Israel's Armenian Genocide recognition dilemma, truth or political

Yervant1 · May 1, 2021

The Jewish Chronicle

April 30 2021

All Jews have a moral duty to recognise Armenian genocide

President Biden has become the first president to use the word — but it is to some Israeli leaders’ shame that they have not

Colin Shindler

April 30, 2021 11:06

Ambassador-Morgenthau-s-Story-p314.jpg?f

Last Shabbat, 24 April, was the annual day of remembrance of the Meds Yeghern — the “great evil crime” of the 1915 Armenian Genocide. While it often merits a throwaway comment in speeches during Holocaust Memorial Day, it is doubtful whether it earned a mention during the many services in Jewish houses of worship last week.

In contrast, President Biden used the occasion to become the first US president to describe the events of 1915 as genocide, something George Bush and Barack Obama never dared to do. In Jerusalem, Prime Minister Netanyahu remained silent while the Foreign Ministry put out a respectful statement, but one which happened to omit the crucial word — genocide.

Yet Israel’s President Rivlin has been continually outspoken in drawing attention to “the first mass murder of the twentieth century”. Ten years ago, as the Speaker of the Knesset, he told his largely silent parliamentary colleagues that, “it is my duty as a Jew and Israeli to recognise the tragedies of other peoples”.

The International Association of Genocide Scholars estimates that well over a million people perished. While the Turks put the figure at 500,000 and say that there was no systematic attempt to kill Armenians, two leading Israeli academics, Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi, have demonstrated that there was an intentional effort to eliminate Anatolia’s Christian population — Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians — over a 30-year period between 1894 and 1924. They wrote: “While the Nazis used guns and gas, many of the murdered Christians were killed with knives, bayonets, axes and stones; thousands were burned alive (the Nazis burned corpses); tens of thousands of women and girls were gang-raped and murdered; clerics were crucified; and thousands of Christian dignitaries were tortured — eyes gouged out, noses and ears cut off...”

This long, harrowing passage from Morris and Ze’evi’s book, The Thirty Year Genocide, shockingly concludes: “In terms of the behaviour of the perpetrators, on the level of individual actions, the Turkish massacre of Christians was far more sadistic than the Nazi murder of the Jews.”

Jews and Armenians — as dispersed peoples — found that their paths often crossed. It was during World War I that the Armenian James Malcolm worked with Chaim Weizmann to abort a clandestine attempt by the Americans to remove the Ottoman Turks from the war through negotiation.

Malcolm was friendly with the JC editor of the time, Leopold Greenberg, who introduced him first to Weizmann and Sokolov, which led to a meeting with the politician and diplomat Sir Mark Sykes.

Sykes, who was deeply involved in Middle East politics, believed that an “Armenia for the Armenians, Arabia for the Arabs and Judaea for the Jews” would prevent German penetration in the area. This was part of the political process which manifested itself in the Balfour Declaration of November 1917.

While it is well known that the British allowed Vladimir Jabotinsky to create a Jewish Legion to fight on the side of the allies, they also permitted the formation of an Armenian Legion under French command. The Armenians fought in Palestine under General Allenby at the battle of Megiddo (Armageddon) in September 1918.

While President Rivlin has proved to be that rare exception on the Israeli Right to promote the memory of the Armenian genocide, other Likud politicians such as Yitzhak Shamir regarded it as “not our business”. There was also an element of Menahem Begin’s general disdain — “goyim kill goyim and the Jews are blamed!” It was significant that those who had served in Yitzhak Rabin’s administration and those from the left wing Zionist Meretz party were the most vociferous in their demand for Israeli recognition for the Armenians.

In the 1950s, Ben-Gurion’s government instituted “the doctrine of the periphery”. This meant strategic alliances with the non-Arab states of the Middle East, including Ethiopia, Iran — and Turkey.

Haile Selassie was deposed in Ethiopia while Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution took root in Iran, leaving only Turkey. In 2003, Recep Erdoğan of the Islamic AKP party took power in Ankara. Regarded at first as a conservative — to the extent that he received a ‘Profile of Courage’ award from the American Jewish Congress in 2004 — Erdoğan emerged as an authoritarian figure, imprisoning his opponents and bent on resurrecting Ottoman imperialism.

Erdoğan saved his animus for Israel. He made a key error when he accused the Jewish state of acts of genocide in 2014 during Operation Protective Edge. This faux pas emanated from the lips of a man who had devoted considerable resources towards preventing any international recognition of the Armenian catastrophe.

Marc David Baer’s book, Sultanic Saviours and Tolerant Turks, was published last year. Baer, an American Jewish professor at LSE whose expertise is Turkish studies, forensically deconstructed the mythical relationship between Turks and Jews that had been propagated. The chapter titles, Grateful Jews and Anti-Semitic Greeks and Armenians, 500 Years of Friendship and Whitewashing the Armenian Genocide with Holocaust Heroism testify to years of misleading Turkish propaganda.

Baer was particularly critical of the old guard leadership of the Jewish community in Turkey, whose role was to lobby US Jewish organisations in order to prevent any mention of the fate of the Armenians.

Baer quotes an aide to President Carter, Stuart Eizenstat, who reported that the Turkish ambassador to the US, Şükrü Elekdağ, warned that if the then-newly established Holocaust Museum in Washington mentioned the Armenians, Turkey might not be able “to guarantee the safety of its Jews”.

As evidenced by the silence in Jerusalem today, Western governments and Israel found themselves in a moral dilemma, in that Turkey was a member of NATO and the first line of defence against hostile forces. Militant Armenian organisations made a bad situation worse by systematic assassinations of Turkish diplomats.

In 2007, the then-Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert intervened on the advice of his Foreign Ministry to block a discussion about the Armenians in the Knesset. A year later, President Peres persuaded the Anti-Defamation League in the US to reverse its support for a congressional initiative to debate the fate of the Armenians.

Since then, the voices of dissent in Israel have grown louder because of the deteriorating relationship between Israel and Turkey.

In October 2019, President Trump suddenly withdrew US troops from the Turkish-Syrian border and left the Kurds open to annihilation by Turkish forces. Many were outraged by this move, since the Kurds had been valiant fighters against ISIS and good friends of Israel. Even Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in Congress and a serial apologist for Trump, was publicly critical of the move.

A few weeks later, Erdoğan visited the White House and Trump declared himself “a big fan” of the Turkish president. For Congress, enough was enough — it then unanimously recognised the mass murder of the Armenians as an instance of genocide.

During World War I, the Nili espionage team of early Zionist pioneers in Zikhron Ya’akov supplied information about the Turks in Palestine to the British. Their great fear was that the Turks would do to the Jews what they had done to the Armenians.

Avshalom Feinberg, a Nili member, sent an intelligence report to his British handler. In the depths of the Armenian tragedy, he asked himself if he was living instead in the brutal time of Titus and Nebuchadnezzer: “And I, a Jew, forgot that I am a Jew. I asked myself whether I have the right to weep ‘over the tragedy of the daughter of my people’ only — and whether Jeremiah did not shed tears of blood for the Armenians as well.”

Feinberg did not live to either bear witness to the Shoah nor see the rise of a state of the Jews.

He was murdered aged 27 by Bedouins, but his question has come down to us across the decades. It is a pertinent question which goes beyond national interests.

We ignore the universalism within Jewish tradition at our peril.

https://www.thejc.com/comment/opinion/all-jews-have-a-moral-duty-to-recognise-armenian-genocide-1.516274

Yervant1 · May 6, 2021

May 5 2021

Australian-Jewish community calls on Israel and Australia to recognise Armenian Genocide

5 May 2021

Jeremy Leibler, president of the Zionist Federation of Australia, has called on both Australia and Israel to recognise the Armenian Genocide of a century ago, the Australian Jewish News (AJN) has reported. “It is our moral duty as Jews and as supporters of Israel to be tellers of truth in matters such as these,” he said.

Mr Leibler’s comments come amidst a raft of calls from the Australian-Jewish community for Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison to recognise as genocide the massacre of Armenians and other Christians by the Ottoman Empire.

An AJN editorial published 30 April 2021 stated, “The world recognises the tragedy and horrors of the Holocaust, as it should. But many nations – including Australia and Israel – have stopped short of officially recognising the Armenian genocide.”

Armenian Christians walking to their deaths in the genocide. Syria. 1915

The editorial adds, “One of the reasons we commemorate the Holocaust is to ensure such horrors never happen again – not just to Jews, but to anybody. We cannot insist the world remembers what happened to our people without insisting it also recognises what happened to others.”

Between 1893 and 1923, some 1.5 million Armenians were killed in the Ottoman Empire in a policy of extermination of Christian minorities. In addition some 2.25 million Assyrian, Greek and Syriac Christians were also killed within Ottoman territories between 1914 and 1923, making a total of 3.75 million Christians killed.

The increased calls by the Australian-Jewish and Australian-Armenian communities for recognition began even before United States President Joe Biden became the first U.S. president to officially recognise the slaughter in a statement released to coincide with Armenian Remembrance Day on 24 April.

We must “speak out and shine a light”, says Jewish leader

Days earlier, on 20 April, a plenum of the New South Wales Jewish Board of Deputies (JBOD) pledged its full support for a call by the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) that all nations and governments “recognise the reality of these genocides”.

Peter Wertheim, co-CEO of the ECAJ, told the meeting that it was important to “speak out and shine a light … because silence is a form of complicity – the longer it goes on, the more these sorts of atrocities proliferate”.

Speaking later to the AJN, he added, “The mass killings of Armenians [and Assyrians and Greeks] by Ottoman forces was not merely a random by-product of World War One – it was officially ordered, organised and systematic. The evidence produced by historians is overwhelming.”

He labelled threats of retaliation by Turkey to nations including Australia “if they dare to acknowledge the genocide” as “not the behaviour of a government that is confident it has truth on its side”.

During the plenum, JBOD CEO Vic Alhadeff revealed he had received a letter from the Turkish Consulate-General in Sydney days earlier, which expressed “deep disappointment and sorrow” about the plenum’s agenda, and even included a claim that “challenged the definition of genocide”.

Genocide of Christians “swept under the carpet”

Jewish Australian MP Julian Lesser was one of the first MPs to sign the Joint Justice Alliance’s 2020 Memorandum of Understanding that calls on the Australian government to recognise the genocide against the Armenian, Greek and Assyrian people. In a video message screened at the plenum, he said that the slaughter witnessed by journalists and foreign officials had been swept under the carpet.

“As Jews, we have a particular responsibility to call this out – the first genocide of the 20th century – because it is to be remembered that the man that orchestrated the greatest genocide, against our people – Adolf Hitler – justified his actions by saying, and I quote: ‘Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?’”

