Armenia and Israel’s moral conundrum
The massacre of Armenians is commemorated April 24. Why doesn’t J’lem recognize it?
The mass murder of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians from 1915 to 1917 by the regime of the Young Turks in Turkey is widely seen as the first genocide of the 20th century.
It is also an event that has for long pricked at the conscience of the Jewish people, which suffered the horrors of the Holocaust, the worst genocide of the 20th century and of modern times.
Despite the mutual experience of genocide, the State of Israel, ever since its founding, has shied away from recognizing the Armenian experience, a state of affairs that activists decry but others assert has been and continues to be a necessary aspect of the Jewish state’s delicate diplomatic and security position.
This Saturday, Armenia and the Armenian diaspora will mark Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, with reports that US President Joe Biden may decide to mark the day by recognizing the genocide, as both houses of Congress did in 2019, and as the president promised during his election campaign.
ONE MAN who has struggled for decades to advance this cause is Prof. Israel Charny, whose new book, Israel’s Failed Response to the Armenian Genocide,
details how and why the Jewish state has refrained from acknowledging the atrocities as genocide.
The genocide itself was preceded by a failed Turkish assault during the First World War against Russian forces to its east, and Turkey’s attempts to capture the Azeri city of Baku.
The Young Turk regime subsequently blamed Armenians in eastern Anatolia for betraying Turkey and accused them of being a fifth column in the country seeking independence.
As a result, Armenian soldiers in the Turkish army were disarmed and then systematically murdered by Turkish troops, and irregular forces then began committing massacres of Armenian civilians.
In May 1915 the Turkish parliament authorized mass deportations of Armenians from eastern Turkey to the south, alleging their presence was a national security threat, and under the oversight of civil and military officials, hundreds of thousands of Armenian citizens were then marched to desert concentration camps.
Many were massacred along the way while others died from starvation and dehydration in the Syrian desert.
Despite the broad recognition by historians that this sequence of events, which emptied Turkey
of around 90% of its Armenian population, was genocide, Turkish governments from that time until today have refused to recognize it as such.
Instead, Turkey has acknowledged that large numbers of Armenians died during the period but has insisted that there was never a centrally mandated policy of genocide. It has worked strenuously to deny the genocide, has threatened countries considering recognition with various consequences and downgraded diplomatic relations with those that have made the recognition.
This situation has long placed the State of Israel in a quandary.
In 1949, Turkey became the first Muslim-majority country to recognize Israel and establish diplomatic relations with it.
For a long time since, the country was regarded as a strategic asset for Israel. Not only was it the one friend and ally Israel had in a region of unbridled enmity toward the Jewish state, it was also a regional power with strategic geopolitical importance.
It provided Israeli with an air corridor to the Far East, as well as trade, tourism and military cooperation.
But as a nation that experienced the Holocaust, many have argued that Israel has a particular moral necessity to recognize what is widely considered to be the first genocide of the 20th century.