How the Israeli State Did Its Best to Destroy an Academic Conference which included the Armenian Genocide
For Zionism the Jewish holocaust is a
unique event unlike any other genocide. Whilst accepting that some 1.5 million
Armenians killed by Turkey was a ‘parallel,
or a holocaust-related event’ Zionist historian Lucy Dawidowicz cited ‘the
uniqueness of the fate of the Jews experienced’ [i] Yehuda Bauer,
the dean of the Zionist historians, also argued that there was ‘an element of uniqueness in the history of
the (Nazi) holocaust.’ Nazi ideology saw the Jews as being the ‘incarnation of the Devil.’ [ii]
The role that the Armenians played in
the Ottoman Empire as a ‘middleman minority’ was very similar to that of the
Jews. [iii]
The Armenians were largely
concentrated in eastern Anatolia,
many of them merchants and industrialists,
Just as the
Nazis had invented the stab-in-the-back
legend alleging that the Jews had caused their defeat in WW1, so too did the
Turks, holding the Armenians responsible for their defeats in World War 1.[iv]
On 24 April Joe Biden formally
recognized the Armenian
holocaust, 106 years after it happened. Israel however refuses to recognize the
genocide. To the Zionists the only genocide that matters is the Jewish one.
Despite having ignored and downplayed
the Jewish holocaust when it was taking place, the Zionist movement reacts
angrily to holocaust deniers. Unfortunately the Zionists are not motivated by opposition
in principle to genocide denial other than when it comes to the Jewish genocide.
This is because the Jewish holocaust lies at the core of Zionism’s narrative of
self-justification.
If the Zionists had any principled
objection to genocide denial then they would apply that principle to the
Armenian genocide which is widely recognised to be the first holocaust of the
20th century. Yet far from recognising and remembering the Armenian
holocaust, which prefigured the Jewish holocaust, Zionism has gone out of its
way to play down what happened or even pretend that it did not happen.
The Zionist whitewashing of the record
of the Turkish state vs the Armenians began with the founder of Political Zionism,
Theodor Herzl. In order to secure a charter for Palestine, Herzl agreed to
support Ottoman Turkey in the wake of its massacre of the Armenians in the
mid-1890s. Herzl wrote how
Yesterday I telegraphed the N. Fr. Presse, a rather long Entrefilet (notice) presenting the local, undeniably critical situation in a manner friendly to the government.[v]
Bernard Lazarre,
who led the campaign to exonerate Dreyfus was a prominent supporter of the
Armenians. Lazare resigned from the Zionist Actions Committee as a result of
Herzl’s actions. He ‘could find no place
in Herzl’s essentially reactionary movement.’ [vi]
In an open letter to Herzl Lazarre asked:
‘How
can those who purport to represent the ancient people… extend a welcoming hand
to murderers, and no delegate to the Zionist Congress rises up in protest?’’[vii]
To be fair
the Zionist Congress of 1933 in Prague didn’t rise up in protest at the rise to
power of the Nazis either! Israeli diplomats and politicians supported Turkey’s
opposition to a memorial day to commemorate the Armenian genocide.[viii] Israel opposed the concept of the holocaust
expanding.[ix]
In How Israel Quashed
Efforts to Recognize the Armenian Genocide – to Please Turkey Ha'aretz
demonstrated how, in the summer of
1982, the Israeli Foreign Ministry made strenuous efforts to destroy a
Conference on Genocide in Tel Aviv which included the Armenian holocaust. No expense
was spared in order to please the Turkish regime.
Yad
Vashem, the Zionist holocaust propaganda museum, agreed to withdraw its
sponsorship of the conference.
“Our first objective is to neutralize Yad
Vashem as an official national body from taking part in including the Armenians
in the conference,”
a recently released Foreign Ministry document revealed.
The Ministry’s
next target was Tel Aviv University rector and future president Prof. Yoram
Dinstein. Moshe Gilboa reported that he met with Dinstein and explained to him
“the background for our objection to the
inclusion of the Armenian issue.” The result was that Dinstein’s office sent
a letter detailing their concerns about the event. Tel Aviv University declined
to take part.
The
Ministry also attacked the funding sources of the conference and the Henrietta
Szold Institute agreed not to provide funding for it. Elie Wiesel, the Auschwitz survivor and future
Nobel Peace Prize winner also agreed to withdraw as Chair of the
Conference.
