A day after U.S. President Donald Trump praised Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and as Washington weighs a possible sale of F-35 fighter jets to Turkey, Israel is moving toward a step Erdogan is unlikely to welcome.
Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar announced Thursday evening that he will bring to the next government meeting a resolution calling for Israel’s first official government recognition of the Armenian genocide.
Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan
(Photo: Adem ALTAN / AFP, AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic)
The draft resolution says that “on the basis of the moral and historical duty, Israel will recognize the genocide committed against the Armenian people in the final period of the Ottoman Empire.”
It also says Israel should condemn the denial, minimization or distortion of the historical truth surrounding those events.
The explanatory notes to the proposal say the Armenian genocide began in April 1915 with the arrest, deportation and killing of hundreds of Armenian intellectuals, leaders and educated figures in Constantinople.
After eliminating the community’s leadership, the Ottoman government began the systematic destruction of the Armenian population, the proposal says. Men were conscripted for forced labor and murdered. Women, children and the elderly were expelled from their homes and sent on long death marches toward the Syrian desert, where they were subjected to mass murder, rape, starvation and deliberate thirst.
According to the proposal, the campaign led to the deaths of about 1.5 million people and destroyed a cultural and historical heritage thousands of years old across Anatolia.
The draft also says that despite “extensive and unequivocal historical documentation,” the Armenian genocide remains the subject of a state-backed campaign of denial and minimization, including the manipulation and rewriting of history books, mainly by Turkey.
The proposal notes that 32 countries have recognized the Armenian genocide in various ways, and says Israel should do so “in light of the moral and historical duty.” It also calls for condemning any attempt to blur, minimize or deny the atrocities.
Trump said Wednesday that Erdogan had been a “leading candidate” to join Iran in the war because, in Trump’s words, he is “not a big fan of Israel.” Trump, who said earlier this month that there would be no confrontation between Israel and Turkey as long as he is president, added that he had asked Erdogan to stay out of the conflict and that Erdogan did so.
“I like him, he’s a friend of mine and he stayed out of the war with Iran,” Trump said of Erdogan.
The issue of Armenian genocide recognition has surfaced several times in Israel but has never been adopted as an official government position.
A decade ago, the Knesset Education Committee declared its recognition of the Armenian genocide. In May 2018, against the backdrop of worsening ties between Israel and Turkey, the Knesset plenum approved a discussion and vote on similar recognition, but the government has not recognized the genocide to date.
Two years ago, Defense Minister Israel Katz wrote on X that “Turkey committed a Holocaust against the Armenians,” and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said last year that he recognized the Armenian genocide.