MP Joe Burns, whose maternal grandmother arrived in Australia as a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, told AJN, “The time for justice is now.” He welcomed Biden’s recognition, adding, “They’ve acknowledged true history and shown global leadership.”

Assyrian-Australian activist and lawyer Suzy David – who has many extended family members who are generational survivors of the genocide – thanked Australian Jewry for its vital support.

Addressing the plenum, she said, “By urging Australia to formally recognise this genocide, I extend, by pleading with our Jewish brothers and sisters, to endorse this demand – not only upon Australia, but also upon the State of Israel.”

The Armenian National Committee of Australia (ANC-AU) has also called on Prime Minister Morrison to recognise the slaughter.

Armenian Genocide “one of the greatest crimes against humanity”

In an open letter, it urges Morrison to uphold his beliefs expressed in a speech to Parliament in May 2011, when he stated, “Today, as a member of this House, I join others in this place, and in parliaments around the world, to place on record that I believe the Armenian Genocide was one of the greatest crimes against humanity … it is important that we recognise the Armenian Genocide for what it was.”

The committee said this is in stark contrast to Morrison’s most recent statements as Prime Minister, which have excluded the use of the word genocide.

Barnabas Fund is running a petition calling on the governments of Australia, New Zealand and the UK to officially recognise the Armenian Genocide. Among the countries that officially recognise the Armenian Genocide are the USA, Chile, France, Germany and Russia. To sign our petition go to barnabasfund.org/armenian-genocide/

Dr. Patrick Sookhdeo, International Director of Barnabas Fund, who wrote to President Biden in February 2021 urging him to officially recognise the genocide, also wrote to UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson in March asking the UK government to recognise the Armenian Genocide.

https://barnabasfund.org/news/australian-jewish-community-calls-on-israel-and-australia-to-recognise-a/

Yervant1 · May 7, 2021

Ha'aretz, Israel

May 6 2021

Note to Benny Morris: The Armenian 'Tragedy' Was a Genocide

Turkey's ultranationalist genocide deniers, led by President Erdogan, must be applauding the shameful revisionism of academics like Benny Morris, while they continue to threaten Armenian lives today

Alex Galitsky

Note to Benny Morris: The Armenian 'tragedy' was a genocide - Middle East News - Haaretz.com

The Armenian genocide in many ways shook the established world order to its very core. Here was an atrocity so inexplicably depraved that there was no word to describe it, and no system to resolve it. In this watershed moment in human history, the basis of our modern system of international governance, human rights, and international law were born.

It wasn’t, however, until the crime of genocide was repeated with the annihilation of Europe's Jewish population – inspired in part by the Ottoman Empire's extermination of the Armenians – that these nascent systems of international law and global governance would be fully institutionalized; namely with the establishment of the United Nations.

It was there the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide first formally defined the extermination of an entire group on the basis of its indelible characteristics as a criminal act – the life work of Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jewish lawyer whose inspiration for coining the term was the lack of legal recourse for the Armenian people to seek justice for the systematic destruction of their people.

Yet despite the centrality of the history of the Armenian people to very concept of genocide prevention and restitution, the Armenian people have long been denied that very justice – and that is due largely to Turkey’s ongoing denial of the genocide.

Elie Weisel referred to denial as a "double killing": the consummation of the process of genocide. It is also widely considered to be the "final stage of genocide," the process by which the memory of a group’s suffering and persecution is forgotten, leading to the risk of repetition.

Turkish counter-protestors in front of the Turkish Embassy on the 106th anniversary of the 1915 Armenian Genocide in Washington, DC last monthSAMUEL CORUM - AFP

From the birth of the Turkish Republic, a concerted effort was undertaken to expunge any mention of the Armenians and their suffering, so as not to undermine the nascent state’s standing within the community of nations - or draw attention to the continuity between it and its predecessor.

Over time, genocide denial became a sophisticated revisionist historiography, a broad church of nationalist conspiracies best encapsulated by Ronald Suny: "There was no genocide, and the Armenians were to blame for it."

Related Articles

From the birth of the Turkish Republic, a concerted effort was undertaken to expunge any mention of the Armenians and their suffering, so as not to undermine the nascent state’s standing within the community of nations - or draw attention to the continuity between it and its predecessor.

Over time, genocide denial became a sophisticated revisionist historiography, a broad church of nationalist conspiracies best encapsulated by Ronald Suny: "There was no genocide, and the Armenians were to blame for it."

Genocide denial soon became Turkey’s greatest export, as it enlisted foreign governments in its obstruction of justice, threatening to sever ties in response to any recognition of historic fact. And while a growing number of governments – including most recently the United States – have recognized the Armenian genocide, many more have evaded using the term to placate Turkey even while acknowledging that mass killings took place.

The failure to characterize the destruction of the Armenian people as genocide has more than just a symbolic impact. Armenians continue to face many of the same threats to their existence today as they did 106 years ago – and this is not mere coincidence. The failure to accurately diagnose genocide has obscured understanding of the continuity of genocidal policies to this day.

A recent article in Haaretz by Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi (The Armenian Tragedy Was Not Genocide, but an Attempt to Exterminate Religious Communities) demonstrates this point well.

Morris and Ze’evi asserts a counterfactual revisionist narrative that refutes the genocide label, replacing it with a caricaturish "clash of civilizations," fueled by an Islamic empire's destruction of its Christian subjects. He therefore posits there was mass murder but not genocide, as it was a proto-jihadist, not nationalist, animus which informed the annihilation of Christian religious communities – not a specific ethnic or national group.

This is nonsensical, because under the UN convention, massacring a religious community clearly constitutes genocide.

Russian soldiers on the Caucasus front during the First World War discover the skulls of victims from the Armenian village of Sheyxalan burnt alive by Ottoman troops, 1915STR / AGMI / AFP

But most significantly, Morris downplays the ideological root of the genocide: Turkish ultranationalism.

Then, as today, Turkey’s minorities weren't persecuted solely on the basis of their common religious identity, but because they weren’t Turks, and were therefore the enemy. As Turkish nationalism took root among the ruling elite, a concerted campaign of ‘Turkification’ foreshadowed the annihilation of the region’s Armenian, Greek and Assyrian populations.

These policies also impacted the empire’s non-Turkish Muslim subjects, specifically the Kurds, who were subject to forced deportations at the writ of Talaat ***** – even as he enlisted Kurdish tribes in the slaughter of Armenians.

Today, Turkey’s President Erdogan is increasingly overcome with Ottoman nostalgia.

In addition to praising Armenian genocide architect Enver ***** at a military parade in Baku, after aiding in the assault on the Armenian-majority enclave of Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh), Erdogan caused a diplomatic row with Iran by reciting a poem ("I will not be separated from you. They have separated us forcibly…") widely seen as a symbol of the doctrine of pan-Turkism - the same expansionist ideology propounded by the perpetrators of the Armenian genocide that seeks the unification of the Turkic world and annihilation of everything in between.

Which country artificially divides the United Turkic World ? pic.twitter.com/hYhfikoKZY
— Fariz Ismailzade (@fismailzade) April 30, 2021

Tweet by Fariz Ismailzade, Executive Vice Rector of Azerbaijan's ADA University

After the ceasefire agreement between Armenia and Azerbaijan was signed in November 2020, Turkey’s newly established military presence in Azerbaijan was widely portrayed as a "return of Turkish troops to the Caucasus after 102 years." Azerbaijan and Turkey have long seen each other "one nation, two states" – sharing a common commitment to the realization of a pan-Turkic regional order.

The escalation of this rhetoric also meshes with the expanding influence of the pan-Turkic ‘Nationalist Movement Party’ (MHP) in Turkey, which entered into a coalition with Erdogan’s AKP in 2018, and whose leader has been quoted saying the deportation of Armenians in 1915 were "absolutely correct" and "should be done again if the circumstances were the same."

Turkish nationalists making the far-right nationalist Grey Wolf hand signal chant slogans against France in Istanbul following the passing of a French law criminalizing denial of the Armenian genocideAFP

The party’s youth wing, the "Grey Wolves," not only vociferously denies the Armenian genocide, but has organized and incited violence against Armenians, Greeks and Kurds within Turkey. Unsurprisingly, the Grey Wolves also propagate antisemitic conspiracy theories and Holocaust denial.

Erdoğan salutes crowd with nationalist grey wolf sign https://t.co/7lYOw8wcvC pic.twitter.com/JY1bqbicM1
— Turkish Minute (@TurkishMinuteTM) March 12, 2018

As the Armenian people today face an existential threat at the hands of Azerbaijan and its ally Turkey - as they brazenly dehumanize the Armenian people, torture and execute prisoners of war, destroy Armenian cultural heritage sites, and threaten further military aggression - it has become clear what the failure to recognize and condemn historic genocides, by politicians and intellectuals, and the efforts to deny and obscure that history, has cost us.

It is often said that a genocide denied is a genocide repeated. Not only because the impunity afforded the perpetrator risks enabling future violence, but because the failure to identify the crime of genocide after the fact obstructs our ability to address the warning signs before it occurs.

Alex Galitsky is communications director of the Western Region of the Armenian National Committee of America, the largest Armenian-American grassroots organization in the United States. Twitter: @algalitsky

https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/.premium-turkey-erdogan-armenian-genocide-benny-morris-1.9775943

Yervant1 · May 12, 2021

Ha'aretz, Israel

May 11 2021

Letters to the Editor:

A Particular Kind of Genocide

Letters to the editor: A particular kind of genocide - Letters to the Editor - Haaretz.com

In response to “Not an Armenian Genocide, but a Genocide of Christians.”

The title and opening line of our May 5 op-ed about the genocide in Turkey were misleading. There is no doubt that the Turks (and the Ottomans before them) committed genocide against the Armenians in three stages during the years 1894-1924. But during those years they also murdered hundreds of thousands of Greeks and hundreds of thousands of Assyrians – perhaps a million in total. And the main motivating force for all these killings was religious zeal. During the years of World War I and the first years of Ataturk’s rule, Turkish nationalist zeal was also an important component, but religion was still an important motivator for the massacres and the mass deportations. Perhaps the most precise definition for what happened during those years in Turkey is genocidal ethnic-religious cleansing.

Prof. (emeritus) Benny Morris and Prof.Dror Ze’evi

The genocide conference that was

In response to “How Israel quashed efforts to acknowledge Armenian genocide.”

