Palestine Note
March 6 2010

Israel lobby switch on Armenian genocide

Ha’aretz reports that Israel’s ultra-right foreign minister, Avigdor
Lieberman, believes the US embargo on Cuba is a good model for dealing
with Iran.

Lieberman said Thursday that he doubted the United Nations would
follow through with Western demands for harsher sanctions over Iran’s
contentious nuclear program, and urged the United States to impose its
own embargo similar to the one it has held on Cuba for the last 50
years.

The 50-years part is quite telling. The United States embargo on Cuba
has utterly failed in every conceivable way, unless its goal was
harming the people of Cuba and not the Castro government. In fact,
the news out of Havana this week was that Fidel Castro himself — who
has survived the embargo and 11 American Presidents — is back in
charge again, more than three years after supposedly relinquishing
power to his brother Raul.

So the Cuba model is unlikely to scare the Iranian government much.
If a tiny and poor island 90 miles from Florida can survive US
sanctions for 50 years, the huge and oil rich Iran, 6,000 miles away,
should do even better.

Tom Garofalo, a consultant to the New America Foundation’s U.S.-Cuba
Policy Initiative, writes in the blog Havana Note, that Lieberman’s
position is utterly hypocritical.

For starters, Lieberman believes that the Cuban model works best if it
includes an international aspect, such that the United States would
‘shun foreign firms that continue to do business with Iran.’ That
extraterritorial component was added to our Cuban Embargo in 1996 with
the passage of the Helms Burton act. But, perhaps unbeknownst to
Lieberman, it has been dutifully waived every six months since, at the
behest of our allies.

Lieberman may also be surprised to know that one of the first
countries to suffer the consequences of such a shunning would be
Israel, a leading investor in Cuban agriculture. The USDA reports that
Israeli capital has driven a reinvigoration of Cuba’s citrus sector,
to such an extent that an Israeli-Cuban joint venture now produces a
third of the total citrus grown on the island. (Well, if they can make
the desert bloom, why not Cuba?)"

No doubt, Lieberman does not know any of this. He is basically
illiterate on foreign policy matters. And, even if he did, it
wouldn’t change his views. Besides, he spends most of his time not on
foreign policy but on avoiding indictment. And that is the good news.
His tenure is likely to be short.

Of course, when it comes to foreign policy, hypocrisy is more the norm
than the exception.

For example, yesterday the House Foreign Affairs Committee passed the
Armenian genocide resolution. That is the bill, kicking around for
years, that recognizes the Armenian genocide as precisely that —
genocide. The Turkish government has always strongly opposed the
resolution, arguing — unconvincingly, in my opinion — that the
slaughter of the Armenians occurred in the context of war and was not
an attempt at their intentional eradication.

I never understood why the Turks care so much. The current democratic
Turkish Republic was not even in existence during the Armenian
slaughter. It is the successor state to the Ottoman Empire under which
the killing took place. The current Turkish government is no more
responsible for the Armenian genocide than the current German
government is responsible for the Holocaust.

Nonetheless, the Turks vehemently oppose using the term "genocide" to
describe the events of 1915.

And successive American administrations have deferred to the Turks by
opposing Congressional bills "commemorating" the "Armenian genocide."

It is no different this year. The Obama administration lobbied
against the resolution because it believed that enacting it would
disrupt our relations with Turkey, a fellow NATO member and one of our
most important allies in the Middle East. It also argued that passing
the bill now would disrupt negotiations now underway between Turkey
and Armenia.

It passed anyway and the Turks immediately called its ambassador home.

But here is where it gets really interesting. The following comes
from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, the Associated Press of the Jewish
world. JTA writes:

In the past, the pro-Israel community [i.e. the lobby], has lobbied
hard against previous attempts to pass similar resolutions, citing
warnings from Turkish officials that it could harm the alliance not
only with the United States but with Israel — although Israel has
always tried to avoid mentioning the World War I-era genocide.

In the last year or so, however, officials of American pro-Israel
groups have said that while they will not support new resolutions,
they will no longer oppose them, citing Turkey’s heightened rhetorical
attacks on Israel and a flourishing of outright anti-Semitism the
government has done little to stem.

That has lifted the fetters for lawmakers like Berman (Chairman Howard
Berman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee), who had been loath to
abet in the denial of a genocide; Berman and a host of other members
of the House’s unofficial Jewish caucus have signed on as co-sponsors.

Get that. The lobby has always opposed deeming the Armenian slaughter
a genocide largely because Turkey has (or had) good relations with
Israel. And the lobby, and its Congressional acolytes, did not want to
harm those relations.

But, since the Gaza war, Turkish-Israeli relations have deteriorated.
The Turks, like pretty much every other nation on the planet, were
appalled by the Israeli onslaught against the Gazans. And said so.

Ever since, the Netanyahu government has made a point to stick it to
the Turks. Most famously, Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon seated
the Turkish ambassador in a kindergarten chair during a meeting, and
"forgot" to put a Turkish flag on the table alongside the Israeli
flag. He then called the Israeli photographers in and said to them in
Hebrew (so the Turkish ambassador wouldn’t understand), "The important
thing is that they see he’s sitting lower and we’re up high and that
there’s only one flag, and you see we’re not smiling."

News of that episode so enraged the Turks and humiliated the Israelis
that Ayalon had to apologize three times, in progressively more abject
terms, or face a rupture in Israeli-Turkish relations.

That battle is now being carried to Washington. The Israelis are
trying to teach the Turks a lesson. If the Armenian resolution passes
the House, it will not be for purely compassionate reasons, but
rather, to send a message to Turkey: if you mess with Israel, its
lobby will make Turkey pay a price in Washington.

And, just maybe, the United States will pay it, too.

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