April will mark the 109th anniversary of the Armenian genocide by the Turks, for which their current president, Erdogan, refuses to accept responsibility. Almost simultaneously, it will be 76 years since Israel's embarrassing evasion of formal recognition of this genocide. And in the coming days, another point in time will be marked: 100 days since the massacre, and also the blood libel that the Turkish president has been subjected to against Israel, which "like the Nazis," so to speak, is committing genocide in Gaza.
This juncture – when a debate is about to begin in The Hague on the grounds that "Israel is violating the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide" – invites, albeit belatedly, dialogue and clarification towards official Israeli recognition of the Armenian Genocide.
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The state of the Jewish people, which itself experienced a much worse Holocaust, has for years refrained from recognizing the genocide perpetrated by the Turks against Armenians, due to what the Foreign Ministry informally defines as "vital security interests" and "a deep economic relationship between the two countries." The result of this definition is that even now, when Erdogan identifies with and supports for the umpteenth time the Amalek of our generation, Palestinian Hamas, and even when he repeats the despicable comparison between Netanyahu and Hitler, Israel still refrains from recognizing the Armenian Genocide.
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This genocide was characterized by death marches, mass massacres and large-scale expulsions carried out by the Turks against the Armenian population during World War I. The Ottoman government established 25 concentration camps for Armenians who survived the deportation. Deir ez-Zor in northeastern Syria was at the time the end of the road to hell for the Armenians. Many of the death marches were organized there, at the end of which the Armenians were brutally slaughtered. Those who made the journey were fed animal flesh and the carcasses of dead children.
Some Armenians turned themselves into living documents, inscribed on their skin the horrors and crimes of the Turks. They camouflaged the text with layers of dirt, but when they were caught, their pursuers poured water on them in order to erase the testimonies that were written on their bodies.
Hitler's Question
"The shortest way to get rid of the women and children who were concentrated in the camps was to burn them," various witnesses later wrote in their affidavits. The U.S. and Italian consuls described how tens of thousands of Armenians, including women and children, were drowned in the Black Sea. Two doctors from the city of Trabzon testified that Armenian children were gassed with poison gas. A comprehensive record of Turkish crimes can also be found in the diaries of Henry Morgenthau, U.S. ambassador to Turkey from 1913 to 1916.
Eitan Belkind, a Nili man who infiltrated the Turkish army during World War I, watched in horror as some 5,000 Armenians were tied hand to hand and set on fire with a ring of thorns surrounding them. "The screams of the miserable and the flames rose together into the sky," Belkind wrote.
Avshalom Feinberg, one of the founders of Nili, who traveled extensively during the war, also testified about the murdered Armenians: "Their men in the labor battalions are shot en masse. Starve them. They are abused. I asked myself if I was allowed to weep over the 'break of my people' alone, and if Jeremiah did not shed tears of blood for the Armenians as well?"
Former Minister Yair Zaban: "The claim of 'interests' accompanied the Jewish people during the darkest days of Nazism, when they begged for help, but the nations of the world explained to us that due to these and other 'interests,' it was impossible to respond to our cry."
In his book Denial – Israel and the Armenian Genocide, Prof. Yair Oron revealed that on the eve of the Holocaust of the Jews, in August 1939, Hitler smugly asked his SS officers: "Who remembers today what they did to the Armenians?" Now, with Erdogan scolding Israel under every fresh tree, Israel has no formal reason to continue to depend on what was nowhere to hang on to in the first place – "interests."
Today, in which Erdogan supports the Nazis of our generation, gives Israel another opportunity to make amends and repent. The Jewish state should have asked itself long ago: Would it itself have accepted the lack of recognition of the Holocaust by any of the countries of the world because of economic or security interests, as it has been hanging on such interests for years by not officially recognizing the Armenian genocide?
After all, the moral bar is supposed to be the same, and the Israeli government's failure to recognize the Armenian genocide is a jarring moral void. The Armenian Holocaust was indeed different from the Holocaust of the Jews – less organized and efficient and more limited in scope – but despite the differences, the Armenian people experienced genocide in every respect. Many historians and more than 30 countries have acknowledged this genocide, in which between one million and 1.5 million people were exterminated. Shamefully, Israel avoided this, and in the clear conflict between morality and interests, interests prevailed.
Things that go beyond politics
In the past, the Education Ministry shelved a curriculum, one of whose components was the Armenian genocide. Israeli television refrained from broadcasting Theodore Baguchian's documentary "Journey to Armenia," which dealt with this genocide. Another time, an overly direct text was censored, which Naomi Nalbandian prepared to read at the torch-lighting ceremony on Mount Herzl, because it mentioned the Armenian Holocaust.
Shimon Peres, as foreign minister, appealed to the Anti-Defamation League to moderate its decision, which categorically determined that the massacre of Armenians constituted genocide. When Turkey canceled several arms deals with France, after it recognized the Armenian Genocide, they were won, embarrassingly, by Israel, which was careful to avoid such recognition.
Israel's continued twisting in the face of the Armenian genocide, even when the administration that inherited its perpetrators sides with the worst of our enemies, invites a conversation, even if only briefly, with Yair Zaban, originally a Mapam member and one of the founders of Kibbutz Tzora. Zaban, who fought for many years for Israeli recognition of the Armenian Genocide, was the first minister in Israeli governments to "revolt" against official policy, and already 28 years ago attended the Armenian community's Memorial Day ceremonies in Israel.
Even today, at the age of 93, Zaban is appalled by the use of the word "interests" to refer to Israel's lack of official recognition of the Armenian Genocide. "The claim of 'interests,'" he recalls, "accompanied the Jewish people during the darkest days of Nazism, when the Jews begged for help, but the nations of the world explained to them that due to various 'interests,' it was impossible to respond to their cry.
"How can Israel continue to face the Righteous Among the Nations and their descendants, who also literally had 'existential interests' neither to hide Jews nor to save them, but who preferred conscience to their existential interest?" asks Zaban.
"As a people that has gone through the most serious episode of genocide, we do not and cannot have any assumption whatsoever regarding another genocide. On the contrary, it is precisely from us that a stricter approach is demanded in relation to genocide incidents of others." Zaban returns to the words of the poet Nathan Alterman, who in one of his poems called on "adherents of healthy realism" to stop "working for sculptures called interests."
"There are things that go beyond politics and beyond diplomacy," Benjamin Netanyahu, then deputy foreign minister, said in 1989, stressing: "Holocausts of nations are a clear case in this category." It's not too late.
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