Thank you Ofer Aderet and Haaretz for your meaningful article. It definitely succeeds in painting the picture of government – in this case Israel’s Foreign Ministry – lying blatantly, manipulating, abusing academic freedom, putting out fake news and more. In this instance the subject was efforts to close down an international scholarly conference on the Holocaust and genocide because the subject of the Armenian Genocide was included among all the cases of genocide under discussion, and Israel was out to cater to Turkey’s demands to stop that discussion. However, it is obvious that such behavior may very well be found in various government agencies, and that the challenge to all of us is to stand up against them.

However, “a funny thing happened on the way” to this article, especially in its original publication in the Hebrew edition of Haaretz on April 30. It announced that “in the summer of 1982 the government succeeded in closing down a conference on the subject of genocide, out of a concern about a confrontation with Turkey,” and the headline over the article’s continuation on another page declared, “Thus did the Foreign Ministry close down a conference in Israel on the subject of the Armenian Genocide.”

What may well have happened is that the reporter, who I know was checking the formerly secret Foreign Ministry cables (that I report in my new book, “Israel’s Failed Response to the Armenian Genocide”), came across the Foreign Ministry’s lies about the attendance at the conference, which they had dispatched to Turkey to comfort and console them that the conference had been reduced to virtually nothing. Here is what I write in my book:

“For the humor of it all, now the newly discovered Foreign Ministry documents also show that once the conference nonetheless was underway, Israel lied to the Turks repeatedly that there were absurdly small numbers of attendees at the conference. In one memorandum to Ankara – apparently when we held five pre-conference seminars, each with twenty participants – they reported a participation of four people; and when the larger, full conference assembled with 300 participants, they reported to Ankara in one communication about twenty-three participants and in another memo about a hundred participants. What do you know? Liars (Turkey) can’t even trust fellow liars (Israel)”

Writing in Haaretz, best-selling author Amos Elon strongly objected “that Jews should comply with the Turks in denying the Armenian Genocide,” and applauded the conference for being “faithful to principles.” In the Yale Review, Terrence des Pres, author of “The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps,” applauded the conference’s “intellectual courage” and celebrated “the kind of men and women who, against some very ugly pressure, went ahead with the Tel Aviv conference …”

Prof. Israel W. Charny

Director, Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide

Jerusalem

https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/letters/letters-to-the-editor-a-particular-kind-of-genocide-1.9793740

Yervant1 · June 26, 2021

The Times of Israel

June 25 2021

Recognition of the Armenian genocide is a major moral crisis for Jews and Israel

JUN 25, 2021, 4:33 PM

Do you know that there are many publications in Hebrew which refer to the Armenian genocide as “Hashoa HaArmenit” or the Armenian shoah? This is because “shoah” intrinsically means extensive or cataclysmic destruction. The word became so identified with the terrifying destruction of the Jewish people and the Nazi intention to destroy all Jews everywhere that many of us retain a capital letter for the English translation of “shoah” when we are referring to this immense event of the Holocaust (capital H). But it is a mistake to think that either word –- in Hebrew or English –- is limited or “owned” by the Jewish people. In Hebrew, the word first appears in the Bible where it refers to total consumption by fire, and in English, there are many references through the ages long before the Holocaust to other holocausts, including of the Armenian people in the genocide by the Ottoman Turks 1915 to 1922.

Should Israel have recognized the Armenian genocide many years ago? Of course. The logic, fairness, and historical accuracy of this definition are obvious to a child. Israel’s choice to play such a serious version of realpolitik of lying blatantly about a solid piece of evidence in human history because it believed it would gain favor and benefits of such favor from the Turks was, in the eyes of many of us, disgraceful beyond words.

Moreover, it was pointed out frequently that this kind of “practical thinking” would be bitterly condemned were it applied by other countries to denial of the Holocaust — we Jews have been very fortunate that from the outset the German government has taken full remorseful responsibility for the horror it imposed on the Jewish people. Even so, there are thousands of cases of denials of the Holocaust in our world, and, quite properly, we react to them with angry scorn and whatever possible retaliation. Should not the same justice be our due when we assault another people’s minds and sensibilities by denying a known holocaust of their people?

Somehow, people get used to whatever is the prevailing norm in their lives, and stop fighting back, as even their own instincts incline them to do. Thus, prejudices and discriminatory and worse destructive behaviors by the huge authorities in our lives remain fashionable, practiced and accepted. In US history, for example, slavery for many years, or McCarthyism, or elimination of basic medical insurance for millions of people, or laws restricting the right to vote.

However, what is too little realized is that abject unfairness cannot help but be registered in the conscious and unconscious minds of people in the country responsible for hurting human lives severely. And they have consequences for the lives of people.

Both America and Israel take great pride in being democracies. Their pride in being free and caring societies streams enormous strength to the spirits of their citizens, and not at all surprisingly show up regularly in the rhetoric of their military security when one is called on to fight for freedom and democracy and not only for one’s specific country. Fighters are frequently encouraged that they are fighting for liberty, dignity, and decency in this world against enemies who are pictured as destructive to humanity.

Israel’s bizarre denials of the holocaust or genocide of another people brings enormous shame on Israel and works away inside of us Israelis to reduce and complicate our pride and faith in our country. In my opinion, before long, it actually weakens our spirit and resolve and becomes an insidious source of weakening our basic ability to fight for our safety and survival.

The United States has now overcome decisively its denials of the Armenian genocide — President Biden has issued full recognition, after the Senate voted amazingly unanimously for recognition, after the House of Representatives had voted overwhelmingly for recognition.

In Israel, over the years, we have had several indications of the Knesset’s readiness to recognize the Armenian genocide — in one case, just a few years ago, a major committee of the Knesset voted decisively for recognition. Key leaders such as presidents of Israel and Knesset speakers have championed the move. Our current alternate prime minister and future prime minister has taken a firm public position for recognition: “I will continue to fight for Israeli recognition of the Armenian genocide; it is our moral responsibility as the Jewish state.”

If Not Now, When? The price we pay for grossly immoral behavior is huge and far from a smart-alecky triumph of power and cleverness. We need to be powerful, but mixed and integrated with the emphases of historic Judaism — and universal common sense — to be good to human life.

It is high time for Israel to recognize the Armenian genocide, and it will only add if such recognition is accompanied by a sensitive apology for doing so much too late. It is no crime for us to note in such an apology that Israel is always deeply aware of the terrifying destruction of Jews through the ages and in our Holocaust, and as a result understandably emphasizes policies designed to maximize its protection against future attacks against the Jewish people and sometimes can err because it is so busy protecting itself. The apology of course should then be accompanied by warm wishes for the security of the Armenian people.

In general, if Israel is to fulfill the intrinsic and historic seeking of justice to which Judaism is committed, and if it is to be an honored leader among nations, it is time for a full policy of standing with any and all people, including Muslims such as in China and Myanmar today, and including Christians such as in many countries today who are being subject to genocide.

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/recognition-of-the-armenian-genocide-is-a-major-moral-crisis-for-jews-and-israel/

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Israel W. Charny is executive director and co-founder of the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide in Jerusalem and editor of the Encyclopedia of Genocide.

Yervant1 · November 10, 2021

Here, they go again. Nothing will come out of it, just pretend they care!!!!!

Public Radio of Armenia
Nov 9 2021

Israeli lawmakers submit bill to recognize Armenian Genocide
November 9, 2021, 15:20
1 minute read

Several opposition Members of Knesset (MKs) have submitted a bill Tuesday to officially recognize the Armenian Genocide and hold a memorial day for it every April 24, The Jerusalem Post reports.
The bill was submitted by Shas MKs Ya’acov Margi, Haim Biton and Moshe Arbel alongside Likud MKs Yuli Edelstein, Israel Katz and Yoav Kish.
This is not the fist time an attempt has been made in the Knesset for Israel to officially recognize the Armenian Genocide.
In 2018, Meretz MK Tamar Zandberg proposed a bill to recognize the massacre as genocide, but the bill was canceled due to government resistance.
In 2019, a number of high-profile members of Knesset like Yair Lapid and Gideon Sa’ar voiced support for the move, but again it did not proceed due to little government support.

https://en.armradio.am/2021/11/09/israeli-mks-submit-bill-to-recognize-armenian-genocide/

Yervant1 · December 30, 2021

Armenpress.com

Charges pressed against Israeli company and its senior employees which used drones against Armenian positions

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21:48, 29 December, 2021

YEREVAN, 29 DECEMBER, ARMENPRESS. Israeli drone-maker Aeronautics and three of its senior employees were charged on Wednesday with violating the law regulating defense exports in its dealing with one of its most prominent clients, ARMENPRESS reports, citing Haaretz.

A gag order issued by the Rishon Letzion Magistrate’s Court prevents the publication of further details.

The firm has been under investigation for the past several years. In 2018 the Justice Ministry said prosecutors intended to press charges against its employees for aggravated fraud and violations of the defense export law.

In an unusual announcement in August 2017, the Defense Ministry said that it had suspended the marketing and export license for one of the firm’s attack drones to a significant customer in a foreign country. Police later launched an investigation into the matter.

That same month it was reported that the Defense Ministry’s Security Agency opened a probe into a complaint alleging that Aeronautics representatives demonstrated the use of a kamikaze drone in Azerbaijan by attacking a manned position of the Armenian army.

The company denied the claim at the time and said that any operational use of the aircraft was only carried out by the buyer of the drone. Aeronautics Defense added that it never carries out demonstrations against live targets, as was the case in this instance.

https://armenpress.am/eng/news/1072006.html?fbclid=IwAR0yPElqQ8Jp-NTmdPbaNMPgTqR66-qoyRzRDsFB44LLJwzw9ArIYuIsYBE

MosJan · December 30, 2021

theatricals... just dammm show... nobody will do nothing to them

Yervant1 · December 31, 2021

theatricals... just dammm show... nobody will do nothing to them

Yup!

Yervant1 · January 5, 2022

Tikun Olam תיקון עולם

Breaking news on the Israeli national security state

Jan 3 2022

Fix is In: Israeli Arms Maker Attacks Armenia to Sell Drones, Mossad and Judges Help Hide the Mess
Aeronautics executives donned Azeri army uniforms to attack Armenia military positions in order to seal $13-million UAV deal

January 3, 2022 by Richard Silverstein

Back in 2017, I published a story under Israeli gag order about the Israeli drone manufacturer, Aeronautics, whose executives were panting to sell tens of millions of dollars of their military drones Azerbaijan. Yossi Melman broke the initial story. But to this day, he cannot say which Israeli company was involved, nor which country was interested in buying the drones.

aerostar-uas-aeronautics_50673.jpg?resiz

Aeronautics Aerostar drone sold to Azerbaijan which attacked Armenia

So Aeronautics sent its drone pilots and top executives to that country to seal the deal. But there was one major hitch: the Azeri military high command demanded a demonstration of the drone’s capability. But they didn’t want just any demonstration, they wanted it to actually attack an Armenian army position in contested Nagorno-Karabakh to see how effective it would be in a real battle situation.

