Turkey and Armenia: What Jews should do
LENNY BEN-DAVID , THE JERUSALEM POST
Sep. 4, 2007
As one of the first authors and editors of Myths and Facts, a Record
of the Arab-Israeli Conflict I know what it means to instinctively
jump to defend Israel’s reputation. In the face of barrages of canards
and accusations, we countered that Israel did not expel millions of
Palestinians, did not commit wanton massacres, and did not use an
omnipotent Washington lobby to subvert American interests in the
Middle East.
I was one of the founders of HonestReporting.com, where we encouraged
tens of thousands of activists to leap to Israel’s defense when
publications and networks failed to label terrorists correctly, blamed
Israel unfairly or distorted Israel’s defensive campaign to stop
suicide bombing attacks.
Israel’s defenders intuitively denounced and challenged the
Ahmadinejads and David Irvings of the world, who denied the fact of a
genocidal campaign against the Jews that we call the Holocaust. We
recognize that these anti-Semitic deniers seek to delegitimize the
Jewish state of Israel and lay the groundwork for another attempt to
wipe out the Jewish people.
All nations have sacred memories and traditions surrounding their
creation and their sacrifices. These are national legends that take on
mythic proportions about the nations’ founding fathers and the
circumstances of the nations’ formation. Sometimes, and often after
difficult introspection, citizens recognize that their histories and
heroes are not all black-and-white, and that a true national narrative
involves a rich palette of greys as well. But that realization
requires a national maturation, one that also demands the cognitive
involvement of all parties to the narrative.
SUCH AN introspection took place among Americans in their historical
narrative some 35 years ago. The publication of Dee Brown’s Bury My
Heart at Wounded Knee in 1970 upset a nation used to Hollywood’s
version of valiant and white Indian-fighters taming the Wild West. The
slaughter of Native Americans – "Indians" – and the military campaigns
against the Navajos, Apaches, Sioux and Cheyenne tribes between 1860
and 1880 were eventually woven into the American historical tapestry.
Finally in 2004 the National Museum of the American Indian opened on
the National Mall of Washington D.C.
A similar museum to the African-American experience is still missing
on the Mall. While the American public obviously knew of the history
of slavery in the United States and Abraham Lincoln "setting slaves
free," it probably wasn’t until the release of Alex Haley’s Roots and
its romanticized television version in the 1970s that many Americans
came to grips with the nation’s racist, supremacist past.
Indeed, American historians still debate the nature of the
relationship between the iconic Founding Father Thomas Jefferson and
his quadroon slave and purported mistress, Sally Hemings. It is
difficult for some Jefferson idolaters to fathom such a pairing. Two
hundred years after Jefferson and Hemings spent time together,
Hemings’s descendants underwent DNA testing to determine whether
Jefferson sired Hemings’s children.
National legends and myths are not easily shaken.
IN ISRAEL, some of our national beliefs were stirred by the so-called
new historians, who challenged many of our basic historical
narratives. Perhaps the Israeli public is mature enough to examine the
country’s origin, but the rejection of the new historians’
broad-stroke claims also reflects the failure of our Palestinian
interlocutors to accept the notion that our intertwined histories are
not black-and-white. Most Palestinians see no grey.
"There comes a stage in any revolutionary process when the movement
relaxes its hold on the official narrative," historian Benny Morris
told The Washington Post earlier this year. "The difference is that
when that moment came in Israel, our long struggle with the Arabs
remained an existential threat, as it still does today."
For the Palestinians, their nakba is their Truth; their "right of
return" is their messianic vision; and their concept of any Jewish
history in the land is that it is a total fabrication. To confront
such absolutist, irredentist claims, Israel’s defenders cannot afford
to equivocate.
AS AN adviser for five years to the Turkish embassy in Washington,
until earlier this summer, I understood why the Turkish government and
people jump to deny claims that their ancestors committed a "genocide"
against Armenians some 90 years ago.
It occurred during a maelstrom of battles and massacres. It was
allegedly carried out by founding fathers who were bringing their
country into an enlightened 20th century. And it was waged against an
enemy guilty of the still unspoken crime of massacring hundreds of
thousands of Muslims and thousands of Jews.
Armenians and Turks see no shades of grey, and for now, at least,
demands are made only of Turkey to change its monochromatic narrative.
Israel’s government and Jews in the United States must be careful when
treading through the minefield of Armenian claims against Turkey.
Jewish leaders in Armenia reported that they have heard local claims
that Jews organized the 1915 massacres of Armenians
().
There are accounts of Armenian massacres, between 1914 and 1920, of
2.5 million of Armenia’s Muslim population
().
Recently, Mountain Jews in Azerbaijan requested assistance in building
a monument to 3,000 Azeri Jews killed by Armenians in 1918 in a pogrom
about which little is known
( hives/000730.html).
AND WITHIN our own lifetime – just some 15 years ago – Armenian troops
massacred hundreds of Azeri Muslims. This from Newsweek, March 16,
1992:
"Azerbaijan was a charnel house again last week: a place of mourning
refugees and dozens of mangled corpses dragged to a makeshift morgue
behind the mosque. They were ordinary Azerbaijani men, women and
children of Khojaly, a small village in war-torn Nagorno-Karabakh
overrun by Armenian forces on Feb. 25-26. Many were killed at close
range while trying to flee; some had their faces mutilated, others
were scalped."
Both Turks and Armenians have their grisly tales of persecution and
their vehement denials of genocidal designs. It is the task of the
Jewish community to express sympathy for all the victims and outrage
at all the perpetrators on both sides of the conflict. The US Congress
and the Jewish community should encourage historians on both sides to
objectively examine what took place.
Nations mature when they can look at themselves in the mirror and see
the grey, the wrinkles and the blemishes.
The writer served as Deputy Chief of Mission in Israel’s Embassy in Washington.
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