The full length review of the book written by distinguished German genocide scholar, Tessa Hofmann can be found here by clicking this link.
A somewhat briefer version of this review was published in the California Courier on May 6, 2021.
Book Review: “One is either for human life or not!”
A review of Israel Charny’s New Book, Israel’s Failed Response to the Armenian Genocide: Denial, State Deception, Truth versus Politicization of History (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2021, 267 p.)
In this extremely remarkable anthology, Israel Charny describes with obvious pain, palpable even after nearly 40 years, how a first conference on the Holocaust and genocide, including the Armenian Genocide, initiated by him and others, was blocked, obstructed, and nearly prevented by the Israeli government in the spring of 1982. National institutions such as Yad Vashem played a decisive and deeply deplorable role in this process.
Charny reproduces many previously secret and classified documents of the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Promises made were revoked, which naturally put the organizers under enormous logistical and time pressure. Only now, based on newly declassified state records, Charny found that the boycott campaign was essentially spearheaded by the Israeli government itself, while the protest and attempts at prevention of lectures on the Armenian Genocide on the part of Turkey served Israel as a welcome pretext and reason for its interventions.
Allegedly, Jewish lives and the escape route of Jews from Iran and Syria via Turkey were threatened by Turkey should the planned conference result in the presentation of six “Armenian” lectures – among a total of 150! The Israel Foreign Ministry demanded of Charny and his colleagues compliance, and as the tension mounted the Foreign Ministry also commanded disinviting all Armenian speakers. This was out of the question for Israel Charny. With exemplary civil courage he resisted all attempts at intimidation.
The international conference, nevertheless well attended by 300 participants, took place despite all Turkish and Israeli interventions and became a milestone in the history of genocide studies, since it was not only the first academic conference on the Holocaust and genocide but also on genocide research. And for the first time, renowned Armenian scholars addressed the genocide committed against their ancestors on such an occasion.
But what motives underlie the Turkish and Israeli obstruction of academic and memorial events for genocide victims in the first place? To this day, not only the government of the Republic of Turkey, but also a large part of Turkish opinion leaders deny that there was an Ottoman genocide of indigenous Christians, i.e., of fellow citizens at all; according to official Turkish interpretation, there is no evidence of a state intention to exterminate. Nevertheless, as dissident Turkish academics such as Taner Akçam have pointed out, the state-planned, organized, and executed extermination of Armenians, Greeks, and other indigenous Christians constitutes the founding crime of the Republic of Turkey. In Chapter 7 of the book reviewed here, Turkish human rights activist, publicist, and publisher Ragıp Zarakolu explains the efforts of his country to deny this crime, which was so central to the formation of the Republic of Turkey, with fear of a return of survivors: “The 1915 genocide became the backbone of the nation and national state building in Turkey. Recognition of the Ottoman Genocide could do great damage to the myths of the state-founding nationalist ideology. I defined another aspect of Turkish denialism as ‘Israel syndrome,’ that is: ‘One day the Armenians may come back to their homeland like the Jews.’”
In fact, the crucial difference between ‘mere’ expulsion across the nearest state border and deportations to the distant Anatolian interior was already established by the Young Turkish regime during the Balkan Wars: The Greek Eastern Thracians who had merely been expelled to Greece returned undesirably after the end of the war. Of the Eastern Thracian Greeks deported to Anatolia, however, almost one-half died of epidemics, starvation, and forced labor. This genocidal test run served as a blueprint for the deportations of Armenians that were carried out almost nationwide as death marches
behind the smokescreen of the Great War.
Turkish scholars, publicists and human rights advocates who dared to critically research and comment on the genocide(s) of roughly three million Christians in the Ottoman Empire and in Ottoman-occupied northwestern Iran in 1914 and 1918 risk prosecution, imprisonment or exile, as the biographies of Taner Akçam and Ragıp Zarakolu make clear.
