ROBERT FISK’S WORLD: ISRAEL CAN NO LONGER IGNORE THE EXISTENCE OF THE FIRST HOLOCAUST
The Independent
ommentators/fisk/robert-fiskrsquos-world-israel-ca n-no-longer-ignore-the-existence-of-the-first-holo caust-1883686.html
Saturday, 30 January 2010
Recognition of the Armenian genocide is a paramount moral and
educational act
While Israelis commemorated the second Holocaust of the 20th century
this week, I was in the Gulbenkian library in Jerusalem, holding the
printed and handwritten records of the victims of the century’s first
Holocaust. It was a strange sensation.
The Armenians were not participating in Israel’s official ceremonies
to remember the six million Jewish dead, murdered by the Germans
between 1939 and 1945, perhaps because Israel officially refuses
to acknowledge that Armenia’s million and a half dead of 1915-1923
were victims of a Turkish Holocaust. Israeli-Turkish diplomatic and
military relations are more important than genocide. Or were.
Related articles
* In the West Bank’s stony hills, Palestine is slowly dying * Robert
Fisk: Why does the US turn a blind eye to Israeli bulldozers?
* Israel blamed for murder of Hamas chief * Search the news archive
for more stories
George Hintlian, historian and prominent member of Jerusalem’s
2,000-strong Armenian community in Jerusalem, pointed out the posters a
few metres from the 1,500-year old Armenian monastery. They advertised
Armenia’s 24 April commemorations. All but one had been defaced, torn
from the ancient walls or, in at least one case, spraypainted with
graffiti in Hebrew. "Maybe they don’t like it that there was another
genocide," George told me. "These are things we can’t explain." More
than 70 members of George’s family were murdered in the butchery and
death marches of 1915 – when German officers witnessed the system of
executions, rail-car deportations to cholera camps and asphyxiation
by smoke in caves – the world’s first "gas" chambers. One witness,
the German vice-consul in Erzurum, Max von Scheubner-Richter, ended
up as one of Hitler’s closest friends and advisers. It’s not as if
there’s no connection between the first and second Holocausts.
But the times, they are a-changing. For ever since Turkey began
shouting about Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza a year ago,
prominent Israeli figures have suddenly rediscovered the Armenian
genocide. Who are the Turks to talk about mass murder? Has anyone
forgotten 1915? For George and his compatriots – there are in all
10,000 Armenians in Israel and the occupied West Bank, 4,000 of
them holding Israeli passports – they had indeed been forgotten
until the Gaza war. "In 1982, the Armenians were left out of a
Holocaust conference in Jerusalem," he said. "For three decades,
no documentary on the Armenian genocide could be shown on Israeli
television because it would offend the Turks. Then suddenly last year,
important Israelis demanded that a documentary be shown. Thirty Knesset
members supported us. We always had Yossi Sarid of Peace Now but now
we’ve got right-wing Israelis."
Maariv and Yediot Ahronot began to mention the Armenian genocide and
George Hintlian turned up on Israeli television with Danny Ayalon –
the foreign office minister who humiliated the Turkish ambassador by
forcing him to sit on a sofa below him – and Knesset speaker Reuven
Rivlin who said that Israel should commemorate the Armenian genocide
"every year". The Israeli press now calls the Armenian genocide a
"Shoah" – the same word all Israelis use for the Jewish Holocaust. As
George put it with withering accuracy: "We have been upgraded!!!"
This piece of brash hypocrisy has not gone unnoticed by Yossi Sarid who
has described how, a few months after Recep Tayyip Erdogan denounced
the Gaza war, "an important Israeli personality telephoned me and said
the following: ‘Now you have to hit back at the Turks, to denounce
them for the crimes they committed against the Armenians You, Yossi,
have the right to do so…’" Sarid was appalled. "I was filled with
revulsion and my soul wanted to puke," he wrote in Haaretz. "The
person who telephoned me was an example of the ugly Israeli who had
disgracefully been at the forefront of those who denied the Armenian
Holocaust." So now "new tunes" – Sarid’s phrase – are being heard in
Jerusalem: "The Turks are the last ones who have the right to teach
us ethics."
The bright side to this anguished debate is that one of Israel’s
top Holocaust experts bravely insisted – to the fury of then-foreign
minister (now president) Shimon Peres – that the Armenian massacres
were undoubtedly a genocide. Tens of thousands of Israelis have
always believed the same; several hundred are expected to turn up at
the Armenian commemoration on 24 April, and most Israelis refer to
the Armenian genocide as a "Shoah" rather than the tame "massacres"
hitherto favoured by the political elite.
Yet the most extraordinary irony of all occurred when the Armenian and
Turkish governments last year agreed to reopen diplomatic relations and
consign the Armenian Holocaust to a joint academic enquiry which would
decide "if" there had been a genocide. As Israeli Professor Yair Oron
of the Open University of Israel said, "I am afraid that countries will
now hesitate to recognise the (Armenian) genocide. They will say: ‘Why
should we grant recognition if the Armenians yielded?’ Recognition of
the Armenian genocide is a paramount moral and educational act. We
in Israel are obliged to recognise it." And American-Armenian UCLA
Professor Richard Hovannisian asked: "Would the Jewish people be
willing to forgo the memory of the Holocaust for the sake of good
relations with Germany, if Germany were to make that demand?" George
Hintlian described the Armenian-Turkish agreement – which in fact
may not now be ratified by either side – as "like an earthquake".
We walked together in the cold afternoon through the darkened
interior of the great Armenian monastery of Jerusalem with its icons
and candles. George opened a cabinet to reveal a hidden staircase
up which priests would creep for a secret week when invaders passed
through Jerusalem. In this dank, pious place, Ronald Henry Amhurst
Storrs, governor of British Mandate Jerusalem, would often sit to
ponder what he called "the glory and the misery of a people".
Miserable it has been for thousands of Armenians here. Up to 15,000
lived in Palestine until 1948, many of them survivors of the first
Holocaust. But 10,000 of these Armenians shared the same fate as the
Palestinian Arabs, fleeing or driven from their homes by the army of
the new Israeli state. Most lost their businesses in Haifa and Jaffa,
many of them seeking refuge – for the second time – in Jerusalem. A
few set out for Cyprus where they were dispossessed for the third
time by the 1974 Turkish invasion. As George put it bleakly, "Today,
6,000 Armenians are residents of Jerusalem and the West Bank. They
cannot travel and they are counted as Armenian Palestinians. For
Israeli bureaucracy, they are Palestinians."
George himself is the son of Garbis Hintlian who, as a 17-year-old,
survived the death march from his home at Talas in Cappadocia. "We
lost my uncle – my grandfather was axed to death in front of him."
After the 1918 armistice, he worked for the British, carrying files
of evidence to the initial (but quickly abandoned) Constantinople
trials of Turkish war criminals. To no avail.
And glory be, if the tables haven’t changed again! Turkey and Israel
have made up and become good friends again. Yossi Sarid anticipated
this. "Let us assume that Turkey will renew its ties with Israel. Then
what? What then? Will we also renew our contribution to the denial
of the Armenian Holocaust?"