The Israeli drone operators were horrified. They were prepared to teach Azeri army officers how to operate the drones, but actually attacking the Armenian army was not what they signed up for. So they balked, then refused outright. Then a strange thing happened. As I mentioned, Aeronautics were chomping at the bit. They would do anything to get the deal done. So one of its top executives on the scene himself flew the drone and attacked the Armenians. He even donned an Azeri military uniform to do so. Luckily, none of their troops were hurt.

Amos Matan, Aeronautics CEO who fell on his sword, forced out after Azerbaijan debacle

When they returned to Israel, the drone techs reported the incident to police and defense ministry officials, who began an immediate investigation. The defense ministry revoked Aeronautics export license. The company CEO was forced out (he’d also been accused of insider trading). It seemed that someone directly responsible for this cockamamie idea would be held accountable.

However, anyone who believed the company itself would suffer any punishment was under the false impression that Israel observes the rule of law. Actually, it observes the rule of the military-political elite. Behind the scenes, the outcome was fixed by a hidden hand. As Melman notes, among the company’s executives were Omri Sharon and Eitay Ashkenazi (sons respectively of Ariel Sharon and former IDF chief of staff, Gabi Ashkenazi), former IAF commander, Eitan Ben Eliyahu, and former Israeli Navy chief, Yedidya Yaari. That’s more than enough firepower to sink a battleship…or derail a criminal investigation.

Their first stop was the district court, where they sought and received a gag order from a pliant judiciary always amenable to the needs of the military-intelligence apparatus. The hearing was, of course, in a closed court. the better to suppress this embarrassing episode. Melman and his attorney appeared in court to object to the gag order. But they were excluded from the hearing, lest they offer convincing evidence that all the actors, in what the reporter called this “theater of the absurd,” were engaged in a sham. All this prevented either Melman or any other Israeli reporter from exposing the scandal except in broad, vague terms. Which is the reason I published my own story here.

It also didn’t hurt that both the Mossad and IDF special forces unit offered a legal brief claiming that exposing the incident in the media would harm Israel’s national security. How revealing that an Israeli weapons dealer engaged in an act of war against a foreign nation with whom Israel was not at war, was given protected status. In addition, the Azeri defense minister visited Israel, where the concerns of his leadership over the scandal were a top issue:

Perhaps the most important factor behind [Defense Minister] Hasanov’s trip, however, was was Israeli Aeronautics Defense Systems’ (ADS) decision to temporarily block the Orbitier-K1 drone deal with Azerbaijan. ADS specifically froze the deal following reported allegations that the company’s operators, under Baku’s request, had tested new drones over Armenian targets in the Karabakh conflict zone.

Hasanov avowed that the military-intelligence collaboration of both states would be harmed by such media reporting. Melman adds that state media, under the thumb of corrupt dictator, Ilhan Aliyev, also insulted and reviled him personally, calling him an Armenian agent. Aliyev also threatened to disrupt mutual relations unless the indictments were quashed.

Only two weeks after Aeronautics export license was reinstated, it signed a $13-million deal to maintain drones it had already sold to Azerbaijan. These weapons and other drones sold to the country by Elbit systems played a key role in the 2020 was against Armenia, giving it a decisive edge in the fighting. This is yet another example of Israel’s massive arms export industry fueling conflict around the global. The Jerusalem Post article reporting Aeronautics sale was ordered removed under the aforementioned gag order. But a copy is cached by Google and linked above.

There are other geo-strategic reasons for the military-intelligence apparatus to treat this case gingerly. Azerbaijan borders Iran and Israel uses its territory to maintain listening posts and other intelligence assets to spy on the Iranians. The Azeris have even set aside an entire military airfield for Israeli use. I’ve written as well that an Israeli company announced it would build a “smart city” in the Azeri countryside bordering Iran. My strong suspicion is this is a cover for developing further surveillance facilities in Israel’s ongoing efforts to maintain a close eye on Iran’s military and nuclear infrastructure.

Returning to the Aeronautics case, the fix was in. All the stars were aligned to suppress this sordid episode and prevent the average Israeli from hearing about the atrocious behavior of its weapons industry. But a funny thing happened on the way to Baku, Israel’s state prosecutor defied the odds and the powers-that-be and filed indictments against Aeronautics and three of its senior executives. In this case, the decision validated democratic values and the rule of law. Of course, it remains to be seen whether justice will be done and these officials get the punishment they deserve. It’s quite possible they will never be fully prosecuted.

But the four years in which Melman valiantly fought against the security services’ censor on behalf of transparency took their toll on his belief in the system. He notes that in his numerous appearances before Israeli judges in hearings in which he was seeking the removal of a gag order, he faced judges famed for their liberal humane values; and right-wing judges. All to a person shared the same approach: when the security apparatus said “jump,” they responded: “how high?” They stood ramrod straight and saluted before the representatives of state power.

They did this not only in this particular instance, but in almost every other one related to Israeli military affairs. When human rights attorney Eitay Mack asked the Supreme Court to stop Israel from arming genocidal regimes like Myanmar, South Sudan or the Philipines, and corrupt dictatorships like Azerbaijan, Rwanda, Uganda, and Saudi Arabia, the response was always the same: who are we judges to second guess the generals and intelligence chiefs? Not only did they reject Mack’s appeals, they slapped a gag order on their own decision so the Israeli public would not know that the judiciary had ratified Israel’s collaboration with genocide.

Melman goes even farther: he accuses Israel of being held hostage by its own version of the Deep State:

…In Israel, this dubious title is worthy of the defense establishment, which operates as a state within a state and does almost as much as it pleases, without effective parliamentary oversight, and with close cooperation and the helping hand of the judiciary. This combined pincer movement exhausts the few who are still willing to fight for justice, human rights and morality and against injustice. I, too, feel exhausted and struggling as Don Quixote tilting at the windmills. I have lost the desire to petition in the courts again. But perhaps I’ll try one more time.

RS-photo-Seattle-Times1.jpg?fit=100%2C15

Richard Silverstein

Website | + posts

Silverstein has published Tikun Olam since 2003, It exposes the secrets of the Israeli national security state. He lives in Seattle, but his heart is in the east. He publishes regularly at Middle East Eye and Jacobin Magazine. His work has also appeared in Al Jazeera English, The Nation, Truthout and other outlets.

https://www.richardsilverstein.com/2022/01/03/the-fix-is-in-when-israeli-security-apparatus-messes-up-judges-help-clean-up-the-mess/

Yervant1 · January 7, 2022

The Times of Israel

Jan 5 2022

The Armenians and the Jews: a look in the mirror

JAN 5, 2022, 2:21 AM

The other day, I happened to be in my local dry cleaners, when I heard a customer saying something to the owner, in a language that I did not understand.

“What did that gentleman just say to you?” I asked.

The owner replied: “He was wishing me a merry Christmas. It is the Armenian Orthodox Christmas.”

An awkward silence.

“You know,” I said, “I am a Jew,, and I have always felt a kinship with the Armenian people.”

He held up his hand, and said: “I know. I know.”

The poet Joel Rosenberg writes:

I count the ways we are alike

I cite the kingdoms of our former glory — which, for both of us, perhaps, had been a bit too much to handle,

As it has been ever since.

I cite our landless outposts

of diaspora, strewn close along the rivers

and the shores of human habitation

that branch outward from the founts

of Paradise. I cite our neighboring

quarters in the walled Jerusalem,

our holy men in black, our past

in Scripture, and our overlapping

sacred sites. I cite our reverence for family ties, the polar worlds of grandfathers and grandmothers…

Our Middle Eastern food, our enterprise, our reedy and Levantine tunes.

Our immigration histories, the grainy profiles

our ironic manner, our eccentric uncles. Our clustering in cities

Our cherishing of books

Our vexed and aching homelands.

Why should Jews be talking about this? Even as Armenians observe Christmas, the nation faces hostility from authoritarian Muslim neighbors. Armenian’s neighbor, Azerbaijan, still holds prisoners of war that it captured in 2020; it labors to physically eradicate all traces of Armenia’s ancient Christian heritage; and it covets control of sovereign Armenian land to establish an eastward corridor for Turkey.

So, this is a basic truth: Jews, who are another democratic minority in a Muslim region, should not be silent.

But, there is something else. Because when we look at the Armenians, it is as if we are looking in the mirror – and it is not even the sweet truth that our quarters, the Armenian and the Jewish, are adjacent to each other in the Old City of Jerusalem. (I have visited the Museum of the Armenian Genocide, in the Armenian Quarter, and found it heartbreaking – especially because I was the only one there.)

Let us go back, to more than a century ago. In the waning days of the Ottoman Empire, the Armenians were seen as a foreign element in Turkish society — and, in this sense, they occupied the same place as the Jews of the Ottoman Empire.

Like the Jews, the Armenian Christians challenged the traditional hierarchy of Ottoman society.

Like the Jews, they became better-educated, wealthier and more urban.

Like Germany’s “Jewish problem” the Turks talked about “the Armenian question.”

The Turkish army killed a million and a half Armenians. Sometimes, Turkish soldiers would forcibly convert Armenian children and young women to Islam. In his memoirs, the US Ambassador Henry Morgenthau wrote that the Turks had worked, day and night, to perfect new methods of inflicting agony, even delving into the records of the Spanish Inquisition and reviving its torture methods. So many Armenian bodies wound up in the Euphrates that the mighty river changed its course for a hundred yards.

In America, the newspaper headlines screamed of systematic race extermination. Parents cajoled their children to be frugal with their food, “for there are starving children in Armenia.”

In 1915 alone, The New York Times published 145 articles about the Armenian genocide. Americans raised $100 million in aid for the Armenians. Activists, politicians, religious leaders, diplomats, intellectuals and ordinary citizens called for intervention, but nothing happened.

The Armenians call their genocide Meds Yeghern (”the Great Catastrophe”). It was to become the model of all genocides and ethnic cleansing. It served the Nazis as a model — not only the act of genocide, but also the passive amnesia. “Who talks about the Armenians anymore?” Hitler quipped.

More than this: the way that Armenian theologians responded to the horror echoed the way that Jews responded to the Shoah.

In 1915, in the small town of Kourd Belen, the Turks ordered 800 Armenian families to abandon their homes. The priest was Khoren Hampartsoomian, age 85. As he led his people from the village, neighboring Turks taunted the priest: “Good luck, old man. Whom are you going to bury today?”

