TEHRAN — On June 28, the Israeli cabinet executed a maneuver it had fiercely resisted for decades. In a unanimous vote, ministers approved Foreign Minister Gideon Saar’s proposal to formally recognize the mass killings of Ottoman Armenians during World War I as a “genocide.”
The motion was publicly championed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the very man who for years had suppressed it in order to preserve a lucrative partnership with Turkey, a NATO ally that formally recognized the regime as early as March 1949. On the surface, the regime tried to present a polished performance of historical duty.
A moral epiphany forged in political spite
Israel did not suddenly unearth hidden archival evidence in the middle of 2026.
For decades, the regime ruthlessly prevented its own politicians from uttering the word “genocide” in relation to 1915, viewing Turkish friendship as an indispensable asset.
The shift occurred only because that relationship collapsed. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has become a critic of the ongoing genocidal campaign in Gaza and other Israeli crimes, partly suspending trade and issuing condemning statements. The sudden recognition is naked retaliation.
The profound suffering of the Armenian people deserves sincere acknowledgment rather than transactional exploitation.
Estimates point to immense trauma and massacres that left a deep communal wound. Simultaneously, Turkish accounts place the events within the catastrophic collapse of an empire, emphasizing reciprocal violence and total war.
Both narratives carry the weight of immense historical pain. Healing requires sovereign dialogue and mutual respect. Sinister outsiders who hijack this history to settle unrelated geopolitical scores only trivialize the dead.
The Azerbaijan paradox and the betrayal of Artsakh
The hypocrisy of this sudden awakening becomes grotesque when viewed alongside the Israeli alliance with Azerbaijan.
While politicians in Tel Aviv now weep for the Armenians of 1915, Israeli military technology dictated the fate of their descendants in Nagorno-Karabakh, also known as Artsakh.
Between 2016 and 2020, Israel supplied around 70 percent of Azerbaijan’s major arms imports. Advanced weaponry, including Harop drones and LORA missiles, proved decisive in the devastating 2023 offensive.
Following a brutal blockade, that military operation triggered the exodus of over 120,000 ethnic Armenians from their homeland, leaving hundreds of civilians dead and entire communities completely shattered.
Throughout this period, Azerbaijani cargo planes landed at the Ovda airbase in Israel over 90 times to load munitions.
Israel willingly exchanged Armenian lives for Azerbaijani oil supplies, and a reported malevolent outpost for intelligence and military operations in the broader neighborhood.
Arming the violent displacement of a people yesterday while claiming to protect their historical memory today is the zenith of geopolitical sociopathy.
The commodification of trauma
This behavior belongs to a deeper pathology of selective humanity.
The Jewish historical experience birthed the rallying cry of “never again.” Yet, Israel has particularized this legacy, using it as a tribal shield.
American political scientist Norman Finkelstein, whose parents were Holocaust survivors, dissected this dynamic in his work on “The Holocaust Industry,” demonstrating how authentic trauma can be refined into political capital.
Israel is currently manufacturing an Armenian memory industry for the exact same purpose, seeking moral immunity while dodging international scrutiny.
The German-born American political theorist Hannah Arendt warned that folding human suffering into political calculation corrupts compassion and normalizes atrocity.
Palestinian-American academic Edward Said similarly illuminated how imperial power dictates whose pain is registered as fully human and whose is rendered invisible.
When a genocidal regime invokes historical suffering merely to secure tactical leverage, it desecrates remembrance.
A smokescreen for the annihilation of Gaza
The timing of the recognition is tied to the horrors unfolding in the Levant. As Israeli officials speak of moral duties regarding 1915, they are actively commanding the starvation and bombardment of a trapped civilian population.
A recent UN commission of inquiry confirmed that Israeli forces deliberately target Palestinian children, contributing directly to findings of genocide.
At least 73,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, including more than 20,000 children, with tens of thousands more permanently maimed.
Historian Ilan Pappe has mapped how this violence is a direct continuation of the ethnic cleansing that began before the 1948 Nakba.
The sudden Israeli focus on a centennial tragedy in the Caucasus is a desperate psychological operation. It is designed to fracture regional alliances and launder the reputation of a state facing unprecedented genocide charges at the International Court of Justice.
True moral courage demands the uncompromising and universal application of international justice and human rights.
The dead must not be used as disposable poker chips in a broader U.S.-Israeli war designed to dominate the Middle East.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: tehrantimes.com
