Robert Fisk: Israel can no longer ignore the existence of the first Holocaust

PanARMENIAN.Net -
Israelis commemorated the second Holocaust of the 20th century this week, Jan. 27, but the Armenians were not participating in official ceremonies, says an article published in British Independent.



That’s perhaps because Israel officially refuses to acknowledge that Armenia's million and a half dead of 1915-1923 were victims of a Turkish Holocaust, according to Robert Fisk, the author of the publication.



Israeli-Turkish diplomatic and military relations are more important than genocide, he further notes.



The authors quotes the words of George Hintlian, historian and prominent member of Jerusalem's 2,000-strong Armenian community in Jerusalem who said, “Maybe they don't like it that there was another genocide. These are things we can't explain."

"For three decades, no documentary on the Armenian Genocide could be shown on Israeli television because it would offend the Turks. Then suddenly last year, important Israelis demanded that a documentary be shown. Thirty Knesset members supported us. We always had Yossi Sarid of Peace Now but now we've got right-wing Israelis," said the historian.



George Hintlian turned up on Israeli television with Danny Ayalon – the foreign office minister who humiliated the Turkish ambassador by forcing him to sit on a sofa below him – and Knesset speaker Reuven Rivlin who said that Israel should commemorate the Armenian genocide "every year".

Proceeding with his publication, the British analyst further states that the Israeli press now calls the Armenian genocide a "Shoah" – the same word all Israelis use for the Jewish Holocaust.



"Let us assume that Turkey will renew its ties with Israel. Then what? What then? Will we also renew our contribution to the denial of the Armenian Holocaust?" he asks in clunclusion.



The Armenian Genocide (1915-23) was the deliberate and systematic destruction of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire during and just after World War I. It was characterized by massacres, and deportations involving forced marches under conditions designed to lead to the death of the deportees, with the total number of deaths reaching 1.5 million.



The date of the onset of the genocide is conventionally held to be April 24, 1915, the day that Ottoman authorities arrested some 250 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople. Thereafter, the Ottoman military uprooted Armenians from their homes and forced them to march for hundreds of miles, depriving them of food and water, to the desert of what is now Syria. Massacres were indiscriminate of age or gender, with rape and other sexual abuse commonplace.



To date, twenty countries and 44 U.S. states have officially recognized the events of the period as genocide, and most genocide scholars and historians accept this view. The Armenian Genocide has been also recognized by influential media including The New York Times, BBC, The Washington Post and The Associated Press.



The majority of Armenian Diaspora communities were formed by the Genocide survivors.



Holocaust also known as The Shoah is the term generally used to describe the genocide of approximately six million European Jewsduring World War II, a programme of systematic state-sponsored extermination by Nazi Germany.

The persecution and genocide were carried out in stages. Legislation to remove the Jews from civil society was enacted years before the outbreak of World War II. Concentration camps were established in which inmates were used as slave labor until they died of exhaustion or disease. Where the Third Reichconquered new territory in eastern Europe, specialized units called Einsatzgruppen murdered Jews and political opponents in mass shootings. Jews and Romani were confined in overcrowded ghettos before being transported by freight train to extermination camps where, if they survived the journey, the majority of them were killed in gas chambers. Every arm of Nazi Germany's bureaucracy was involved in the logistics of the mass murder, turning the country into what one Holocaust scholar has called "a genocidal state"