After Wiesel
pulled out he shared internal information about the conference with the Foreign
Ministry. Wiesel met with Naphtali Lau-Lavie, Israel's general consul in New York and
discussed ways “to cancel the Armenian
section" of the conference. One idea being “to prevent such a discussion in the plenum” and to transfer it to “workshops” on the sidelines, so it
would not be given publicity.
Wiesel, together with Arthur
Hertzberg of the American Jewish Committee and Yad Vashem, attempted to destroy the conference.
Wiesel lobbied other delegates into not
attending.[x]
A number of prominent historians,
including Zionist holocaust historian, Prof. Yehuda Bauer, agree not to
attend.
“We continue to act to reduce and diminish the
Armenian issue to the extent of our ability by every possible means,”
according
to one Foreign Ministry document from the summer of 1982.
Israel’s
Foreign Ministry also tried to get the conference canceled outright.
Negotiations were conducted with the conference organizers, headed by Israel
Charny, an American-Israeli psychologist, who was offered compensation if he
agreed to cancel it.
Turkish soldiers standing over the skulls of dead Armenian villagers
Israeli
embassies around the world tried to persuade potential participants to cancel
their attendance. One document stated that
“We are currently trying to dissuade the
invitees from taking part.” “I propose that we instruct the general consul to
contact Wiesel and request that he disassociate himself from the conference,”
wrote Elyakim Rubinstein, the legal adviser to the Foreign Ministry,
now a Supreme Court justice who, along with fellow judges, repeatedly rule that information on Israel’s links with
repressive regimes abroad should be concealed.
Because they couldn’t
prevent the conference from taking place, the Foreign Ministry proposed to
plant articles in the press that would be critical of Israel’s attempts to
prevent the conference from taking place. These articles would “serve as our alibi, in the Turks’ eyes,”
ministry officials hoped. When the conference did eventually take place, the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs spied on the event and reported back.
Alon Liel, the Foreign Ministry’s representative in Turkey,
warned that
“if the Armenian
section is included in the conference, it will have grave implications for
Israeli-Turkish relations.”
The Israeli
government’s excuse was that if the conference went ahead as planned then
Turkey would retaliate by not allowing Jewish emigrants to Israel to pass
through Turkey.
Professor
Charny has just published a book "Israel’s Failed Response to
the Armenian Genocide: Denial, State Deception, Truth Versus Politicization of
History." Charny argues that the Turkish threat was “an invention”. He bases this view on a
1982 document in which Israel’s general consul in Istanbul at the time, Avner
Arazi, wrote that the fear of a severe Turkish reaction was highly exaggerated.
Charny
described the Armenian genocide as a ‘dress
rehearsal for the holocaust’. Israeli historian Bat Ye’or described how the
Germans, allies of the Turks in WW1, were present at the massacres and that ‘this history lesson was remembered one
generation later, when Hitler planned a genocide…’ [xi] Bernard
Lewis a prominent Zionist historian was convicted in a French court of denying
the Armenian genocide.[xii]
Michael Birnbaum, one
of the founders of the US Holocaust Museum wrote in Charny's new book that
people at the Israeli Embassy tried to convince him “not to include the Armenians in the museum."
Charny described how the Foreign Ministry’s conduct made him
put an end to the naivete with which
we ascribe good intentions to our leadership… seeing the dirt, the contemptible
behavior, the manipulations, the wickedness and destructiveness of a key
division of government – it's just astounding.”
In
2007 a scandal erupted surrounding the Anti-Defamation
League's refusal to support a bill calling on the
Bush administration to recognize the 1915-17 Turkish massacre of its Armenian
minority as genocide. The ADL itself was split over the issue; firing its New
England regional director Andrew Tarsy for telling The Boston Globe that,
"I strongly disagree with the ADL's
national position." The ADL, which has a history of anti-Black racism,
including arranging
the training of US police forces by Israeli police, has a long record of
attacking anti-Zionists as ‘anti-Semitic’.
How Israel Quashed Efforts to Recognize the Armenian
Genocide – to Please Turkey
Decades before the U.S. president formally recognized the horrors of 1915, Israel's Foreign Ministry sought to foil an academic conference on the subject, fearing reprisal from Turkey. 'We continue to act to reduce and diminish the Armenian issue to the extent of our ability by every possible means'
Ha'aretz, Ofer Aderet, May. 2, 2021
In
the summer of 1982, Israel's Foreign Ministry set to work on a special mission.
