Jerusalem’s Armenians Want Israeli Recognition of Genocide
By Ezzedine Said
Agence France Presse
April 20, 2005
Jerusalem’s tiny Armenian community has seen Islamic conquests,
the Crusades, the rise and fall of the Ottoman empire, the British
mandate and most recently the Israeli occupation, but has kept its
identity throughout.
The community, present in the Holy Land since the fifth century,
is today made up largely of descendants of those who survived
Turkish massacres of Armenians between 1915 and 1917, as the Ottoman
Empire fell apart. But they are indignant at the refusal by Israel, a
country’s whose identity draws amply on the Nazis’ killing of millions
of Jews during the Second World War, to recognize their own ‘genocide’.
The massacre has already been acknowledged as genocide by a number of
countries, including France, Canada and Switzerland. Armenians will
remember the 90th anniversary of the start of the 1915-1917 slaughter
on April 24.
Some 2,000 Armenians live in the Old City’s Armenian quarter and its
vast monastery, with another 1,000 in the West Bank and 2,000 more in
Israel, says George Hintlian, historian and spokesman for the Armenian
community. “With regard to Israel and its bureaucracy, we are like
the Palestinians. We consider ourselves to be Jerusalemites born
in Palestine,” he explains, walking along the road of the Armenian
Orthodox Patriarchate.
It’s night-time, and the popular Armenian Tavern is serving lahmajun,
a thin pizza topped with minced meat, to its last clients. Israeli
cars drive slowly down the narrow street to the Jewish quarter or
towards the Wailing Wall. At the monastery’s entrance, a group of
youths stands on the ancient paving stones and chats in Armenian. This
former hospice turned monastery then home to hundreds of Armenians
is only accessible to residents and invited visitors.
Restrictions imposed by Israeli authorities on the Palestinian
population are part of Armenians’ daily life since the eastern part
of the city was occupied in 1967. The Armenians of Jerusalem, as
in the rest of the world, also say that Israel’s strategic alliance
with Turkey which began in 1996 has hampered their quest for global
recognition of their genocide.
“The worst consequence of the alliance between Israel and Turkey
is the fact that the Israeli embassy in Washington and the Jewish
lobby openly intervened on two occasions in 1999 and 2001 to prevent
Congress from recognizing the Armenian genocide,” says Hintlian.
Twenty of his family members, including his grandfather and uncle, died
in the massacres, he says. “It’s difficult to understand the official
Israeli position on the Armenian genocide, coming from a country that
was a victim of its own genocide in the same century,” he says.
The presence of Turkish Justice Minister Cemil Cicek at the
inauguration of Israel’s new Holocaust museum in Jerusalem in March, to
which no Armenian representative was invited, “shocked” the community,
says Hintlian. With a hint of bitterness, he shows the remains of
posters detailing the Armenian genocide glued to walls along the
street and torn down, he says, by passing Jews. “Sometimes they write
‘big lie’ over them,” he says.
Elise Aghazarian, 26, says she is “Armenian in her blood and
Palestinian in her soul.” “We are attached to Mount Ararat but also
to Jerusalem. I am for a bi-national Palestinian and Israeli state,
but if a division is imposed I would want to be on the Palestinian
side,” says this researcher and sociology graduate, who lives inside
the “monastery”.
While she pragmatically considers the Turkish-Israeli pact “an alliance
of interests”, she is no less irritated by the Israeli refusal to
recognize the Armenian genocide. “It boils down to saying that Jewish
blood is more sacred than other peoples’,” she says.
More than 30 percent of Armenians have emigrated from the Holy Land
since 1967, says Hintlian, adding that “if there is no solution,
in 20 or 30 years our number may have dropped by half.”
But Aghazarian is not about to leave. “I belong here and I wouldn’t
want to leave even if the difficult living conditions put us under
constant pressure,” she says.