‘Genocide’ in Armenia is not for Israel to decide
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January 11, 2012
The Education Committee of the Israel Knesset recently held open hearings on whether the events in Armenia in 1915-18 should be defined as “genocide.” The committee closed the hearing without taking any action. Hopefully, the Israeli Knesset will not take any further action on this issue, since it is not appropriate for the State of Israel to become the arbiter and decider of whether the events in Armenia — or any other historical event for that matter, with the exception of the Nazi Holocaust — are or are not properly defined as genocide.
The Knesset’s taking up this issue is part of a trend in which legislatures of various countries have considered (and made determinations on) the question of whether the events in Armenia constituted genocide. Most recently, the lower house of the French legislature passed a bill that would make it a crime to deny that the events in Armenia were genocide (this bill still requires approval of the French Senate to become law). It seems quite hypocritical for the French — whose Vichy government collaborated with the Nazis to implement the genocidal Holocaust in France — to sit in judgment of others.
Regretfully, words like “genocide” and “Holocaust,” used outside the context of the Shoa, have become terms of political dynamite with meanings light-years away from their significance in the context of the Nazi genocide against the Jewish people. The careless and inappropriate use of the term “genocide” outside the context of the Jewish Holocaust diminishes the significance and uniqueness of the Nazi genocide against the Jewish people.
Some have suggested that politicians in the Knesset took up the Armenia issue to retaliate against Turkey for its actions against Israel (including the expulsion by Turkey of Israel’s ambassador in connection with the Gaza flotilla debacle). However, this strategy could backfire to the detriment of Israel, because further action on this issue could interfere with efforts to repair and reinstate relations between Ankara and Jerusalem, and could even terminate relations entirely. Even the Israeli Foreign Ministry — whose head, Avigdor Lieberman, has been a sharp critic of Turkey — urged the Knesset not to take up the Armenia issue.
Because of developments in Iran and the Middle East, it is very likely that the interests of Turkey and Israel will converge at some point in the future, and that Turkey, Israel, and the United States will have to work together to maintain stability in the region. Further Israeli actions on the Armenia issue could disrupt efforts at achieving peace and stability in the region.
It is also important to mention that Turkey and Armenia agreed to protocols in 2009 to normalize their relations. One aspect of this agreement was the establishment of a historical sub-commission consisting of Armenian, Turkish, and international experts to perform an impartial scientific review of historical archives relating to the events in Armenia. These protocols, unfortunately, are in limbo because the parliaments of Turkey and Armenia have not ratified them. The United States is in favor of their ratification.
Turkey and Armenia need to move forward with the protocols and also establish the historical sub-commission to perform the historical analysis of the events in Armenia. This is a job for the historians, not the politicians. Historians are divided on the Armenia issue, and even distinguished historians such as Bernard Lewis and Steven Katz have taken the position that the events in Armenia did not constitute “genocide.”
As people of conscience, Jews have given the world the gift of human compassion. However, we must also be vigilant and oppose the mischaracterization of historical events, other than the Jewish Holocaust, as genocide. We must never forget, as Steven Katz tells us, that the Holocaust was “unique” because “never before has a state set out, as a matter of intentional principle…to annihilate physically every man, woman, and child belonging to a specific people.”
Finally, Israel’s further involvement in this issue can only lead to problems and difficulties, and will provide no benefit — moral, political, or otherwise — for Israel at this time of crisis in the Middle East.
Comments
Robert
January 11, 2012
This is a shameful article that not only ignores the suffering of victims of genocide but also contributes to the last phase of genocide.
Janet Levy
January 11, 2012
http://www.atour.com/news/international/20110807a.html
Most historians regard 1912 to 1925 as a time of massive Christian annihilation and relocation by the Muslim Ottoman Empire. Although commonly given the misnomer “Armenian Genocide,” the atrocity was a carefully planned ethnic cleansing to rid Asia Minor of Armenians, Assyrians, Greeks and other minorities in order to establish an exclusively Muslim Turkish state. Some scholars date the first phase of the Christian genocide from the reign of Sultan Abdul Hamid and his Hamidian Massacres of 1895-1897 through the Istanbul Pogrom of 1955.
The Hamidian massacres attempted to assert Muslim supremacy and advance the cause of Turkification. French ambassador Pierre Paul Cambon described Turkey at the time as “literally in flames” with “massacres everywhere” and Christians murdered “without distinction.” Marauding Kurdish chieftains in the region were encouraged to join in and channel their aggression into the killing, pillaging and raping of non-Muslim populations. Estimates of the number of Christians who perished during the reign of Sultan Hamid range from 100,000 to 300,000.
From the 1900’s to 1922, the Christian population declined from 25% to less than 5% within Anatolia. Under Islam, Christians had few rights, paid exorbitantly high taxes - the jizya - and enjoyed limited political representation and access to government services. Their testimony was inadmissible, no provision existed for their legal protection, they were prohibited from owning firearms, and their property, wives and children were vulnerable to spontaneous attacks.