The old priest replied: “God. God is dead and we are rushing to his funeral.”

So, too, those post-Holocaust theologians, like the late Richard Rubenstein, who believed that the idea of God had perished in Auschwitz.

After the Shoah, Jews cried aloud to God: “O God, how could You do this to us, the children of Your covenant?”

After the genocide, Armenian theologians cried: “God, how could this have happened to us, for we were the first people to adopt Christianity as a state religion?”

Some Armenian Christians referred to the story of Sodom and Gomorrah and asked: “Were there not even 50 Armenians who could have been saved?”

After the Shoah, Jews cried: “We must have sinned. God has used the Nazis as a club against us.” Armenians cried: “We must have sinned. God used the Turks as a club against us.”

After the Shoah, Jews pondered: “The ways of God and of evil are unknowable.”

So, too, the Armenians: “It is not understandable in human terms. God’s ways are not our ways. It is all a very great mystery now, but in heaven we will find the answers to our many whys.”

Some Jews have wanted to hoard the concept of genocide: “What happened to the Armenians was not as bad as the Holocaust!’”

True, but that is an extremely high and ghastly bar to set. No genocide has approached the scale of the Shoah.

Not all genocides are created equal.

Jews were killed wherever they lived in Europe; by contrast, Armenians outside of Armenia were relatively safe.

Antisemitism is a deep, pervasive moral illness; by contrast, there is no such thing as “anti-Armenianism” in the collective psyche of the world.

But, if Jews do not allow the world to compare the Holocaust to other genocides, then its relevance to the world will wither.

And when that happens, Jews would be inflicted by moral laryngitis, losing their ability to speak truth to the world.

We Jews wish our Armenian friends and neighbors: Շնորհավոր Սուրբ Ծնունդ. A blessed Christmas.

I hope to return to Jerusalem this summer. Among my first stops will be the Armenian Quarter – to admire the crafts, the pottery – and yes, as I always do, to study the maps on its walls that tell a story of darkness that mirrors our own.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jeffrey K. Salkin is the rabbi of Temple Israel in West Palm Beach, Florida, and a frequent writer on Jewish and cultural matters. He also blogs frequently at Martini Judaism: for those who want to be shaken and stirred, published by Religion News Service.

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-armenians-and-the-jews-a-look-in-the-mirror/

Yervant1 · February 7, 2022

Ha'aretz

Feb 6 2022

Why French Jews Finally Changed Their View of the Armenian Genocide

For decades, France’s Jewish community followed the Israeli line on the Armenian genocide of 1915. Now, Jewish and Armenian historians agree, that approach is itself being consigned to history

by Shirli Sitbon
Paris

PARIS – French presidential candidate Eric Zemmour wants to revoke France’s so-called memorial laws, which recognize genocide and slavery as crimes against humanity, and make Holocaust denial a criminal act.

The controversial far-right candidate is currently facing an appeal trial after saying in a 2019 TV debate that the Vichy regime led by Marshal Philippe Pétain saved French Jews during the Holocaust. For him and others, memorial laws muzzle free speech and historic debate. “Most French historians have opposed those memorial laws that block historic research,” Zemmour told the CNews French news station last September.

The 1990 Gayssot law, making it a criminal offense to question the actions of Nazi Germany, made it easier to limit revisionist theories. However, France’s memorial laws don’t protect all victims to the same extent. For instance, while they recognise the 1915 Armenian genocide, they don’t criminalize revisionism of the facts.

In other European countries such as Switzerland, Greece, Cyprus and Slovakia, it is illegal to deny the Armenian genocide. But when French lawmakers voted in 2011 on whether to criminalize the denial of all genocides that are recognized by French law, it was struck down by the constitutional court, which said it violated free speech.

Many Armenians were shocked at the time to hear respected Jewish public figures oppose the bill. As the court was due to rule, for instance, former Justice Minister Robert Badinter wrote in the French daily Le Monde that banning revisionism would be unconstitutional.

French Armenians demonstrating in Paris, on the 100th anniversary of the

Armenian genocide. Credit: Remy de la Mauviniere / AP

“Can the French parliament turn itself into a court of world history?” wrote Badinter, a respected Jewish lawmaker. He argued that banning Holocaust denial had a legal basis because the Nuremberg Trials convicted Nazi leaders after the war, but no international trial had been organized after the 1915 Armenian genocide. Instead, the Ottoman authorities held courts-martial for some of the perpetrators.

Many Armenians believed this line of reasoning to be fundamentally wrong. “The notion of genocide did not even exist at the beginning of the 20th century,” notes French-Armenian historian Raymond Kévorkian.

How Turkey's genocide denial, boosted by shameful academics, threatens Armenian lives today
Recognizing the trauma of the Armenian genocide doesn’t diminish the Holocaust
The Jews who befriended Turkey and became genocide deniers

And for Ara Toranian, who co-chairs the Coordinating Council of Armenian Organizations of France umbrella group, such legal arguments were pretexts to avoid new tensions with Turkey.

An estimated 1.5 million people were killed in the events that are widely viewed by scholars as the first genocide of the 20th century. Turkey denies the deaths constituted genocide, saying the toll has been inflated and that those killed were victims of civil war and unrest. Ankara contends that some 300,000 Armenians were killed.

The historical role of French Jews in failing to support Armenian efforts to get the genocide recognized rankled for many decades. In recent times, though, their fight has been more widely acknowledged in the Jewish community.

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A protest in Paris calling for the Armenian genocide not to be recognized by the state.

It was, despite their protests, but it's still not illegal to deny it. Credit: AP

France’s chief rabbi, Haïm Korsia, for instance, is unequivocal in his belief that the laws governing Holocaust denial should also cover the events of 1915-1917.

“The Armenian genocide is an unquestionable reality, there is no denying it,” he says. “The genocide had been planned in advance and carried out. There is [also] continuity between the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust – Hitler said, ‘Who remembers the Armenians?’” when he discussed the Final Solution.

“If people want to deny a reality, they must be put in place, be corrected,” Korsia adds. “Laws are important, but educating children about the Holocaust and about the Armenian genocide is even more crucial.”

Armenians had long hoped Diaspora Jews would lend such support to enshrine the memory of the Armenian victims, but over the years faced a major obstacle: the Jewish state itself.

“Israel’s position on the Armenian genocide is very significant, considering the historic dimension,” Kévorkian says. “Our two nations have suffered genocides and it’s difficult to accept this cynical posture. The reasoning behind this is regional: Israel has had a decades-long military and intelligence alliance with Turkey. They have been strategic allies – especially when Israel had few official contacts with its Arab neighbors.

“But the situation is improving. [israeli] historians and left-wing politicians have pushed for recognition. I think Israel will eventually recognize the genocide like other countries have.”

‘All genocides are unique’

Toranian cites her disappointment that not only has Israel failed to recognize the Armenian genocide, “it also backed Turkey’s position abroad. In the U.S., the Anti-Defamation League, for example, pushed back against the official recognition of the genocide.” Although he notes that the ADL has since reversed its position, for years “those organizations played by the revisionist guide book and made the situation extremely tense.”

In France, some prominent Jewish figures adopted a similar approach. Armenian historians and public figures say they don’t want to accuse anyone specifically, either because of their advanced age or because some have passed away.

“It’s part of the past,” is how Kévorkian describes it. “Some Jewish figures used to insist on the singular and specific nature of the Holocaust – it was almost contemptuous,” he says. “Even historian researchers can be politicized sometimes. But I believe we are past that now.

“You have to understand that the French authorities took so much time to acknowledge their responsibility in the Holocaust that this generated bitterness. Some Jews were absorbed by their personal story and didn’t care as much about what others had suffered,” he says. (France only began to acknowledge its wartime role in 1995, when then-President Jacques Chirac broke a 50-year taboo and said his country owed French Holocaust victims “an everlasting debt” for its actions helping the Nazis.)

Kévorkian says that, today, he would “rather think of those who helped us – like the Klarsfeld family. They pushed doors open and did everything they could to have the Armenian genocide recognized,” referring to lawyers and historians Serge and Beate Klarsfeld and their son Arno. “These are the people who initiated the creation of the Jewish Contemporary Documentation Center, collecting documents about the Holocaust, and then they helped Armenian historians do the same. CRIF has voiced support too,” he says, referring to the umbrella body of French Jewish organizations.

Toranian says that in the past, some French Jewish public figures “saw the Holocaust as a genocide apart; they said it was unique. They are right. But then again, all genocides have specific and unique characteristics.”

Kévorkian also notes the work of the Shoah Memorial Holocaust museum in Paris, “which has also voiced support and done much more. It organizes training for teachers: this is key to educating children about violence, exacerbated nationalism and what it can generate. They learn in high school about the three major genocides of the 20th century [Rwanda being the third]. Sometimes, there are problems during these classes when some children of Turkish origin protest – a bit like some students criticize lessons about the Holocaust,” he says.

French Jewish historian Marc Knobel says we should look forward, not back, when it comes to French Jews’ attitudes toward the Armenian genocide.

“I think that digging 15, 20, 30 or 35 years back will not bring anything positive; we should not create frictions,” he says. “If there had been a different position regarding the genocide decades ago – and I’m not saying that was the case – then I think it would have been linked to the Israeli position, the Israeli alliance with Turkey. Perhaps some institutions that were connected to Israel did not want to push this issue forward and come in the way of Israeli interests.”

Knobel also believes Israel should now recognize the Armenian genocide (“Failing to recognize it is deeply wrong”), but says there is “no ambiguity” among Jewish historians. “Jewish and non-Jewish historians agree quasi-unanimously about the Armenian genocide. No Jewish figure protested when the French parliament recognized the Armenian genocide. Jews have always expressed solidarity with the Armenians and their fight against genocide denial,” he adds.

Eric Zemmour arriving in Yerevan, Armenia, with his adviser Sarah Knafo

last December. Credit: KAREN MINASYAN - AFP

New phenomenon

On the streets of France, meanwhile, the Armenian genocide still fuels hatred and violence. Descendants of Armenian genocide survivors who found refuge in France, for instance, have faced new threats in recent years. In 2020, a group of pro-Turkish nationalists calling themselves the “Grey Wolves” threatened them. And while the organization has since been disbanded, the threat remains real.

“It’s a new phenomenon. These groups of people marched in several cities, searching for Armenians – it’s alarming,” Toranian recounts. “The level of violence escalated during the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh,” he adds, referring to the war that flared between Armenia and Turkish-backed Azerbaijan in the autumn of 2020.

