For the world to ensure that these atrocities do not happen again, we have to be clear about what they are,
Jerusalem Post writes.
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.
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 Jerusalem Post writes that 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.
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.
When Jewish recite “Never Again” on Holocaust Remembrance Day, it is obviously “never again” for their people, but there is nothing wrong with making it clear that we also believe that genocide should never happen to anyone else as well. The first step in ensuring “never again” is recognizing history as it was and making clear that what happened to the Armenians was in fact a genocide.