Approximately 2.5 million Armenians[1], Assyrians and Greek Christians were massacred during this period. Kurds were encouraged to settle in Christian territory, demand the payment of tributes and illegally seize land. They were given free rein against local Christians in exchange for their loyal service to the Ottoman government.
Origins
The Turkish campaign began five years prior to World War I, when the Young Turks, a secret society of students and military officers, seized control of the Ottoman government. Initially, in an attempt to solidify their control, the Young Turks promised equality for all non-Muslims. Once in power, they rescinded this policy and devised a scheme of plunder to obtain much needed economic resources for the declining Ottoman Empire. To encourage and justify the attacks, they promulgated rumors that Christians were traitorously assisting the Empire’s enemies. A fatwa was declared against Christians and was announced in mosques throughout the empire. A two-fold plan was devised to homogenize Turkey through: 1) the assimilation or dilution of non-Turkish Muslims by dispersing them throughout the empire and 2) the elimination of non-Muslims who were deemed infidels and enemies of Islam. Convicts were released from prison to staff the Special Organization[6], which was formed to carry out the final solution to the Christian problem. Escorted by military troops, they raped, robbed and killed innocent Christian men, women and children.
The Christian genocide was a three-phase process. First, able-bodied men were rounded up and deported for labor battalions. Second, community leaders and influential people were publicly executed. Then, defenseless women, children and the elderly were massacred or resettled and enslaved.
Janet Levy
January 11, 2012
Armenians & Other Minorities
In 1915, the Young Turks moved against the Armenians, Assyrians and other minority groups. All non-Turks were disarmed and troops dispatched to collect weapons. In the process, the Young Turks murdered men, raped women and burned houses. Armenians and Assyrians serving in the army were removed from combat ranks and forced to serve in labor battalions. Non-Muslim leaders were removed from the community under the pretext that they were conspiring against the government. Imprisoned and marched out of town, they were roped together and forbidden to bring any possessions or bid farewell to their families. Once the population was disarmed and the men removed, the reign of terror began, similar to the Greek Genocide.
Published compilations at the time provided details of the deliberate massacre of innocent Christians from eyewitness accounts by diplomats and missionaries from various parts of the Ottoman Empire as well as from American, German, Italian, Scandinavian, Greek, Kurdish, Russian, Assyrian and Armenian witnesses. Volumes included the British Blue Book, “The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915-1916,” “The Black Book of Sufferings of the Greek People” and “Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story” by the American Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1913-1916, who witnessed the genocide of the Armenian, Assyrian and Greek population.
Descriptions of the atrocities were horrific. Witnesses observed villages surrounded and often set ablaze with no possible exit for villagers. Property, livestock and homes were confiscated by the authorities. Children were poisoned or murdered with injections of morphine and entire schools pumped with toxic gas. Women and children were loaded into boats and taken out to sea to be capsized or thrown overboard. Women and girls were striped naked, beaten with tree branches, raped in full view of family members and skinned and burned alive. The bellies of pregnant women were bayoneted and fetuses tossed into the air and impaled on swords. Some victims were injected with live typhus and suffered a slow death from the ravages of disease. Others were made to march naked with horseshoes nailed to their feet. No water or food was provided and they endured constant beatings by the gangs that escorted them. People were tied to horses and dragged to their deaths or had their bodies torn in half by being tied to opposite tree limbs. Others were crucified, hacked to death and sawed into pieces.
Churches were ransacked and priests beaten and made to march naked as they were massacred. Men were beaten on the soles of their feet until they swelled and burst and their limbs required amputation. The Turks pulled out facial hair, extracted nails, ripped out tongues, applied hot irons to the chests of victims, poured hot butter into their wounds and taunted them about Christ coming to their aid. The Ottoman Turks even reviewed the records of the Spanish Inquisition to come up with ideas for torture.
Some Christians were deported with the idea that they would die en route without food or water. During the journey, they were robbed, whipped, bayoneted and murdered by Muslims who prohibited them from stopping for water. Others were hit with saws, hammers and clubs and left to be devoured by wild animals.
Christian victims who weren’t killed were enslaved in harems, kidnapped and forced to convert to Islam. Surviving women were required to remand their children to the government to be raised as Muslims.
Ergun Kirlikovali
January 11, 2012
Armenian Started Fighting Their Own Ottoman Government and Neighbors Long Before 1915.
Armenians took up arms against their own government since 1862 when the first armed insurrection and other bloody revolts were recorded (Nalbandian).
Armenian insurrection got worse in 1880s after Armenakan (1882) and Hunchaks (1887) revolutionary parties were established. Armenian revolts, terrorism, and treason reached epidemic proportions in 1890s after Dashnaks (1890) were established (Uras).
