Turkey lashed out at Israel on Sunday hours after the Israeli cabinet voted unanimously to recognize the 1915 Armenian Genocide, branding the decision a “political” maneuver designed to cover up Israel’s own alleged crimes in Gaza, in a statement that never once mentioned the Armenian people.
In its official response, titled “Regarding the Decision by the Israeli Government Concerning the Events of 1915,” the Turkish Foreign Ministry (MFA) accused the Israeli government of carrying out systematic persecution against the Palestinian people before the eyes of the entire world, and noted that Israel is currently before the International Court of Justice in the case concerning the crime of genocide against Gazans. Through the political decision it adopted regarding what it called “the events of 1915,” the ministry said, Israel was seeking to cover up its own crimes. That phrasing is the standard euphemism Ankara uses to avoid the word genocide, and the ministry applied it throughout while declining to name the Armenians at all.
The MFA called the recognition a malicious attempt that disregards legal and historical facts, and said it exposed the predicament of Netanyahu and his accomplices, for whom it noted arrest warrants have been issued in the context of the International Criminal Court investigation into crimes committed against Palestinians. “Türkiye will continue to work resolutely for an end to Israel’s expansionist and destabilizing policies in the region and for the Netanyahu government to be held accountable under the law for crimes committed against civilians, particularly the Palestinian people,” the statement said.
The response confirmed what Israeli officials had anticipated when they advanced the resolution amid sharply deteriorating ties between the two states. Turkey, the Ottoman Empire’s successor state, has for more than a century rejected the charge that the systematic killing of 1.5 million Armenians constituted genocide, maintaining what the Israeli resolution described as an organized campaign of denial that includes the manipulative rewriting of history books. Ankara accepts that Armenians died during World War I but disputes the figures and denies the killings were orchestrated.
The Israeli government voted Sunday to formally recognize the genocide, following the resolution brought by Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar late last week. The measure now heads to the Knesset for a vote. The Knesset is expected to begin its pre-election recess on July 16, with new elections scheduled for the autumn, and it remains unclear whether the current parliament will have time to take up the bill before then.