“We continue to spare no effort on this
issue, which is currently a central one on our agenda,” an internal
ministry document says of the mission. “We
shall leave no stone unturned, whether or not this thing succeeds,” another
document says. “Intensive treatment that
encompasses both institutions and public figures in Israel and abroad… feverish
and tireless efforts… at the highest diplomatic levels,” other documents
add.
The
mission that so occupied the Foreign Ministry personnel 40 years ago had
nothing to do with the First Lebanon War, which had just begun, but with
another much larger and deadlier war: the Armenian genocide in 1915, during
which an estimated 1.5 million people were killed by the forces of the Ottoman
Empire.
Following U.S. President Joe Biden’s formal recognition on April 24 of the genocide, it’s particularly interesting to see how Israel not only denied the horrific mass murders – a policy to which it still adheres – but also tried to influence others to act in the same manner.
‘We continue with intensive and comprehensive efforts to get the conference canceled or to at least have the Armenian section removed from the agenda’
A
recently released file from the National Archives reveals Israeli efforts
during that summer four decades ago to thwart an academic conference due to be
held in the country, focusing both on the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide.
The documents in question offer a lesson in realpolitik and the willingness to
sacrifice fundamental values of the type that any democratic society –
especially one established after the calamity of the Holocaust – is supposed to
hold dear, on the alter of political and security-related interests, among
other reasons.
Beginning
in April 1982, from the day the conference was first announced, the Foreign
Ministry’s efforts to sabotage it never ceased. These efforts, which went on
for two months, bore fruit.
The Yad Vashem Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem
withdrew its initial sponsorship of the event, Tel Aviv University declined to
take part, the Henrietta Szold Institute pledged not to provide funding for it,
Holocaust survivor and then-future Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel resigned his
post as conference chairman, and a number of prominent historians, including
Prof. Yehuda Bauer, said they would not to attend. The conference did
ultimately take place, but in a much watered-down and unofficial framework.
“We continue to act to reduce and diminish the Armenian issue to the extent of our ability by every possible means,” according to one Foreign Ministry document from the summer of 1982.
Removing the 'Armenian section'
“Reduce and diminish” – as if this was not
about the murder of well over a million people that also involved uprooting,
plunder, expulsion and death marches.
“We continue with
intensive and comprehensive efforts to get the conference canceled or to at
least have the Armenian section removed from the agenda,”
the document adds. The “Armenian section” –
two simple words that stand for a huge genocide.
Aside
from the successful attempts to damage the prestige of the event by making the
list of participants shrink significantly, the Foreign Ministry also tried to
get it canceled outright. This is evident from the negotiations conducted by
ministry personnel with the conference organizers, headed by Israel Charny, an
American-Israeli psychologist. The talks were an attempt to reach a compromise
whereby the event would be canceled, but the Foreign Ministry would provide
organizers with “compensation for the actual damage – on the basis of
receipts.” But the proposal didn’t go very far.
'I propose that we instruct the general consul to contact Wiesel and request that he disassociate himself from the conference,' wrote Elyakim Rubinstein
Meanwhile,
the ministry enlisted embassies around the world to help persuade potential
participants to cancel their attendance in the conference, as one document
states: “We are currently trying to
dissuade the invitees from taking part.” The most important guest was Elie
Wiesel, who was supposed to chair the event. “I propose that we instruct the general consul to contact Wiesel and
request that he disassociate himself from the conference,” wrote Elyakim Rubinstein, the legal adviser of
the Foreign Ministry at the time, and the future attorney general, cabinet
secretary and Supreme Court justice.
After Wiesel agreed to pull out, he shared internal information
about the conference with Foreign Ministry personnel, and even took part in the
effort to foil it. For one thing, Wiesel met with Naphtali Lau-Lavie, Israel's general
consul in New York and a Holocaust survivor himself, and discussed ways “to
cancel the Armenian section" of the confab. One idea proposed was “to
prevent such a discussion in the plenum” and to transfer it to “workshops” on
the sidelines, so it would not be given publicity. “We could say that the
conference did not designate the Armenian issue as a subject for discussion,”
Lau-Lavie suggested.
'Our first objective is to neutralize Yad Vashem as an official national body from taking part in including the Armenians in the conference'
Israeli
ambassadors around the world were called upon by the ministry in Jerusalem to
use their ties to keep the conference organizers from finding a replacement for
Wiesel. “We request that you call [Lewis]
Samuel Feuer and convince him not to accept the presidency of the conference,”
Ambassador to France Meir Rosenne was told. Feuer, an American sociologist, has
“an international reputation and broad
personal authority and his non-participation in the conference will lower the
level of the conference and reduce its dimensions to the minimum,” Rosenne
was informed.