Zemmour has been accused of mining such tensions for political gain. He visited Armenia in December, and says the country shows what could happen to France if it does not stop immigration from Muslim countries.

“Zemmour tried to use the situation in Armenia to stigmatize and criticize French Muslims,” Kévorkian says. “Some of us have criticized this strategy. The Armenian genocide is not a question of religion,” he adds.

Chief Rabbi Korsia agrees. “There will always be people who deny genocides, but what does that show us about society?” he asks. “It’s a place where people oppose others instead of building together a common reality full of promises. There is no reason to distinguish between the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide,” he sums up.

https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/europe/.premium-why-french-jews-finally-changed-their-view-of-the-armenian-genocide-1.10594431

Yervant1 · March 15, 2022

March 14 2022

Recognize Armenian genocide by April 24 - opinion

Like Israel, the US shamefully struggled for many years with its failure to recognize the Armenian Genocide because – very mistakenly and actually meekly – the US feared Turkish anger.

By ISRAEL W. CHARNY

Published: MARCH 14, 2022 20:48

On April 24, 2021, President Joe Biden extended the full recognition of the United States to the Armenian Genocide. Israel has a powerful opportunity to link itself to the recognition by the US by declaring its recognition of the Armenian Genocide on this coming April 24, 2022.

April 24 is for the Armenians ‘Yom HaShoah’ or Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, the day to remember and mark with prayer and deep feeling the history of the Armenian Genocide. It was on this day in 1915 that the Turks proceeded to systematically arrest approximately 250 leaders of the Armenian community and culture, including outstanding entertainers, media professionals, intellectual leaders, academicians, clergymen and professionals in all areas of specialties.

The overwhelming majority of these celebrated leaders and influences on the morale of the Armenian community were executed within a short period following their arrests. (Intriguingly, a small number were rescued thanks to the intervention of the Jewish US Ambassador to Turkey, Henry Morgenthau Sr. – who went on unsuccessfully to make many efforts to stop the genocide – whose son, Henry Morgenthau Jr. would become the secretary of Treasury for president Franklin Roosevelt and play a unique role in the lifesaving of some Jews during the Holocaust.)

Like Israel, the US shamefully struggled for many years with its failure to recognize the Armenian Genocide because – very mistakenly and actually meekly – the US feared Turkish anger and the disruption it could wreak in Turkish-US relations. Over many years, there were spurts of pieces of recognition, such as a resolution by the House of Representatives that was not reinforced by the Senate or president, or say a statement by a president (this was true of Ronald Reagan, for example) but was not backed by the houses of Congress.

Then, on October 29, 2019, the House of Representatives voted by an unbelievable majority of 405 to 11 for recognition, and on December 12, 2019 the truly ultimately unbelievable occurred when the US Senate voted unanimously to recognize the Armenian Genocide. Note also that these votes come about in a period that will long be remembered in American history as one where the two major parties were adamantly unable to cooperate with one another on many pieces of legislation.

It was hardly a surprise that former president Donald Trump, while still in office, did not see fit to follow through with presidential recognition, but the subsequent formal recognition of the genocide by Biden definitely completed the cycle of American recognition once and for all. Biden emphasized the meaning of the recognition not only as rational and just with regard to the past, but as a statement of intentions for the future of human beings:

“Beginning on April 24, 1915, with the arrest of Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople by Ottoman authorities, one and a half million Armenians were deported, massacred, or marched to their deaths in a campaign of extermination… We honor their story. We see that pain. We affirm the history. We do this not to cast blame but to ensure that what happened is never repeated… Let us renew our shared resolve to prevent future atrocities from occurring anywhere in the world.”

Senior scholar at the US Institute of Peace (a formal institution of the US Government) Hrach Gregorian commented, “US recognition of the acts of 1915 as genocide sends a strong signal to the world that America is willing to offend even an important ally when it comes to defending human rights… It signals that the US will not sacrifice principle for political expediency and now it empowers more states who might otherwise be reluctant to do so – for fear of angering Turkey – to follow suit.”

The invitation to Israel is unmistakable. We have the opportunity to recognize the Armenian Genocide on the Day of Remembrance of the Armenian people and exactly a year following US recognition on the same day. Moreover, it is widely acknowledged that a majority of Israelis favor recognition and indeed in August 2020, the Knesset Education, Culture and Sports Committee chaired by MK Yaakov Margi (Shas) reported that the committee voted resoundingly to recognize the genocide of the Armenian people. “It is our moral obligation to recognize the holocaust of the Armenian nation,” Margi said.

The writer has directed the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide, located in Jerusalem, since the Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide of all nations in 1982. Recently, his book Israel’s Failed Response to the Armenian Genocide was published in the US. In the early 1990s, he was one of the founders of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, serving as vice-president and president for several years.

https://www.jpost.com/international/article-701274

Yervant1 · April 6, 2022

April 5 2022

Israel should not fear Turkish in recognizing Armenian genocide - opinion

Many countries have been scared to recognize the Armenian genocide because of Turkey's possible reaction.

By ISRAEL W. CHARNY Published: APRIL 5, 2022 21:06

MEMBERS OF the Armenian diaspora rally in front of the Turkish Embassy in Washington last year, after US President Joe Biden recognized that the 1915 massacres of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire constituted genocide. (photo credit: JOSHUA ROBERTS/REUTERS)

Clearly, our hearts and minds are deeply concerned with the murdering hells of war crimes or crimes against humanity – that in my professional language as a genocide scholar are one of the several subtypes of genocide – that Putin’s Russia is committing. But at the same time, some of our attention deserves to be saved for the issues of other peoples’ welfare as well, and that includes the ways we extend respect to past events of genocide, such as the Armenian Genocide, whose official day of remembrance is April 24. (This was the day in 1915 the Turks rounded up some 250 leaders of every aspect of Armenian culture and executed almost all of them.)

Quite obviously, Israel has been refraining these many years from officially recognizing the Armenian Genocide out of an effort not to excite the fury and retaliation of Turkey. The Turks have persisted in their bizarre denials of the factual history of the Armenian Genocide through all these years, and are known to have devoted literally millions of dollars to campaigns of censorship and cancellations of reports, articles, books, professional congresses, art exhibits, and even musical events that in one way or another were intended to express pain and caring about the Armenian Genocide.

In Turkey, an easy one-way ticket to jail has been to bring up the subject of the Armenian Genocide prominently – although strangely there also grew a generation of brave intellectuals and artists who managed to get across the memory of the slaughter of the Armenian people and survived, though a good many of them had to go through painful legal trials of charges of insulting the government, and the ones who survived came at the expense of periods of being in jail. Obviously, the Turks took the subject terribly seriously. One might say that it was the Turkish version of the American taboo of cussing the other guy’s mother – in the age when to say that to a good old American marine was an established one-way ticket for getting yourself slugged–in Turkey you went to jail if you talked of a genocide.

So, big grown-up countries – like the United States and I think Israel deserves to be characterized in this way, too – have been scared from getting involved with Turkish sensitivity. Writing in the Times of Israel, Lazar Berman notes, “Many countries have refrained from recognizing the genocide out of fear of the Turkish response, which often involves recalling its ambassador for a period of time. That was Ankara’s reaction in 2011 when the French National Assembly passed a bill making it illegal to deny the Armenian Genocide. It also recalled its ambassador to the Vatican when Pope Francis used the word genocide during a 2015 mass marking the 100th anniversary of the slaughter, and its ambassador to Germany after the Bundestag passed a resolution calling the murder of Armenians a genocide in 2016.”

HAPPILY, AUTHOR Berman nonetheless was of the opinion that Turkey likely would not take any steps against the US for its recognition, and that has proven to be the case. In fact, even in earlier years when Turkey was far less stressed, economically and politically, than it is today, its characteristic modus operandi has been to react with a torrent of invectives and threats, including concrete announcements that it would cancel major economic relationships, and in some cases seemed to go about implementing their threatened repercussions, but then, quite consistently, withdrew from retaliating and resumed essentially complete relationships.

People wave Armenian and US flags in front of the US Embassy in the Armenian capital Yerevan after President Joe Biden recognized the 1915 killings of Armenians by Ottoman forces as genocide, April 24, 2021. (credit: KAREN MINASYAN/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES)

Israel is a country that takes special pride in not being afraid, and of standing up proudly and firmly against huge Samson-like antagonists. It has been humiliating and puzzling that in a matter of basic ethics and factual truth, Israel has been so meek, obsequious and fawning that it has failed to extend the simple honor of recognizing another people’s suffering and destruction in a massive genocide. Is it so beyond our imagination as Israelis to be able to say to Turkey at this time, “We have every respect for you as an important country and are happy to work closely with you, but we owe our own culture the clear cut responsibility to identify with a people whose historical record – confirmed by an overwhelming number of scholars all over the world – shows that they were subject to governmental extermination. The truth is that this is a universal problem for all of mankind, and as Germany has shown in its greatness, it is possible to acknowledge genocide in one’s history and go on to contribute to building better lives for one’s own people and other peoples.”

Will we not feel prouder and stronger if we speak that way?

Insofar as Israel still fears the Turkish response, it has an unusual opportunity to recognize the Armenian Genocide under the umbrella of the first anniversary of American recognition. The linking of Israel’s recognition of the Armenian Genocide to the recognition by the US on the same day, April 24, which is designated as the start of the Armenian Genocide, will also provide an additional layer of defense for Israel, since any retaliation against Israel will also take on a meaning of being an attack on the US, as well. As President Joe Biden said, “Each year on this day, we remember the lives of all those who died in the Ottoman-era Armenian Genocide and recommit ourselves to preventing such an atrocity from ever occurring again... the American people honor all those Armenians who perished in the genocide.”

The writer has directed the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide in Jerusalem since the famous conference on the Holocaust and genocides of all nations in1982, which took place despite fierce opposition from the Israeli Foreign Ministry and Turkey. Recently, his book was published in the US: Israel’s Failed Response to the Armenian Genocide. In the early 1990’s he was one of the founders and a president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars.

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-703331

Yervant1 · April 22, 2022

April 21 2022

TTTI to commemorate Yom Hashoah, Armenian genocide April 22

The Temple-Tifereth Israel will host a Yom Hashoah commemoration service at 6 p.m. April 22 at The Temple at 26000 Shaker Blvd. in Beachwood.

The service will also commemorate the Armenian genocide and The Temple will welcome the Rev. Father Hratch Sargsyan of St. Gregory of Narek Armenian Church in Richmond Heights to co-officiate the service.

