Sa'ar to Bring Armenian Genocide Recognition to Cabinet Amid Tensions With Turkey

Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar said on Thursday evening that he will bring a government resolution to Israel’s cabinet for approval at its next meeting recognizing the Armenian Genocide. The proposal comes against the backdrop of the worsening crisis in Israel-Turkey relations.

The draft says that, “on the basis of moral and historical duty,” Israel should recognize the genocide committed against the Armenian people in the final period of the Ottoman Empire. It also calls for condemning denial, minimization or distortion of the historical truth about those events.

The explanatory notes say the genocide began in April 1915, with the arrest, expulsion and killing of hundreds of Armenian intellectuals, leaders and public figures in Constantinople. After the community’s leadership was eliminated, the Ottoman authorities moved to systematically destroy the population, drafting men into forced labor and murdering them.

The text says women, children and the elderly were driven from their homes on death marches toward the Syrian desert, where they were subjected to mass murder, rape, deliberate starvation and thirst. These actions, it says, led to the deaths of about 1.5 million people and the destruction of a thousands-year-old cultural and historical heritage in Anatolia. Sa'ar’s statement added that, despite extensive and unequivocal historical documentation, the genocide remains the target of an organized campaign of denial and minimization, including manipulative rewriting of history books, בעיקר by Turkey. He noted that 32 countries have already recognized the Armenian Genocide in various ways.