Jun 7, 2016

News broadcasts on Israeli TV June 2 were dominated by two stories. The first reported that the German parliament had voted to recognize the World War I massacre of Armenians by the Ottoman Turks as genocide. The resolution was approved by a majority of lawmakers from all parties, headed by Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats. In response, Ankara recalled its ambassador from Berlin “for consultations.” The second news report heralded a breakthrough in negotiations between Israel and Turkey on settling the 2010 Mavi Marmara flotilla crisis and easing the blockade of the Gaza Strip. Officials in Jerusalem predict the Turkish ambassador, who was recalled back to Ankara at the time, will soon be reinstated in Tel Aviv.

Reacting to the German Bundestag’s decision, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu accused Germany of an “irresponsible and groundless” stance vis-a-vis the history of another nation. He wrote on Twitter that Germany’s decision was motivated by a desire to “close the dark pages” of its own history. The state of the Jewish people, whose blood is saturated with German history, prefers the more noncommittal term “tragedy” — in official communiques — in describing the disaster that befell the Armenian people. Not only that, but Israel mobilized American Jewry in a campaign to thwart US recognition of the genocide carried out by the Turks against the Armenians.

In October 2007, several weeks before the vote in Congress, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), one of the most prominent Jewish organizations in the United States, announced a change in its position on this sensitive issue and agreed that the massacre of up to 1.5 million Armenians was a genocide. The Turkish prime minister at the time, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, picked up the phone to then-President Shimon Peres and asked him to intervene. Following Peres’ intervention, the ADL recanted and issued a toned-down version of its original announcement.

At a special July 2015 session of the Knesset’s Committee on Education, Culture and Sports to mark the 100th anniversary of the massacre, the panel’s chairman, Knesset member Yaakov Margi of the Shas Party, said, “It is incumbent on the Jewish people to commemorate the murder carried out against the Armenian people in order to educate future generations and understand the historic processes so as to prevent an additional genocide.” The Shas Party lawmaker called on the government to recognize the Armenian genocide and urged the Knesset to adopt a historic resolution in keeping with Jewish values. Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein of the Likud Party promised to “make an effort to promote the issue, and I sincerely hope the members of Knesset will know how to vote at the moment of truth.” That moment has yet to arrive and is unlikely to do so in the foreseeable future. To quote Oded Yosef, the Foreign Ministry representative who took part in the Knesset committee’s debate, “focusing on terminology is political and it diverts us from relating to the issue.”

True, everything is politics. The blueprint for extracting and using Israel’s natural gas reservoirs is a good example. At a December 2015 debate by the Knesset’s Economic Affairs Committee on this politically, socially and economically charged issue, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, "We have had contacts with Turkey. A personal envoy of mine spoke with a very senior Turkish government official. They discussed the possibility of Israeli gas exports to Turkey and through Turkey.” Netanyahu took a long and convoluted path for the sake of his gas plan. To open up the Turkish market to Israeli gas exports, he would not hesitate to let Erdogan get his foot in the door of the Israeli-Arab peace process — Turkey has stipulated that normalization with Israel would be conditioned on lifting the blockade on Gaza, for instance — and by doing so he stepped on the toes of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who views Turkey as a bitter rival.