>>From Evil, Make Good
By Mayaan Jaffe
Israel Hasbara Committee, NY
May 5 2005
One-and-a-half million innocent individuals were killed. Women were
raped and children were tortured. The survivors are few, the pain is
great. But even ninety years after the Armenian Genocide, in which
Armenians were systematically murdered at the hands of the Ottoman
Turks, many ignore or deny the tragedy; many, but not all…
On 2 May 2005, the Hebrew University Armenian Studies Program, under
the auspices of Professor Michael E. Stone, brought the massacre
to the forefront of the thoughts of Israelis in a commemorative
evening, one week after the 24 April official day of remembrance
of the genocide. There was laughter, there were tears, and despite
the pain of the speakers (who presented materials in English, Hebrew,
Armenian and Russian), they offered sentiments of empowerment, outlooks
of hope. His Beatitude Patriarch Torkom II, the Armenian Patriarch
of Jerusalem, was present. Steven Kaplan, Dean of the Department of
Humanities at the Hebrew University, attended as well. Mr. Tsolag
Momjian, Honorary Consul of the Republic of Armenia, inspired the
crowd with his personal story. And leading scholars in the field
of genocide, including keynote speaker Professor Israel Charney
and Armenian Studies Program Director Professor Michael E. Stone,
offered educational and inspirational lectures.
The evening was not a small feat for the Hebrew University. Despite
an Armenian-Israeli population of 25,000 and aside from scattered
Israeli politicians who support genocide commemoration and study,
the Jewish state has refused to recognize the Armenian massacre. The
country’s reasons are twofold. First of all, Israel has few allies
and is afraid to harm its relations with Turkey, a perpetrator who
has still not taken responsibility for its crime. Second of all, there
is a hesitation among Jews to give credence to other genocides so as
not to detract from the world’s focus on the Nazi Holocaust, in which
some six million Jews were murdered. While the former may be a viable
reason for Israel’s stance, according to Monday’s keynote speaker
Professor Israel Charney, the second reason is totally unfounded.
Said Charney, “We have an absolute moral responsibility to recognize
the Armenian Genocide… Respecting and honoring the memory and history
of each and every genocide is the first essential step towards creating
new means of preventing genocide to all people in the future.”
And there might be some truth to Charney’s statement. The Armenian
Holocaust of 1915 occurred less than half-a-century before the
Jewish Holocaust. Adolf Hitler was aware of how the world almost
instantaneously ‘forgot’ about the Armenians. In one of Hitler’s
many speeches he recognized the Armenian Genocide, drew comparisons
between it and the acts he plotted to carry out, and used it as a means
to encourage his followers. He said, “I have issued the command – and
I’ll have anybody who utters but one word of criticism executed by a
firing squad – that our war aim does not consist in reaching certain
lines, but in the physical destruction of the enemy. Accordingly,
I have placed my death-head formations in readiness … with orders
for them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men,
women and children of Polish derivation and language. Only thus shall
we gain the living space … we need. Who after all speaks today of
the annihilation of the Armenians?”
Making the connection then
As the statement by Hitler alludes, there is a deep connection between
the Armenians and the Jews. But the histories of the two peoples
connect more extensively than one might imagine. Senior lecturer at
the Open University of Israel and the Kibbutzim College of Education,
Professor Yair Auron has dedicated himself to bringing to light the
connection Armenians and Jews, their trials and tribulations. In his
book The Banality of Indifference: Zionism and the Armenian Genocide
(Transaction Books, 2000), which was published this year in Hebrew
in honor of the 90th anniversary, he writes: “At the time of the
Armenian genocide, the possibility of its extension to include the
Ottoman Jews was just barely avoided. One cannot help but be reminded
that between the two world wars, when the fate of the Armenians became
the forgotten genocide, European Jewry failed to heed the clear early
warnings of Hitler’s final solution.”
Auron devotes the major portion of his study to the fate of the
Armenians and the Jews under Turkish rule during the twilight of the
Ottoman Empire, from the beginning of the twentieth century, to the
rebalancing of world power in the Middle East after World War I.
He proves that the Jews of the Yishuv were well aware they were
next in line for a Turkish genocide. Indeed, during the spring of
1916 the order for expulsion of the Jews from Jaffa was a distinct
possibility. The intervention of the U.S. and German consuls with the
Turkish government in Jerusalem proved to be decisive in helping the
Jews avoid the fate that befell the Armenians.
Ironically, it was Henry Morgenthau, a Jew and the American ambassador
to Turkey during World War I, who became the first whistleblower
in what he described as the murder of a nation. In September 1915
Morgenthau requested emergency aid from his government, and in the same
year the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief (ACASR)
was established. In 1916, assistance efforts under the auspices
of Congress were reorganized as the Near East Relief (NER), which
collected and distributed substantial sums from private and government
sources. Through these projects, tens of thousands of Armenians were
saved. However, more were murdered than saved; according to Professor
M.E. Stone, head of the Hebrew University Armenian Studies Program,
the number of Armenians murdered by the Ottoman Empire totaled more
than 1.5 million, virtually wiping out the Turkish-Armenian population.