This is the third time The Temple has welcomed the Armenian community for a special Shabbat service. The service will also include music appropriate for the occasion as those who perished in the Holocaust and Armenian Genocide are remembered, according to a news release. In addition, several Holocaust survivors will be present to light six candles representing the 6 million Jews who were killed in the Holocaust.

https://www.clevelandjewishnews.com/news/briefs/ttti-to-commemorate-yom-hashoah-armenian-genocide-april-22/article_afa91960-c187-11ec-976c-2f93d14ae299.html

Yervant1 · April 22, 2022

PanArmenian

Armenia - April 21 2022

Jerusalem march demands Armenian Genocide recognition

April 21, 2022 - 10:52 AMT

PanARMENIAN.Net - Hundreds of people took to the streets of Jerusalem on Wednesday, April 20 to march for the recognition of the Armenian Genocide.

In photos published on Facebook, participants are seen carrying the March For Justice banner, as well as the flags of Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh).

The Armenians of Israel will stage another rally, this time in front of the Turkish Consulate in Jerusalem on April 24. Later in the day, a commemorative event will be organized near the Zharangavorats College.

On April 24, 1915, a large group of Armenian intellectuals was rounded up and assassinated in Constantinople by the Ottoman government. On April 24, 2022, Armenians worldwide will be commemorating the 107th anniversary of the Genocide which continued until 1923. Some three dozen countries, hundreds of local government bodies and international organizations have so far recognized the killings of 1.5 million Armenians as Genocide. Turkey denies to this day.
https://www.panarmenian.net/eng/news/299788/Jerusalem_march_demands_Armenian_Genocide_recognition

Yervant1 · April 27, 2022

April 23 2022

Israeli Participation in a Solidarity Event with Armenia Upsets Ankara

Saturday, 23 April, 2022

Tel Aviv – Asharq Al-Awsat

Israel’s participation in the annual event held in Armenia in memorial of the genocide is likely to upset Ankara.

At a time when Turkey announced it would maintain ties with Israel and Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu would visit Tel Aviv next month, a member of the Knesset from the governmental coalition decided to participate in the annual event held in Armenia in memorial of the genocide.

Israel’s participation in the Armenian event, its first in seven years, was officially approved by Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Armenia accuses Turkey of committing genocide against the Armenians between 1915-and 1918; the genocide killed around two million people.

Turkey, however, denies and considers Armenia to be exaggerating and deforming the truth.

Israel abstains from endorsing the stances of the West in this regard and turns down all the pressures exerted to make it change its stance.

Yet, left-wing and right-wing parties in Israel show solidarity with Armenia. They even suggest a draft that reinforces solidarity with Armenians and say that “Jews who suffered from a genocide should stand by the Armenians.”

Member of the Knesset for Meretz, Mossi Raz is visiting Armenia to attend the occasion on Saturday.

He stated that he and his party agrees that the official Israeli stance should change and demand recognition of the Armenian genocide.

The political ties between Israel and Turkey have been in an ongoing crisis since 2008 on the backdrop of the Israeli policy towards Palestinians. The crisis aggravated in 2010 when the Israeli forces intercepted six Turkish ships that participated in the flotilla to break Israel's siege on Gaza.

The Turkish FM is expected to arrive in Israel next month in an attempt to reinforce and restore ties with Israel.

https://english.aawsat.com/home/article/3607731/military-aid-and-arms-ukraine

Yervant1 · May 2, 2022

April 30 2022

Time for Israel to not fear Turkey and Russia and recognize genocide - editorial Israel’s approach to the Armenian genocide is too similar to the way it has managed its position on the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

By JPOST EDITORIAL

Published: APRIL 30, 2022 20:05

Updated: APRIL 30, 2022 20:57

Last week, Israel marked Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, to commemorate the genocide and murder of six million Jews by the Nazis.

Newspapers, TV shows and radio airwaves were filled with stories of the survivors – and the country paid attention.

It makes sense. The story of the establishment of the State of Israel is intertwined with the Holocaust. Survivors flocked to the country after the war, helped build it, fought for it in subsequent wars and deserve a large deal of credit for Israel’s spectacular success.

Last Sunday, though, a day was marked around the world, that went largely unnoticed in Israel. It was the 107th anniversary of the start of the Armenian Genocide that commemorates the 1.5 million Armenians who were deported, massacred or marched to their deaths in a campaign of extermination by the Ottoman Empire.

US President Joe Biden issued a statement to commemorate the massacre, which he termed a “genocide” for the first time last year, in line with a promise he made on the campaign trail.

“We renew our pledge to remain vigilant against the corrosive influence of hate in all its forms,” the president said. “We recommit ourselves to speaking out and stopping atrocities that leave lasting scars on the world.”

Turkey, as expected, responded angrily, calling Biden’s remarks “statements that are incompatible with historical facts and international law.”

Israel was noticeably quiet, and it is a silence that is a stain on the Jewish state. It shows how once again Jerusalem is preferring diplomatic and security interests over standing up for what is true and right, especially being a people that knows genocide firsthand.

As Prof. Israel Charney, one of the founders of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, wrote in these pages last month, Israel should not fear Turkey.

“Is it so beyond our imagination as Israelis to be able to say to Turkey at this time, ‘We have every respect for you as an important country and are happy to work closely with you, but we owe our own culture the clear cut responsibility to identify with a people whose historical record shows that they were subject to governmental extermination'?” Charney asked.

The continued Israeli refusal to recognize the Armenian genocide comes as Jerusalem is renewing diplomatic ties with Turkey. President Isaac Herzog recently visited Ankara and Israel obviously does not want to undermine those efforts.

What makes this wrong is that even when Israel’s ties with Turkey had hit rock bottom due to Erdogan’s vile antisemitism, the government also refused to recognize the Armenian genocide then. The reason was that it was better not to do something that would derail the chance for rapprochement. In other words, when ties are bad the timing is bad – and when ties are better the timing is also bad.

In 2019, after the US Senate recognized the genocide, Yair Lapid – then in the opposition – called on Israel to follow suit. He even proposed a bill that would obligate Israel to mark the day.

“It’s time to stop being afraid of the Sultan in Turkey and do what is morally right,” he tweeted at the time.

If it’s time to stop being afraid of the “Sultan in Turkey,” then why did Lapid not put out a statement last week? Why did he not order the Foreign Ministry to publicly mark the day?

Is doing “what is morally right” no longer the right thing to do?

The answer is obvious. What is easy to push for in the opposition is harder to do when you are foreign minister.

This is wrong. Israel’s approach to the Armenian genocide is too similar to the way it has managed its position on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, on the one hand offering support to Kyiv but on the other hand holding back from sanctions against Russia and public condemnations of President Vladimir Putin.

Policy on Ukraine has been dictated by security interests and the need to be able to continue operating in coordination with Russia in Syria. With the Armenian genocide, Israel is again letting diplomatic and security interests get in the way of what is the right and moral stance to take.

It is time for Israel to stop being afraid of Turkey and Russia. Standing up for what is moral and right strengthens nations. It is Israel’s time to do so.

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-705543

MosJan · May 3, 2022

i think we should change the name of this topic
any suggestions ?

Yervant1 · May 4, 2022

How about "Israel's Armenian Genocide recognition dilemma, truth or political convenience".

Yervant1 · August 7, 2022

Aug 6 2022

Book explores why Israel failed to recognize the Armenian Genocide - review

Israel Charny explores how Turkey pressured the First International Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide to silence talk of the Armenian Genocide.

By GLENN C. ALTSCHULER

Published: AUGUST 6, 2022 04:45

In the spring of 1982, shortly before the First International Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide was scheduled to begin in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, the Turkish government demanded that the six sessions on the Armenian Genocide (out of 150 overall) be canceled, and Armenian speakers prohibited from participating. If the Israeli government, which was co-sponsoring the conference, did not comply, Turkish authorities threatened to end protection to Jews escaping from Iran and Syria through their country.

Under pressure from Israeli officials, Elie Wiesel resigned as president of the conference; Yad Vashem withdrew its offer to host the opening ceremonies; Tel Aviv University backed out as a co-sponsor; the Szold National Institute for Research in the Behavioral Sciences in Jerusalem and Hunter College of the City University of New York stopped participating; many speakers, including professors Yehuda Bauer and Alan Dershowitz canceled; donations from philanthropists dried up; pre-conference coverage in the Jewish press was curtailed; and the number of registrants shrank from 600 to 300.

Nonetheless, Israel Charny, the originator and director of the conference, decided to go ahead. The proceedings are now regarded as an important event in the development of the field of genocide studies, marking the first recognition of the Armenian Genocide in an international setting.

In Israel’s Failed Response to the Armenian Genocide, Charny, an American-Israeli psychologist, co-founder of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, author of How Can We Commit The Unthinkable: Genocide: The Human Cancer and editor-in-chief of the two-volume Encyclopedia of Genocide, revisits the conference, attempts by the Foreign Ministry to torpedo it, and issues a scathing indictment of Israel’s refusal, then and now, to officially recognize genocidal wars against other peoples.

Understandably, perhaps, even after 40 years, Charny approaches his subject with a mixture of pride and pain. Intent on setting the record straight and speaking truth to power, he steps on his analysis by going over familiar ground, repeating himself in clumsy prose, and inserting long lists of panels, presenters, book titles and extended excerpts from essays written by him and other human rights advocates in the 1980s and 1990s. And on occasion, Charny seems determined to settle scores.

Members of the Armenian community in Israel attend a demonstration against Israel’s stance on the 1915 massacre of Armenians by Ottoman Turks outside the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem; the sign on the left reads: ‘Judaism is for acknowledgement of Armenian Genocide, the State of Israel against?’ (credit: RONEN ZVULUN / REUTERS)

That said, serious consideration of Charny’s claim – “the basic and horrendous commonality” in all genocides, including the Armenian tragedy, should override obsessions about uniqueness and a consensus definition of the “category name” – is as urgently necessary as it has ever been.

Because he defied the Israeli government in 1982, Charny states, the rector of Tel Aviv University denied him tenure at the School of Social Work, despite favorable recommendations by the relevant committees. The decision “hurt deeply” and “may have contributed psychosomatically” to “the development of cancer a few years later.” Charny sued Tel Aviv University, was appointed a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and for a time collected a TAU pension along with his Hebrew University salary. Grateful in retrospect for being forced to choose between personal, professional and financial security and fundamental ethical values, the experience, he now believes, was “a Turkish delight.”

Charny maintains that in response to Turkey’s threats and the Israeli government’s intervention, he considered reducing the visibility of the Armenian sessions at the conference, but not eliminating them. He indicates as well, rather contradictorily, that he was convinced that “threats of this sort should never be honored to any extent whatsoever.” And then lets himself off the hook by adding that an official of the US State Department assured him, “almost without any reservation or uncertainty,” that the Turks were bluffing.

