Israel’s leading Jerusalem Post periodical has published an article, titling it “Recognize the Armenian Genocide.”
“105 years ago the Armenian Genocide began. Members of the Armenian community living in the Ottoman Empire were systematically destroyed by order of the rulers. 1.5 million Armenians — an ethnic minority — were killed or exiled to the deserts of Syria to die,” writes the Jerusalem Post.
The slaughter of the Armenians, which preceded the Holocaust and the crimes of the “Islamic State,” was a precursor to cases of such mass killings in a hundred years.
“As a state founded as a result of genocide, Israel knows very well what it means to be a minority subjected to massacre and government-organized killing. Like the Armenians, the Jews were forced to live as minorities under regimes such as the Germans or the Poles, enjoying ‘protection’ as long as they did not stand in the way of the state’s interests,” writes the site, noting that recently the US House of Representatives adopted a resolution on the recognition of the Armenian Genocide.
Unfortunately, as the Jerusalem Post writes, Israel has not acted in the same way, mainly for the political reason that recognition of the Armenian Genocide would undermine Israel’s ties with Turkey.
“This has created an undesirable situation where our country, created by survivors of persecution, has not supported another minority group in such a situation,” writes the site, adding that decades ago this might have made sense, when Israel’s leaders needed to make complex compromises, such as, for example, the reparations agreement between Israel and Germany in 1952.
“Now we have a valuable opportunity to right those wrongs. Israeli-Turkish ties are now at their lowest level of all time. Turkey’s leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan continues to incite maximum antisemitism against Israel. In September, he compared Israel to Nazi Germany at the UN.
Turkey thinks it can threaten other countries, and that those countries will refrain from recognizing the Armenian Genocide; it is a matter of Turkish pride. Israel no longer has any reason to fear Turkey’s reaction,” writes the site.
“The recognition of the Armenian Genocide by the US House of Representatives was a vote for historical truth and justice. Turkey cannot be allowed to terrorize the world into denying the genocide. I will continue to fight for Israel’s recognition of the Armenian Genocide,” wrote Knesset member, one of the leaders of Israel’s ‘Blue and White’ party, Yair Lapid, on Twitter.
Likud party parliamentarian Gideon Sa’ar also welcomed the US House of Representatives’ “moral and principled stance” in recognizing the mass killings of Armenians 100 years ago as genocide, and wrote that “Israel must likewise make clear its recognition of the terrible atrocity.”
“Lapid and Sa’ar are right. It is time for Israel to take the right steps — not to return to Turkey, but to tell the truth,” the Jerusalem Post concluded.