ARF used Russian made Mosin weapons to attack and kill Ottoman Muslims since 1893. (ARF publication: “Epic Wars”, Houshamatyan, page 185)
The “Dictionary of WWI” by Stephen Pope & Elizabeth-Anne Wheal, 2003, ISBN 0 85052 979-4, states on page 34, that 120,000 Muslims, mostly Turkish, were killed by Armenian nationalists by December 1914.
And that does not even take into account the infamous Van Rebellion by Armenians in April of 1915.
So, the premise that Armenian did not fight until after 1915 or that they were innocent by standers or that they were poor-starving Armenian women and children are deliberate misrepresentation aimed at deceiving the world as they are demonstrably absurd and baseless (see photo of Armenian army, in uniform and rifles brandished: www.ethocide.com )
Why is it so difficult for Armenian lobby (and their supporters) to comprehend that the Van Revolt by Armenians—where about 40,000 Muslim inhabitants of the town were cut down by Armenians and the city was turned over to Russian invader—is the EQUIVALENT TO 9/11 FOR THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE?
Consider this: The U.S. crossed oceans and continents to wage a trillion dollar global war on terrorism because about 3,000 of its citizens were killed on American soil. Why is it, then, so difficult to understand that the Ottoman Empire, having lost 120,000 of its citizens, resorted to similar , but much lesser, measures of TERESET (Temporary Resettlement) of the perpetrators?
Rephrased, how can 3,000 victims in 2001 justify a international, global war, but 120,000 victims in 1914 (and many more in 1915) do not justify even a domestic, local TERESET ?
Armenian claims of genocide ignore Turkish suffering at the hands of Armenians; dismiss Armenian terrorism, raids, bombings, assassinations, terrorism, revolts and treason; disregard Armenian demands for territory onwhich Armenians were a minority(apartheid).
If one chooses to ignore half the story, then what’s left? Other than baseless and long discredietd political claims?
It was wartime suffering that engulfed all the people of the area, not genocide where only Armenian suffering is cherry picked, embellieshed, and exaggerated.
Ergun Kirlikovali
Son of Turkish Survivors from both paternal and maternal sides
Suzie
January 11, 2012
Let me start off by saying, the title of this article is flawed. It wasn’t a genocide in “Armenia”. The Armenian Genocide happened in the Ottoman Empire (present day Turkey). It was orchestrated by the government, Talat Pasha and his hateful followers. The Armenians who were a minority in that empire, were considered second class citizens, persecuted since the 19th century, and that hatred finally escalated to what we know today as the Armenian Genocide. This is not a topic that is under discussion. Turkey and some ultra-nationalist Turks make it sound as if this is a part of history that is currently being studied to see if it can be verified. That is nonsense. The genocide is a very well known and recorded fact of history. The only country who is feverishly trying to cover up its past is Turkey. In fact, if Turkey says that the genocide never happened, then let them give back all of the lands that they confiscated from all those Armenians that just “left the country” (and everything they owned in the world).
And if the genocide is not for Israel to decide, then no genocides should be recognized by other countries. Unfortunately, countries don’t recognize a genocide unless it is politically safe for them to do so. Israel and its Jewish citizens have every moral responsibility to stand up for all human rights, everywhere. If Israel doesn’t do this, what makes it different than Iran.. another country who denies genocide?
Hakob
January 11, 2012
I wanted to add, the Armenians in “Eastern Turkey”/Western Armenia took up arms in order to protect themselves, since no one came to their help. The Armenian political parties established because of Turkish tyranny, not Turkish kindness. No one in their right mind should expect that they get robbed, persecuted, raped and not resist… that is simply not Human. Of course Turks would expect that they rob and rape their citizens and not expect any resistance or that proves they are “dishonorable” and “rebels” - what a joke.
David Davidian
January 11, 2012
Israel is not deciding anything, neither is France. Israel is simply in the process of politically recognizing the established fact of the Turkish genocide of the Armenians.
Raphael Lemkin who coined the term genocide, stated, “I became interested in genocide because it happened to the Armenians; and after the Armenians got a very rough deal at the Versailles Conference because their criminals were guilty of genocide and were not punished.” You can watch his video statement on Youtube, in his 1949 CBS TV interview with Quincy Howe.
Why is any of this this important? One person who took inspiration from this successful genocide was Adolf Hilter. In a 1931 interview with Richard Breiting in _Leipziger Neueste Nachrichten_ , he stated, “We intend to introduce a great resettlement policy; we do not wish to go on treading each others toes in Germany. In 1923 little Greece could re-settle a million men. Think of the biblical deportations and the massacres of the Middle Ages and remember the eradication of Armenia [oder erinnern Sie sich doch an die Ausrottung Armeniens].”