But what drove the Israeli government as well as government-affiliated or government-dependent institutions such as Yad Vashem to obstruct an academic or historical-political discussion of the Ottoman genocide since 1982? Israel Charny suspects that the real driving force is the antagonism between those who consider the Holocaust a unique and therefore singular event and ‘heretics’ who, like Charny himself and numerous other prominent Jews, consider the extermination of European Jews in World War II to be a quite comparable or even repeatable crime. For these ‘generalists,’ each genocide has both individual unique characteristics, but at the same time also commonalities with
other genocides.
The inclusive, generic approach represented by Israel Charny, Yair Auron, Benny Morris, Dror Ze’evi, and other Israeli and Jewish colleagues, respectively, can draw on prominent antecedents regarding the comparability of the two serial World War II genocides: Russian Jewish poet Ossip Mandelstam emphasized the kinship of fate between Jews and Armenians, calling Armenia the “younger sister of the Hebrew Earth.” Centuries of persecution and diaspora were meant by this. The Austrian Jewish novelist Franz Werfel also saw in the Ottoman extermination of Armenian Christians a warning to European Jews of the danger they were about to face. For the Polish-Jewish jurist and historian Raphael Lemkin, who became the principal author of the United Nations Genocide Convention, the ‘religious genocide’ of the Armenians, along with the Shoah, provided the empirical basis for Lemkin’s definition of genocide. Of the five offenses that have been considered genocide under international law since 1948, all the rest, with the exception of birth control, were committed against the Ottoman Christians as early as World War I.
I have not only read the book edited and to a large extent also written by Israel Charny with great interest, but find it important and useful reading for all those who deal theoretically or practically with questions of memory culture, history policy, genocide prevention and related educational work. Above all, the personal principles of the author, scholar and distinguished colleague Israel Charny are impressive and inspiring. It consists in addressing even the darkest and most agonizing chapters of one’s own national history. “Charny is a brave scholar-one of the rare academics who risks speaking about Israeli crimes such as the State of Israel selling weapons to other governments that commit genocide or about crimes toward the Palestinian people during the War of Independence-the Nakba,” writes Yair Auron, author of The Banality of Denial: Israel and the Armenian Genocide in his Foreword.
Israel’s sales of weapons to states that commit genocide or are considered potential perpetrators of genocide or are engaged in wars of aggression have included Guatemala, whose “Silent Genocide” against the Maya took place in 1981-1983, Rwanda, Serbia, Sudan, and currently Myanmar, as well as Azerbaijan, which is apparently seen by Israel as a strategic partner against Iran and whose Jewish population may be playing the role of hostage. The drones that Israel provided to Azerbaijan (along with Turkey) played a crucial role in the war of aggression against the Armenian-populated Republic of Artsakh.
Israel Charny, Yair Auron, Michael Berenbaum, and Ragıp Zarakolu show us the way to achieve academic and human rights integrity, revealing at the same time the adversities its bearers may face. An exclusive understanding of the genocide of the European Jews leads, as Israel Charny convincingly demonstrates, not only to questionable decisions regarding the Ottoman genocide in terms of remembrance policy; other genocides committed in more recent times are not recognized either. In terms of remembrance and history policy, Israel apparently takes a generally indifferent, passive position when it comes to the suffering of non-Jews.
The justifications for the Israeli government’s refusal to ‘recognize’, or better condemn genocides other than the Shoah appear arbitrary. In November 2018, when the Knesset rejected a motion to recognize the genocide of the Yazidis, the Israeli deputy foreign minister justified his government’s rejection on the grounds that – allegedly – the United Nations had not yet ‘recognized’ this genocide. In the case of the refusal to recognize the Ottoman Armenian Genocide, however, it did not help that the United Nations had already passed a resolution to that effect in 1985.
To conclude, this book by Israel Charny strongly renews the call for recognition of the Armenian Genocide. It is remarkable and inspiring writing and warmly recommended as a good read.