London (Agenzia Fides) – Representatives of the United Kingdom House of Commons unanimously expressed their support for the bill proposed “at first reading” on Tuesday, November 9, by parliamentarian Tim Loughton in favor of the recognition of the Armenian Genocide. All 646 members of the House of Commons expressed their vote in support of the bill, which should be submitted to a “second reading” vote in the session of March 22, 2022, to be then also submitted for approval by the House of Lords.
Also in Israel, on Tuesday, November 9, some representatives of the opposition parties presented a bill to the Israeli Parliament proposing that the Knesset officially recognize the systematic massacres of Armenians perpetrated in Anatolia in the years 1914/1916 as “genocide”, and that April 24 of each year also become the day of commemoration in Israel of the victims of those massacres. The bill was presented by a cross-party group of parliamentarians belonging to the Shas and Likud parties.
It is not the first time that bills have been presented to the Israeli Parliament aimed at sanctioning the official recognition of the Armenian Genocide by the Jewish state. In June 2018, the Israeli Parliament canceled at the last minute the vote that had been placed on the agenda to ask for the recognition of the Armenian Genocide (see Fides, 26/6/2021). It was Tamar Zandberg herself, leader of the Meretz Party, who withdrew the proposal, after the government coalition and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had asked to remove the _expression_ “Genocide” from the text under discussion to replace it with the words “tragedy” or “horrors”. In February of the same year, the Israeli Parliament had in fact rejected a bill presented by Yair Lapid, representative of the centrist and secular party Yesh Atid, which allegedly made official the recognition of the “Armenian Genocide” by Israel. (GV) (Source: Agenzia Fides, 12/11/2021)