For
his part, Lau-Lavie reported to the ministry that he had spoken with Jack P.
Eisner, who fought in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and was
actively involved in Holocaust commemoration. Eisner had received an offer to
chair the conference but Lau-Lavie said he turned down the offer, “ceased funding the conference and had just
halted a transfer of money for the event.”
The
Israeli consulate in Stockholm was asked, meanwhile, to contact Per Ahlmark, a
renowned Swedish writer and politician, and to let him know that Wiesel “would be greatly appreciate it if he did not
attend the conference.”
Targeting Yad Vashem
The
list of people whom Foreign Ministry emissaries contacted to persuade them not
to participate included local officials such as Yad Vashem chairman Yitzhak
Arad and Yad Vashem council chairman Gideon Hausner, the prosecutor in the
Eichmann trial two decades earlier. The idea was to try to persuade the
Holocaust remembrance center of the problematic nature of the conference,
which, in dealing with both with the Shoah and the Armenian genocide, would
detract from the uniqueness of the former.
“Our
first objective is to neutralize Yad Vashem as an official national body from
taking part in including the Armenians in the conference,” one of the newly
publicized documents says.
“This should be
possible because the inclusion of other peoples in the same line with the
Jewish Holocaust would place Yad Vashem in a controversial position in the
world and in terms of international public opinion. If we succeed in getting
Yad Vashem out of the conference in which Armenian issues will be discussed, it
will be an important and significant achievement since no official public
government body will then be standing behind it.”
The
next target was Tel Aviv University rector and future president Prof. Yoram
Dinstein. Moshe Gilboa, director of the Foreign Ministry’s Diaspora Department,
reported that he met with Dinstein and explained to him “the background for our objection to the inclusion of the Armenian
issue.” The meeting was a success, and yielded a letter from Dinstein’s
office detailing concerns about the event.
Behind
the scenes, Israel boasted to Turkey about its activities, according to one
archival document:
“We put an emphasis on
our efforts to cancel the conference completely or to at least remove the
Armenian issue from it… It was explained to the Turkish representative in
Israel that, in the present circumstances, the conference has shrunk to tiny
proportions and will be run by a small group of private individuals, without
any official government or public support.”
Ministry
officials also instructed Israel’s representatives in Turkey to inform their
local counterparts about the efforts being made and to add – perhaps
apologetically – that “in a democratic
regime, as we have here [i.e., in Israel], we cannot prevent private
individuals from holding conferences and discussing any subject they wish.”
Prof. Israel Charny. Argues in his new book that the Turkish threat to holding the 1982 conference in Israel on the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide was “an invention.” Credit: Emil Salman
To
assuage the Turks, the Foreign Ministry also proposed to plant articles in the
press that would be critical of Israel’s attempts to prevent the conference
from taking place. These articles would “serve
as our alibi, in the Turks’ eyes,” ministry officials hoped.
Eventually,
as in a military operation, the Foreign Ministry even “spied on” the event that was held:
“No Armenian clergy
were spotted… A certain Armenian speaker gave a talk about the Armenian issue.
A film on the subject that was supposed to be screened was not shown because
the projector didn’t work. No more than six or seven people were seen in the
conference rooms. The [Armenian] Patriarch was seen walking around,”
according
to a report.
There
is no one clear answer as to what was behind the Foreign Ministry’s obsession
with foiling this academic conference. Officially, ministerial representatives
told people that Turkey could potentially harm Jews from Iran and Syria who
would try to immigrate to Israel via Turkey.
“All of the Foreign Ministry’s activity to
prevent the holding of the conference is intended solely to save Jews from
lands where they are in distress,” one of the archival documents says. That
account is supported by another source, describing how a Foreign Ministry
representative in Turkey, Alon Liel, was summoned to the Foreign Ministry in
Ankara, in April 1982.
Elyakim Rubinstein,
Foreign Ministry counsel in 1982. "There was a constraint here, a concrete
interest, that we had to pay attention to, because the Turks could be tough,”
he says today.Credit: Olivier
Fitoussi
“Turkey cannot conceive of a conference being held in Israel in which it will be presented in the same category with Nazi Germany,” Liel was told.
