Israeli Parliament to Consider Recognition of Armenian Genocide

Invitation to this year's commemoration ceremony at the Hebrew University

Yesterday, the Knesset approved by a 12-point margin a proposal to have a parliamentary committee hold a hearing on recognizing the WWI killings of Armenians by the Ottoman empire as genocide (Ha'aretz). The Knesset House Committee will now decide whether recognition of the Armenian Genocide ought to be sent for review to the Knesset Education Committee or to the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. Unlike last year, the government did not oppose the proposal.

The person behind the initiative is MK Haim Oron (Meretz), mentioned previously in this blog. Oron recently won the leadership race of the small left-wing party and is the brother of Yair Auron, who has written two books, one on Israel's position on the Armenian Genocide, and other about the Genocide's reception in the pre-state Jewish community in Palestine.

Backers of recognition in Israel would prefer to have the issue debated in the open Knesset Education Committee, while its opponents, led by MK Yosef Shagal (Yisrael Beitenu), previously described here, would like to see it delegated to the closed-door Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee.

Archbishop Aris Shirvanian: "The Road to the Recognition of our Catastrophe Starts in Jerusalem"

There is an interesting article by Anshel Pfeffer in Ha'aretz, so far only available in Hebrew, that features the Armenian Archbishop in Jerusalem, Aris Shirvanian. Subtitled, "The Armenians are close to a historic achievement," the article describes the efforts by Turkey as well as by Armenians to win the support of Israel and Jewish groups in their opposed efforts. The piece, which appeared with a big picture of Shirvanian on the frontpage of the online edition, comes in the wake of the vote by the Committee on Foreign Relations to put House resolution 106 before Congress, described by Taline below.

The archbishop is quoted as saying that,

Not only the Turks believe that the road to Washington goes through Jerusalem.

According to Shirvanian,

on the day when Israel changes its policy and recognizes the Armenian genocide, the US, too, will move." Pfeffer remarks dryly that "the belief in the almost mystical power of Israel and the Jewish lobby to determine votes in Washington is probably the only thing that the Turks and Armenians share in their historical fight over recognition of the Armenian Holocaust [ba-shoah ha-armenit].

According to Pfeffer, the Turks are doing their utmost to persuade the Israelis to exert more pressure on American Jewish organizations. Apparently, Turkey is afraid that Jewish and Armenian organizations are now cooperating to ensure that the resolution passes.

As I have argued previously, there is something very dangerous about the manner in which some Israeli statesmen are playing with the Turks. Yossi Sarid, of the leftist Meretz Party, who as a minister of education under Prime Minister Ehud Barak in 2000, promised that "he will do everything in order that Israeli children learn and know about the Armenian Genocide," points to President Shimon Peres as a prime culprit. Back in 2000, Peres, then Barak's Foreign Minister, flew to Ankara in the wake of Sarid's comments and assured the Turks of the standard lie, that "a tragedy" happened to the Armenians but not genocide. Today, Yossi Sarid says, Peres, among others, continues to support the "demonic image from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion that we [i.e., the Jews] rule the world and that if you want something from America, you should come to us."

According to Pfeffer, during his visit to Jerusalem, Turkish Foreign Minister Ali Babacan was able to obtain an assurance from Peres to support Turkey's goal of establishing a joint Turkish-Armenian historical commission to study "the issue." Prof. Yair Auron, long active in the recognition cause in Israel, points out the obvious: that such a commission is a deliberate attempt to obscure the truth. As Aram Hamparian, Executive Director of the Armenian National Committee told the Jerusalem Post, such a request

is about as sincere as the Iranian government saying they need to revisit the Holocaust.

Pfeffer's article also finally elucidated the connection of Israeli Meretz parliamentarian Haim Auron to Prof. Yair Auron; the two are brothers. If you recall, MK Haim Auron (also, Oron) appeared previously on this blog after he tried to place recognition of the Armenian genocide on the agenda of the Knesset.

The Suffering of Others

Profs. Israel Charny (left) and Yair Auron (right)

Last Monday (June 5, 2006), the Open University in Israel sponsored a one-day seminar titled קורבנות אחרים [Other Victims] that included addresses by Professors Israel Charny (ישראל טשרני) and Yair Auron (יאיר אורון). As the title of the colloquium suggests, the seminar was meant to correct a lacuna in Israeli education and research. Neither the universities nor the schools are teaching Israelis enough about acts of genocide other than the Shoah (Ha'aretz Hebrew; Ha'aretz English).

Even with respect to the Holocaust, a study conducted by researchers Eyal Naveh and Esther Yogev in 1996, with a sample of 800 Israeli students, revealed that some 85% had minimal knowledge of the Nazis' murder of the Roma ("gypsies") during World War Two. Furthermore, surveys conducted from 1996-2004 among participants in an elective course on genocide showed that 85-90% of the students admitted knowing "very little" about both the murder of the Roma by the Nazis during the Second World War, and the Armenian genocide perpetrated by Ottoman Turkey beginning in 1915.

For many Jews in Israel and the diaspora, comparisons of other genocides with the Shoah remain a source of discomfort, in part because such comparisons have sometimes been carried out in an attempt to relativize the destruction of European Jewry during WWII, as during the Historikerstreit ("historians' controversy") in Germany during the 1980s. But at times the effect of insisting on the "uniqueness" of the Shoah has blinded us to the suffering of others. It must be especially painful to Armenians to see so little awareness among Jews about the Armenian genocide. Worse, due to the same geopolitical considerations (Turkey) driving American policy, the State of Israel does not officially recognize the Armenian genocide. Charny and Auron have been at the forefront of raising awareness of the Armenian genocide in Israel - as well as about genocide more generally.

As the title of Auron's book suggests, genocide is defined not only by the "banality of evil" (Hannah Arendt) but also by the "banality of indifference." Preventing genocide thus requires being open to the pain of others and opening the memory of "our" tragedies to "their" suffering.

Both Israel Charny and Yair Auron are pioneers in the study of genocide in Israel. Charny is the director of Israel's Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide, the editor of the excellent two-volume Encyclopedia of Genocide (1999), and the author of many other works. Auron, a lecturer at the Open University, where he teaches courses on genocide, is best-known for two important books dealing with the Armenian genocide, both of which have been translated into English. The Banality of Indifference: Zionism and the Armenian Genocide (2001) examines the reactions of the yishuv, the pre-1948 (i.e., pre-state) Jewish community in Eretz Yisrael (Palestine), to the Armenian genocide - reactions that ranged from callous indifference to attempts to actively aid the victims. His more recent book, The Banality of Denial: Israel and the Armenian Genocide (2002), deals with the role of the Armenian genocide in Israeli society and politics from the creation of the state until the present - reviews to follow. In an interview with Shahar Ilan of Ha'aretz, Auron, quoting genocide researchers, called denial "the final stage of genocide."

The colloquium also marked the publication of two new books, in Hebrew, as part of the university's Genocide series. I have not been able to confirm the full titles of both books, but one, edited by Auron, is called "מחשבות על הבלתי נתפס" (Thoughts about the Inconceivable), and the other is edited by Gilad Margalit of Haifa University.