One and a half million Armenian men, women and children were killed in the final years of the Ottoman Empire in what has become known as the Armenian Genocide. In Israel, though, despite being a country created just after the Holocaust, you won’t hear much about it, wrote The Jerusalem Post.
“That is because the Jewish state—the home to the people who saw six million of their own exterminated by the Nazis—still does not officially recognize the Armenian Genocide. It is time for this to change.
The official day of commemoration for the massacre of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire during World War I is on Saturday. On Thursday, White House sources said that US President Joe Biden would formally recognize the massacre as an act of genocide even though the move would undoubtedly infuriate Turkey and further strain already frayed ties between the two NATO allies.
Last year, when he was running for president, Biden pledged to do exactly that. ‘Today, we remember the atrocities faced by the Armenian people in the Metz Yeghern—the Armenian Genocide. If elected, I pledge to support a resolution recognizing the Armenian Genocide and will make universal human rights a top priority,’ he wrote on Twitter at the time.
For decades, measures recognizing the Armenian genocide stalled in the US Congress and presidents refrained from calling it that, stymied by concerns about relations with Turkey and intense lobbying by Ankara.
The same has happened in Israel. Here too, Israel feared Turkish retaliation if it were to recognize historical facts.
In 2018, Meretz MK Tamar Zandberg proposed a bill to recognize the massacre as genocide, but the bill was canceled due to government resistance. A year later, 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.
Traditionally, the explanations for Israel’s failure to move on this have ranged from a need to leave a door open to better ties with Turkey to a clear government agenda that prefers Azerbaijan over Armenia. This was made clear this past fall, when Israel supplied weapons to Azerbaijan as it fought the Armenians in the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh [(Artsakh)],” The Jerusalem Post added, in particular.
