Thank you Ofer Aderet and Haaretz for your meaningful article on May 3, 2021, “How Israel Quashed Efforts to Recognize the Armenian Genocide.” The article definitely succeeds in painting the picture of government – in this case Israel’s Foreign Ministry – lying blatantly, manipulating, invading academic freedom, putting out fake news and more. In this instance the subject was efforts to close down an international scholarly conference on the Holocaust and Genocide because the subject of the Armenian Genocide was included among all the cases of genocide under discussion, and Israel was out to cater to Turkey’s demands to stop that discussion. However, it is obvious that such behaviors may very well be found in various government agencies, and that the challenge to all of us is to stand up against them.

However, ‘a funny thing happened on the way to this article,’ especially in its original Hebrew edition in Haaretz on April 30. There two big and bold headlines announced that “in the summer of 1982 the government succeeded in closing down a conference on the subject of genocide out of a concern about a confrontation with Turkey,” and the second headline continuing this story on another page announced definitively, “thus did the Foreign Ministry close down a conference in Israel on the subject of the Armenian Genocide.”

What may well have happened is that the reporter, who I know was checking the formerly secret Foreign Ministry cables (that I report in my new book, Israel’s Failed Response to the Armenian Genocide), came across the Foreign Ministry lies about the attendance at the conference which they had dispatched to Turkey to comfort and console them that the conference had been virtually reduced to nothing. Here is what I write in my book:

“For the humor of it all, now the newly discovered Foreign Ministry documents also show that once the conference nonetheless was underway, Israel lied to the Turks repeatedly that there were absurdly small numbers of attendees at the conference. In one memorandum to Ankara—apparently when we held five pre-conference seminars, each with twenty participants—they reported a participation of four people; and when the larger full conference assembled with 300 participants, they reported to Ankara in one communication twenty-three participants and in another memo a hundred participants. What do you know? Liars (Turkey) can’t even trust fellow liars (Israel)” (p.61).

Writing in Haaretz, best-selling author Amos Elon (author of The Israelis) strongly criticized “that Jews should comply with the Turks in denying the Armenian Genocide” and applauded the conference for being “faithful to principles.” In the Yale Review, Terrence des Pres (author of The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps) applauded the conference’s “intellectual courage” and celebrated “the kind of men and women who, against some very ugly pressures, went ahead with the Tel Aviv conference …”

Prof. Israel W. Charny, Director, Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide Jerusalem