Epress.am News from Armenia
Was the recent surfacing of the Armenian tragedy in the Israeli Knesset rooted in political or moral ground? ask Hakan Yavuz and Tal Buenos in a column published by The Jerusalem Post on Saturday:
“Fully aware that the timing of the public debate on the Armenian tragedy recently held by the Knesset’s Education Committee is political to an embarrassing degree, Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin set out to negate this immediate perception by stating, more than once, that the reopening of the debate on the issue was not a matter of political or diplomatic considerations, but a moral duty.
“Such rhetoric aims to establish a narrative according to which the Israel-Turkey plitical relationship held Israel’s moral position hostage. Now that Israel is free from its political commitments to Turkey, the argument goes, Israel may officially declare that what happened to the Armenians during WWI was genocide.
“However, to argue that Israel did in fact keep silent on this issue for the sake of maintaining political ties with Turkey is tantamount to declaring Israel’s moral bankruptcy.
“A state that prides itself on earnestly trying to do the right thing despite endless and tremendous challenges and unprecedented moral trials cannot afford to abandon its moral compass in this manner.
“Is Israel prepared to sacrifice the integrity of its current president, whose position symbolizes Israeli consensus, and say that when Shimon Peres announced unequivocally in April 2001 that what happened to the Armenians was tragic but not genocide, he sold morality for political gain? Tragically, by blurring the differences between the Holocaust and the massacre of Armenians, Israel is harming itself by lending a hand to the continued practice of irresponsible use of the term genocide in other arenas of conflict, such as the conflict Israel itself has with the Palestinians. In a growing number of forums, campaigns against Israel’s position in its conflict with the Palestinians are armed with the term genocide as a weapon of mass political pressure.
[…]“Is it hard to imagine a possible law somewhere in Europe that would make it illegal to deny the ‘genocide’ of the Palestinians? Instead of letting politicians add more fuel to the fire of misuse of the term genocide, careful scholarly work must be done to investigate the transition from Holocaust to the modern-day use of the term genocide and put its politicization in proper academic perspective.
[…]“Every nation has the right to employ whatever means it has to fight for its survival, and should not have to do so at the expense of its moral standing in the eyes of other nations. This is a belief both Israel and Turkey share.
[…]“A common denominator for both might be found in the attempt to rescue the term genocide from further politicization. With this short essay, we intend to encourage increased scholarly dialogue on the concept of genocide: morally, philosophically, historically and legally. It is our hope that such activity would advance the field of genocide studies in both countries, and weather the storm between the two governments until the relations between the two nations know better days.”
Professor M. Hakan Yavuz is originally from Turkey and teaches political science at the Middle East Center at the University of Utah. Tal Buenos is originally from Israel and is a doctoral student political science at the University of Utah, focusing on genocide studies.