization, including the manipulative rewriting of history books, primarily by Turkey,” the explanatory text for the proposal says, according to The Times of Israel.
“In light of this moral and historical obligation, it is proposed that the Government of Israel recognize the genocide committed against the Armenian people during the final years of the Ottoman Empire. In addition, given ongoing attempts to blur, minimize, or deny the atrocities of the Armenian Genocide, the proposal calls for condemning all efforts to distort the historical truth of these events,” the text added.
Last August, Netanyahu said that he personally recognizes the Armenian Genocide as a genocide in an appearance on a local podcast.
Speaking on the Patrick Bet-David’s podcast, Netanyahu said he recognized the Armenian Genocide after the host asked why Israel has been so reluctant to recognize the massacre committed by the Ottoman Empire from 1915 to 1917 as a genocide, given the context of worldwide recognition of the Holocaust.
Netanyahu informed the host that the Knesset recently passed a bill recognizing the massacre as genocide, but the host pushed him for personal recognition.
Netanyahu responded: “I just did.”
At the time, the Armenian National Committee of America issued a statement in response to Netanyahu’s remarks Tuesday.
“Netanyahu’s tack toward long‑withheld Israeli recognition of the Armenian Genocide — in the wake of its arming of Azerbaijan’s blockade and genocide of Artsakh’s Armenian Christians and amid ongoing threats to Jerusalem’s Armenian Christian Quarter and serious and sustained violations of international law in Gaza, akin to Azerbaijan’s ethnic cleansing of Artsakh — must, if it is to represent more than an attempt at tactical cover for its transgressions, be followed by a sharp break with Israel’s military alliance with Azerbaijan and public pressure on Turkey to abandon its denial and obstruction of justice for the Armenian Genocide,” said ANCA Executive Director Aram Hamparian.
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