Tel-Chai Nation

Jeremy Sharon at the Jerusalem Post wrote about why Israel's government refused to make a public recognition of the Armenian Genocide for many years, and why it's best to do so now, considering that the USA did so:

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.

[...] 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.

Indeed, Adolf Hitler infamously recalled the massacres of the Armenians and the global failure to stop them or punish the perpetrators as a reason that the Nazis themselves should not shy away from similar actions.

Charny is one such person who has argued for decades that Israel, as the nation-state of a people that was a victim to genocide, and as part of Jewish values and tradition itself, has a moral obligation to recognize the genocide perpetrated against the Armenians.

From the early 1970s when he first learned of the atrocities, into the 1980s when a conference he organized in Israel on genocide – including discussion about the mass murder of Armenians – generated opposition from the Israeli government, and until today, Charny has worked passionately to bring public awareness to this dark historical chapter and for Israel to recognize it as genocide.

Just this month, Charny, who made aliyah in 1973, published a book detailing Israel’s history of refusing to recognize the genocide, including the fierce opposition to the 1982 conference he organized which dealt with the Armenian Genocide.

Originally an academic psychotherapist by trade, Charny has also lectured on genocide studies at Tel Aviv University and other universities around the world, and is a former president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars.

At the end of the 1970s, Charny began organizing what he would call the First International Conference on Holocaust and Genocide which would eventually take three years for him to bring to fruition.

It was the first international conference to connect the Holocaust to other genocides, and also the first to include Armenian scholars.

The renowned writer and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel was invited to chair the conference, an invitation he accepted, while numerous other scholars and organizations also participated.

But when the Israeli government got wind of the conference, according to Charny following publication about the event in The Jerusalem Post, intense pressure began to be exerted against Charny and his initiative.

Wiesel pulled out, and Charny came under heavy pressure from the Foreign Ministry to cancel the lectures on the Armenian Genocide and to cancel the participation of the Armenian scholars.

The ministry even claimed at one point that should the conference go ahead, Turkey might close its borders to Jews seeking to leave Iran and Syria at the time, a step that would trap them in those countries.

Of late, a student of Charny’s dug up Foreign Ministry cables from Ankara to Jerusalem which had recently been declassified indicating the lengths to which the government was prepared to go to stop the conference and avoid offending Turkey.

In one cable, sent two days before the conference from Israel’s chief consul in Turkey to the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem, the consul congratulates the ministry on its efforts to shut the conference down but says he was mystified by the claims about Turkey shutting down its borders to Jewish refugees.

In the cable, the consul is quoted as saying that he had not heard of such threats.

“I realized that Israel had concocted the threats to justify its behavior to try and close the conference down to please Turkey,” Charny told the Post.

He said that, at the time, he contacted the US State Department to ask if there was any threat to Jewish lives, which it said there was not, and therefore proceeded with the conference.

Charny is forthright in his diagnosis of the reasons behind Israel’s refusal to recognize the Armenian Genocide, asserting that it is Israel’s diplomatic, military and economic concerns that have trumped what he sees as its moral imperative.

“We are out for our own self-interest, which is the first value we should be concerned about, but it is coming at the expense of doing what is central to Jewish tradition, ‘Justice, justice, you shall pursue,’” he asserts, quoting from Bible.

Back at the time, it was a Menachem Begin-led government in charge. And they really led to a long ranging embarrassment that caused an unnecessary rift with Armenia, all because the Israeli government was so hysterically terrified of losing relations with a country still condoning barbarism. It goes without saying that Wiesel, among any other Holocaust survivors who withdrew, really made stunning fools of themselves by caving. I'm glad Charny didn't do that. Maybe one of the worst things about the capitulation and lies the government tried concocting for justification of their positions is that it played into the hands of liberals for a time...until they too started dropping the subject by the end of the late 2000s, because their own pro-Islamist positions ultimately trumped the issue too.

Hugh Fitzgerald at Jihad Watch followed up with a vital point:

And doesn’t self-interest include a nation’s sense of itself? Now with Israel as one of the few holdouts among the countries of the West, in refusing still to recognize the Armenian Genocide, aren’t Israelis likely to suffer from the sense that they are betraying their own principles of justice? What will that do to Israeli morale?

Correct. Considering where Turkey's going today, that's one more reason why there's very little point continuing with refusal to acknowledge the issue on an official basis, and the conservative movement in particular must show it's capable and has the guts to take up such an issue without getting hysterical over diplomatic ties to a country that's still allowing Islamic barbarism under the reign of Erdogan. On which note, one of the worst things about this whole matter is that the Religion of Peace's role is still being obscured in its own way, even by some Armenian news sources themselves. That's not helpful.

Labels: anti-semitism, Armenia, dhimmitude, islam, Israel, jihad, Judaism, Knesset, misogyny, racism, State Dept, terrorism, turkey, United States