This current juncture – at the precise time when a court hearing has begun in The Hague alleging that "Israel has violated the Convention of the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide" – should lead the way, however late this might be, to a profound discourse and reflection towards official Israeli recognition, after all this time, for the Armenian genocide.
The state of the Jewish people, which itself experienced the Holocaust, a considerably more severe historical event both in terms of scale and ferocity, has for years refrained from officially recognizing the genocide that the Turks perpetrated against the Armenians, due to what the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has informally defined as "vital security interests" as well as "the profound economic relationship between the two states." The outcome of this definition is that even now when for the umpteenth time, Erdogan has identified with and supported the modern-day Amalek, the Palestinazi Hamas, and even when he has reiterated the absurd comparison between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hitler – Israel still refuses to recognize the Armenian genocide.
This genocide took the form of death marches, mass slaughters, and the widespread forced expulsion of the Armenian population by the Turks during World War I. The Ottoman government established 25 concentration camps for the Armenians who survived the expulsion. At that time, Dayr az-Zawr in north-eastern Syria was the end of the line on the road to hell for the Armenians. Many of the death marches were organized to reach Dayr az-Zawr and it is here that the Armenians were eventually savagely massacred. Those who did manage to survive these marches were forced to feed off animal meat and the corpses of dead children.
Some Armenians turned themselves into a living documentation of the horrors, etching on their skin the incidents they had survived on the way and the crimes perpetrated by the Turks. They covered up this writing with layers of dirt, but once they were caught – their pursuers poured water on them to erase the testimony that had been etched on their bodies.
"The quickest way of getting rid of the women and children who were gathered in the concentration camps was to burn them," various witnesses to the atrocities later wrote in the testimonies they submitted. The US and Italian consuls described how tens of thousands of Armenians, including women and children, were drowned in the Black Sea. Two doctors from the city of Trabzon on the Black Sea coast testified that Armenian children had been killed with poison gas. Comprehensive documentation of the Turks' crimes is also evident in the diaries of Henry Morgenthau Sr., the US Ambassador to Turkey between 1913 and 1916.
Eitan Belkind, a key member of the anti-Ottoman Jewish spy ring known as NILI, who infiltrated the Turkish army during World War I, was witness to the horrific murder of some 5,000 Armenians who were tied together and then set on fire using a ring of thorn bushes placed around them. "The screams of the miserable and the flames ascended into the sky hand in hand," wrote Belkind.
Avsholom Feinberg, one of the founders of NILI, who used to travel a lot during the war, also provided testimony of the Armenians who were murdered: "Their members in the working battalions are being put to death en masse by shooting. They are starving them. They are abusing them. I asked myself if I may only cry because 'my People is shattered', and did Jeremiah not shed tears of blood also for the Armenians?"
Former minister, Yair Tsaban: "The claim of 'interests' accompanied the Jewish people during the darkest hours of the Nazi era, when we desperately appealed for help, but the nations of the world explained to us that due to various 'interests' – it is not possible to respond to our cries for help."
In his book, Denial: Israel and the Armenian Genocide, Professor Yair Auron revealed that on the eve of the Jewish Holocaust, in August 1939, Hitler arrogantly asked his S.S. officers: "Who remembers today what they did to the Armenians?" Now, when Erdogan constantly vilifies and reviles the State of Israel whenever he gets the chance to, Israel no longer has any logical, formal reason to continue to rely on the paltry excuse that it had good reason to rely on in the first place – that of "interests".
At this current period in time, when Erdogan unashamedly supports the new Nazis of our generation, Israel has been presented with another opportunity to amend this situation. The Jewish state should have asked itself a long time ago: would it, itself, have accepted the refusal to acknowledge the Jewish Holocaust by any state due to economic or security interests, as it has pinned its refusal for years on such interests in its decision to refrain from any official acknowledgment of the Armenian people's holocaust.
After all, the moral compass should be the same in both cases, and the Israeli government's refusal to acknowledge the Armenian genocide is a clear case of blatant moral bankruptcy. Though the Armenian holocaust was different from the Jewish Holocaust – less industrially organized and effective, and much more limited in terms of its scale – despite these significant differences, the Armenian people did suffer a real form of genocide. Many historians and more than 30 states have recognized the genocide of this people, in which between one to one and a half million people were annihilated. To our great shame, of all nations, Israel has refrained from acknowledging this, and in the clear conflict between morality and interests – it is the interests that prevailed.
In the past, the Ministry of Education shelved a curriculum that included teaching about the Armenian genocide. Israeli TV refrained from broadcasting the documentary movie of Theodore Bogosian, An Armenian Journey, which dealt with this genocide. On another occasion, a text deemed to be too direct was censored, which Noemie Nalbandian had prepared to be read out at the annual Independence Day torch-lighting ceremony at Mt. Herzl, as it mentioned the Armenian holocaust.
When Shimon Peres was Israel's minister of foreign affairs, he approached the Anti-Defamation League, imploring the organization to tone down its resolution, categorically determining that the slaughter of the Armenians was genocide. When Turkey canceled a number of arms deals with France, after the French had acknowledged the Armenian genocide – it was Israel, rather embarrassingly, which was granted these contracts, as Jerusalem had made the decision to avoid any such recognition of the Armenian's plight.
Israel's continued political contortions when faced with the Armenian people's genocide, even now when the administration that is the heir to the perpetrators of that horrific act aligns with the worst of our enemies, should give cause for a conversation, however brief, with Yair Tsaban, originally a member of the left-wing Mapam (United Workers Party) and one of the founders of Kibbutz Tzora. Tsaban, who for many years has been at the forefront of the struggle for Israeli recognition of the Armenian genocide, was the first minister in an Israeli government to 'rebel' against official policy, and already 28 years ago, he attended the memorial day ceremonies of the Armenian community in Israel.
Even today, at the ripe old age of 93, Tsaban is horrified by the use of the word "interests" in relation to the lack of Israel's official acknowledgment of the Armenian genocide. "The claim of 'interests,'" he reminds us, "accompanied the Jewish people during the darkest hours of the Nazi era, when the Jews desperately appealed for help, but the nations of the world explained to us that due to various 'interests' – it is not possible to respond to their cries for help."
"How can Israel continue to look the Righteous Among the Nations and their descendants in the eye – as they too literally had 'existential interests' in not hiding Jews or saving them, but they preferred to live by the dictates of their conscience rather their existential interest?" asks Tsaban.
"As a people who have undergone the worst of all genocides – we neither have nor should make any exceptions when it comes to the genocide of another people. On the contrary – we have the moral obligation of adopting a much more rigorous and less tolerant approach to cases of genocide experienced by others." Tsaban reiterates the words of one of Israel's most renowned poets, Nathan Alterman, who in one of his poems called on the "Champions of healthy realism" to stop "worshiping the idols called interests."
"There are issues that go beyond politics and diplomacy," said Benjamin Netanyahu in 1989, serving as the Deputy Foreign Minister at the time, and he stressed: "Genocides are a clear case of this particular category." It is not yet too late.
https://www.israelhayom.com/2024/01/14/recognize-the-armenian-genocide-now/