“The Turkish people find this especially surprising given the fact that Turkey aided Jewish refugees who managed to escape the arms of the Nazis in World War II,” the summary of the meeting says. “The Turks display extreme sensitivity, bordering on irrationality, regarding the Armenian issue, and are unwilling to admit that the events of 1915 constitutes the Armenian genocide."
The
bottom line, as Liel warned in his report to Jerusalem, was that “if the Armenian section is included in the
conference, it will have grave implications for Israeli-Turkish relations.”
Historian
Eldad Ben Aharon, whose areas of
expertise include Israel-Turkey relations and who published a paper in 2015
about efforts to torpedo the 1982 conference, says that the reason for Israel's
policy lies in how important it sees ties with Turkey, because of both defense
considerations and geopolitical realities.
'An invention'
Last
week, Elyakim Rubinstein recalled his involvement on behalf of the Foreign
Ministry in preventing the event from taking place. “I would have been much more comfortable, as a proponent of academic
freedom, to sit on the other side of the barricade. But there was a constraint
here, a concrete interest, that we had to pay attention to, because the Turks
could be tough,” he told Haaretz. “I
think we acted correctly. Israel has responsibility vis-a-vis the Jewish issue
everywhere.”
But where did the threat to hurt would-be Jewish immigrants passing through Turkey come from? Prof. Charny, the organizer of the 1982 conference, has just published a new book entitled "Israel’s Failed Response to the Armenian Genocide: Denial, State Deception, Truth Versus Politicization of History." In it, Charny argues that the Turkish threat was “an invention.” He bases this view on a 1982 document in which Israel’s general consul in Istanbul at the time, Avner Arazi, wrote that the fear of a severe Turkish reaction to the conference was highly exaggerated.
“I would like to touch
on a point that I believe served as the basis for our concerted efforts to get
the conference canceled, i.e., the hints about the passage of Iranian and
Syrian Jews via Turkey,”
Arazi wrote
“I was not aware of
this issue. Here in Turkey, there were no signs of a connection between this
issue and the conference. Anyone familiar with Turkey’s dedication to its
tradition and its principles, which include not extraditing refugees, would
never imagine that it could endanger Jews’ lives by turning them over to the
Syrians and Iranians… At a time when Turkey is making every effort to improve
its image in the world, it is not reasonable to think it would commit such an
injustice and thereby also invite harsh criticism from the Free World,”
he
added.
Other
evidence shows that the Israeli “handling” of the confab was just one front
where Israel was active on the subject of the genocide: Michael Birnbaum, one
of the founders of the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, writes in Charny's
new book that people at the Israeli Embassy tried to convince him “not to include the Armenians in the
museum."
Charny,
who is today 90, told Haaretz that the Foreign Ministry’s conduct in the
episode made him “put an end to the
naivete with which we ascribe good intentions to our leadership,” and that “seeing the dirt, the contemptible behavior,
the manipulations, the wickedness and destructiveness of a key division of
government – it's just astounding.”
See Zionist leader colluded with Armenian genocide
[i] Lucy Dawidowicz, The holocaust and the Historians, Cambridge, p.13 cited by Vahakn Dadrian p. 159.
[ii] Bauer, Rethinking the holocaust, p.44.
[iii] Helen Fein, Accounting for Genocide, p. 10.
[iv] Helen Fein, Accounting for Genocide, p.17.
[v] Diaries
p. 392.
[vi] Hannah Arendt, The Jew as a Pariah, p. 171.
[vii] How Herzl Sold Out the Armenians, Rachel Elboim-Dror Ha'aretz, May 01 2015, https://tinyurl.com/y7dc34cd Herzl complained that Lazarre had written ‘“a mean, malicious article against me”Diaries of Theodor Herzl, p. 1201, ed. Ralph Patai, 13 Jan 1902.
[ix] Holocausts and Politics, Akiva Eldar, Yediot Aharanot, 1975. See also Armenian Genocide Debate Exposes Rifts at ADL, Jennifer Siegel, August 22, 2007. https://tinyurl.com/ybzcra6c -/
[x] Norman Finkelstein, The holocaust Industry, p. 69.
[xi] Vahakn Dadrian, p. 159.
[xii] Finkelstein p. 69.
USHM, Charny, Wiesel, Armenian Genocide, Anatolia, holocaust, Yehuda Bauer, Lucy Dawidowicz,
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