ARMENIAN PROTESTERS DEMAND ISRAEL RECOGNIZE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE BY TURKS
The Associated Press

International Herald Tribune
Oct 22 2007
France

JERUSALEM: Jerusalem’s tiny Armenian community held banners and flags
at a protest Monday to demand that Israel recognize the mass killings
of ethnic Armenians in Turkey nearly a century ago as genocide.

About 100 people stood outside Israel’s Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem,
singing songs in Armenian and holding banners. A group of teenage
girls stood in school uniforms alongside an elderly woman holding a
sign that read, "I am a survivor," in English and Hebrew, and others
waved colorful flags.

The mass killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turkish troops took place
between 1915 and 1917 as the 600-year-old empire collapsed. It was
again thrown into focus over U.S. congressional debates about whether
to recognize those events as genocide.

Turkey says the killings were a result of widespread chaos and
political upheaval.

Israel has become a player in the U.S. debate. Armenians expect
Israel to sympathize with their demands, because of the Jewish state
was built in the shadow of the Nazi Holocaust of World War II. But
Turkey has threatened to cool its ties with Israel if it doesn’t use
its influence in Washington to quell the campaign. Turkey is one of
Israel’s few Muslim allies.

Armenians say Israel is actively lobbying on behalf of Turkey in the
U.S. Congress, where Democrats have pulled back from their attempt
to label the mass killing as genocide, under pressure from the
White House.

"It’s frustrating for us, and it’s frustrating for Israelis," said
George Hintlian, an Armenian historian, who attended the protest.

Organizers of the protest said Israel "jeopardizing its claim to
moral high ground on the Holocaust" by not taking Armenia’s side.

Israel’s government has said previously that massacres were perpetrated
against Armenians and expressed sympathy for their suffering. But it
has stopped short of calling them genocide.

Thousands of Armenians fled to nearby states during the mass killing,
including to Jerusalem, where they established a neighborhood in
the walled Old City. Their numbers have steadily shrunk as younger
generations emigrate to the West, and now only about 1,000 Armenians
live in Jerusalem.