In any event, Charny makes a compelling case that the principal reason Israeli leaders opposed the conference was their determination to keep the Holocaust, the “unbearable cataclysmic tragedy” of the Jewish people, “at the ultimate untouchable apex of a hierarchy of genocidal suffering... the greatest evil ever seen in human history.”

Wiesel, who “believed entirely – naively and, one might say, messianically – in the virtue, decency and integrity of the miraculous State of Israel,” Charny writes, warned him “not to use genocide in plural.”

When Jews deny genocide

Charny emphasizes that he is a Zionist, proud of Israel’s survival in the face of enemies determined to destroy the Jewish state, and its efforts “to achieve a secure country that is basically still largely democratic.” He also blasts Israel’s quest for exclusivity and superiority; for refusing to acknowledge “the genocidal massacre of unarmed civilian Arabs” in Kafr Kassem in 1956; for indifference toward the forced expulsion of the Rohingya in Myanmar; persecution of Uighurs in China; and “genocidal orgies” in Yemen; for arm sales to Azerbaijan, “where there are gathering storms of potential genocide;” and for recent “fascist trends,” including discrimination against non-Jewish people who are fully entitled citizens of Israel.

Irrepressibly candid and combative at age 91, Charny has thrown down the gauntlet. Whether or not they “claim to be the most important and chosen victim people,” he insists, those who have “experienced fiendish genocidal destruction” should have “heightened sensitivity and caring for others who became victims.” And it is unnecessary, unproductive and unjust for them “to continue denying hard historical facts” about the commission of brutal acts of genocide.

The writer is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies at Cornell University.

Israel’s Failed Response to the Armenian GenocideBy Israel W. Charny

Academic Studies Press

267 pages;

$26.95

https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-713855

Yervant1 · September 20, 2022

1945

Sept 19 2022

Israel’s Embrace Of Azerbaijan Erodes Its Moral Standing

By

Michael Rubin

Israel’s close ties with Azerbaijan are no secret. For Israel, realism and strategic necessity govern decision-making. Azerbaijan provided the Jewish state with fuel at a time when most Arab oil producers boycotted Israel. In exchange, Israel provided Azerbaijan with top-tier weaponry. That a Muslim-majority state established a warm partnership with Israel was also affirming. Azerbaijan, meanwhile, used its ties to Israel to leverage allies in the United States.

Calculations regarding Iran also played a role. Prior to the Iraq War, Azerbaijan and Iran were the only two Shiite-majority states with a Shiite government. Azerbaijan antagonized Iran because it shined by juxtaposition. Iranians vacationing in Baku could walk the corniche without fears of morality police or the burden of compulsory hijab. They could enjoy beer, wine, or something harder in Baku’s bars and restaurants in a way they never could in Tehran, at least openly. That a secular republic outperformed a theocratic one undermined the Islamic Republic’s claim to divine legitimacy.

Azerbaijan’s service as a launch pad for the shadow war against Iran was just as important. Azerbaijan allowed both the United States and Israel listening posts, if not access to its territory, in order to conduct espionage against Iran, if not operations. Until Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev subordinated himself to his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and then pivoted toward Vladimir Putin, Azerbaijan was simply a better ally than Turkey on issues relating to Iran.

A Complicated Reality

Situations evolve. Israel no longer needs to depend on Azerbaijani fuel, given the establishment of warm diplomatic relations with the United Arab Emirates as well as the development of the Eastern Mediterranean gas field. Israel’s accelerated embrace of Azerbaijan, however, comes at a huge strategic cost. In the months prior to Azerbaijan’s September 2020 surprise attack on the Artsakh, the self-governing but unrecognized Armenian state in Nagorno-Karabakh, Israel provided Azerbaijan with drones that tilted the balance of the war in Azerbaijan’s favor. Israeli officials and partisans pointed out that the international community recognizes the entirety of Nagorno-Karabakh as Azerbaijani. Some also point to a history of close ties between Armenia and Iran.

Precedent matters. The basis of Minsk Group diplomacy prior to the 2020 war was land for peace: Armenia had agreed to return some Azeribaijani districts that it had occupied three decades before to defend strategic routes between Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh and guarantee Armenia’s water security. Armenia also sought to tie compromise on the status of Artsakh to assurances that Azerbaijan would not continue the ethnic cleansing of the historic Armenian majority in Nagorno-Karabakh. While the international community recognizes Nagorno-Karabakh as part of Azerbaijan, international law is more complicated. Independent Azerbaijan never controlled Nagorno-Karabakh. Josef Stalin gifted the territory to Azerbaijan after the formation of the Soviet Union as part of his efforts to gerrymander the USSR’s constituent nationalities. When Azerbaijan reasserted its independence at the fall of the Soviet Union, it did so on the basis of the borders of pre-Soviet Azerbaijan that did not include Nagorno-Karabakh. Regardless, repeated referenda showed the majority of the region’s population rejected Azeri rule and sought self-determination.

Azerbaijan, of course, rejects this. While the country is oil-rich, Aliyev family corruption has impoverished Azerbaijan. On a per capita basis, Azerbaijan is poorer than both Armenia and Georgia, neither of which have Azerbaijan’s oil and gas.

Israel Undermines Its Own Arguments

Ideology also comes into play. Azeris demonize Armenians in a way that has no equivalent in Armenia. Indeed, there is a functioning mosque in the center of Yerevan. Aliyev’s own rhetoric dehumanizes Armenians and likens them to animals and insects. That the September 2020 invasion came on the centenary of the Ottoman invasion of Armenia was no coincidence – it directly linked the action to a key episode in the Armenian genocide.

By siding with Baku, Jerusalem sets a precedent by which it undermines its own arguments for defensible borders. Ignoring Armenia’s historical ties to Artsakh and the will of the Armenians living there for generations also empowers those who deny any Jewish heritage in Jerusalem and the Israeli government’s own claims to portions of the West Bank.

Pundits and propagandists can tweet and repeat “Armenia is an ally of Iran” as a mantra, but this is disingenuous. Azerbaijan and Turkey’s blockade of Armenia forces the relationship and empowers Iran. Azerbaijan, meanwhile, treats such pundits as useful idiots to distract Washington as Baku deepens its own economic ties to Tehran.

Perhaps Israel’s greatest mistake, however, is moral. Aliyev’s rhetoric toward Armenia and Armenians is little different than Saddam Hussein’s against Israel or Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah’s against Jews. His most recent attack on Armenia proper shows that Aliyev’s rhetoric is not simply bombast – not any more than Saddam Hussein’s reference of Kuwait as a nineteenth province was. Simply put, Aliyev is a racist and is ideologically committed to Armenia’s eradication. So too are many in Turkey. Erdogan ally and Great Unity Party leader Mustafa Destici tweeted on Sept. 15, “We say to the Armenian administration: Make up your mind: I remind you once again that the Turkish Nation has the power to erase Armenia from history and geography, and that they stand at the limit of our patience.” Neither Erdogan nor Aliyev denounced him. That Azerbaijani cargo planes, meanwhile, shuttled between Baku and Tel Aviv before the latest Azeribaijani assault deserves explanation. Perhaps the trade was innocent, but the fact that similar flights occurred before the September 2020 attack is suspicious.

Time to Speak Up About Azerbaijan

Traditionally, Jewish groups and Israel discounted the Armenian genocide, because they believed it would detract from the Holocaust. This is false. Both events were evil, unique, and interrelated. Many Jewish groups now acknowledge this.

Both Armenians and Israeli Jews are surrounded by forces who seek their eradication. Rather than provide cover for Azerbaijan as Aliyev descends into a rabbit hole of hate, Israel should use its leverage with Aliyev to warn him that he risks transforming Azerbaijan into a pariah state. To be Erdogan’s mini-me as the Turkish leader enters his final years does Azerbaijan a disservice. Silence and excuses enable Aliyev’s increasingly erratic behavior.

There may be some practical reason why Israeli officials do not speak up. They may fear that Aliyev could turn on Azerbaijan’s shrinking Jewish population, essentially treating them as hostages in the same manner that Erdogan and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei do. Likewise, Israel may fear that Aliyev will turn against them and side with Iran. Either reality, however, would be a tacit acknowledgement that Aliyev is not the secular and tolerant opponent to the Islamic Republic they make him out to be. Simply put, for Israel to associate itself with a dictator increasingly intent on Armenian cultural eradication, ethnic cleansing, and genocide will be a stain not easily removed.

Now a 1945 Contributing Editor, Dr. Michael Rubin is a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). Dr. Rubin is the author, coauthor, and coeditor of several books exploring diplomacy, Iranian history, Arab culture, Kurdish studies, and Shi’ite politics, including “Seven Pillars: What Really Causes Instability in the Middle East?” (AEI Press, 2019); “Kurdistan Rising” (AEI Press, 2016); “Dancing with the Devil: The Perils of Engaging Rogue Regimes” (Encounter Books, 2014); and “Eternal Iran: Continuity and Chaos” (Palgrave, 2005).

https://www.19fortyfive.com/2022/09/israel-azerbaijan-relationship-needs-to-change/

Yervant1 · September 20, 2022

Israel - Sept 19 2022

Armenia and Azerbaijan resume fighting: watch the Israeli Harop destroy Armenian S-300 batteries

The Harop, a loitering munition (suicide drone) developed by the Israel Aerospace Industries, has been leaving the Russian-manufactured Armenian anti-aircraft systems helpless. It appears that the Azeris have developed a military doctrine which combines the Harop with the Turkish TB2 drone

Ami Rojkes Dombe

Armenia and Azerbaijan have recently experienced, once again, a round of fighting along the border between them. And as usual, the Azeri army was the first to pull out its loitering munition, manufactured by the Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) – the Harop drone.

This loitering munition is designed to destroy mostly radars, and videos which have surfaced across the web show the Harop drones being turned against Armenian S-300 anti-aircraft missile systems.

A Caucuswar publication shows two Harops descend on Armenian 5P85 missile launch vehicles, followed by a Turkish TB2 drone which completes the mission by launching missiles against the battery’s radar. One can assume, that after the launchers are disabled, there is no danger to the TB2s.

Another documentation, also by Caucuswar, shows a Harop drone being used to destroy an Armenian P-18 radar.

Conflictzone shows a Harop destroying the radar of a 5N63S S-300 battery radar.

Additional documentations of the TB2 drone were published by Oryxspioenkop.

https://www.israeldefense.co.il/en/node/55866

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