Ambassador Morgenthau was also effective in rescuing Jews, saving
leaders such as David Ben Gurion and Yitzhak Ben Tzvi, later prime
minister and president of Israel, respectively. Both men were avidly
pro-Turkish. Indeed Ben Gurion had tried to organize a Jewish corps in
support of the Ottomans, but when his name appeared on a Zionist list
he was jailed and charged with treason. On arriving in Alexandria he
was jailed again by the British, and then evacuated to New York. In
both instances, he was saved thanks to the intervention of Ambassador
Morgenthau.
Auron argues that Ben Gurion knew of the murders and what the Turks
capable of doing. Auron writes, “Whatever Ben Gurion’s strategy may
have been, he wrote privately to his father in 1919 that ‘Jamal Pasha
[then Turkish military ruler in Palestine] planned from the outset
to destroy the entire Hebrew settlement in Eretz Yisrael, exactly as
they did the Armenians in Armenia.'”
The murder of the Armenian political, cultural and business leadership
in Constantinople in April 1915 marked the beginning of full-scale
genocide. One month prior, Ambassador Morgenthau made arrangements
through his friend Josephus Daniels, Secretary of the Navy, to have
the USS Tennessee evacuate a number of Jews from Palestine to refugee
camps in Alexandria, Egypt. On the eve of World War I, there were some
85,000 Jews out of a population of 700,000 in the area of Palestine
west of the Jordan River [modern day Israel]. Half of the Jews were
part of the “Old Yishuv” and half were part of the “New Yishuv,”
immigrants who had arrived at the end of the nineteenth century and
the beginning of the twentieth.
As noted, evidence suggests the Jews knew what was happening to the
Armenians in the Ottoman Empire.
“The Yishuv knew about the fate of the Armenians and feared a similar
fate,” Auron writes.
Interestingly, it was Mordecai Ben-Hillel HaCohen, a Jewish journalist
in the Yishuv and uncle of the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin,
who became the first publicist to report the chain of events affecting
the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire. This was as early as 1916.
Likewise, the first book to document the plight of the Armenians,
The Forty Days of Musa Dagh: Symbol and Parable, was also written by a
Jew, Franz Werfel, and published in Germany in 1933. Translated into
Yiddish and Hebrew, Franz Werfel’s novel influenced Zionist youth
movements in Palestine in the 1930s and the resistance movements to
the Nazis throughout occupied Europe.
When Hitler’s plans began to come to fruition, it was Morgenthau’s
son, Henry Morgenthau II, the treasury secretary under President
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who became the only member of the American
government during World War II to campaign for the creation of a
World Refugee Board to save the remnants of European Jewry. He was
always quoting the cables sent from his father, which warned of the
Armenian genocide during his time.
Making the connection now
One might assume these parallels, especially those between the tragic
events themselves, would lead the Jewish people to both identify
with and recognize the Armenian Genocide. This is especially since
the Armenian community has been in Jerusalem and the Holy Land since
the fourth century (more than 1,700 years). However, this is not
the case; as mentioned, Israel does not officially recognize the
Armenian Genocide. But it is also not accurate to say the facts have
gone unnoticed by everyone. Five years ago, for example, then-Israeli
Minister of Education Yossi Sarid became one of the first Israelis
to take a stance against denial of the Armenian Genocide when he
participated in that year’s memorial event. During his speech he
said, “The Armenian Memorial Day should be a day of reflection and
introspection for all of us, a day of soul-searching. On this day,
we as Jews, victims of the Shoah [Holocaust], should examine our
relationship to the pain of others. The massacre, which was carried
out by the Turks against the Armenians in 1915 and 1916, was one of
the most horrible acts in modern times…”
Sarid even recommended the state implement a new history curriculum
that would include a central chapter on genocide, and within it,
an open reference to the Armenian genocide. (Since Limor Livnat took
over as education minister, this idea has been dismissed.)
While few other politicians have followed Sarid’s lead, educated
historians and professors such as Auron have for a long time taken
a stand. As Director of the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide
in Jerusalem, Charney lectures regularly about the significance of
Jewish recognition of other people’s tragedies.
“Denying that there was an Armenian genocide, or any other genocide,
is the same as someone saying there was no Holocaust of the Jewish
people,” he said.
During the aforementioned 2 May memorial event, Charney noted that
there has been decisive progress against denials, but that there is
still much work to be done.
Stone also has extensively written and lectured about the similarities
between the atrocities committed against the Armenians by the Ottomans
and those committed against the Jews by the Nazis. He said, “In
my view they are the same sort of event. The Holocaust was simply
‘bigger and better’ because the Nazis had a much more organized
state and much more advanced technology.”
But Stone has taken it all a step further. It is through his work that
the Armenian Studies Program has come alive in the last ten years;
Stone plays a critical role in the education of Israel about the
genocide, but also Armenian history, culture and art.
“It is vital that we not only focus on the horrible effect of genocide
or the one-third of the Armenian people that were wiped out,” said
Stone, “but also focus on rejuvenating the culture and history that
the Ottomans attempted to eradicate.”
In his short but poignant remarks last Monday, Stone declared that
his work in general, and the memorial event in particular, are not
solely about remembering those needlessly murdered, but serve the
purpose of creating positive results from evils that have occurred.
Echoing the Jewish message that as terrible as the pain could be, the
happiness can be even greater, Stone said, “From evil, make good.”
And that is what the Armenians plan to do…