Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday rejected Israel’s recognition of the Armenian Genocide, dismissing it as a smear campaign by a state guilty of mass killing in Gaza and declaring that Turkey’s own history contains no genocide at all.
“We pay absolutely no attention to the slanders against our country by this criminal network, which has the blood of 73,000 innocent people of Gaza, mostly children and women, on its hands,” Erdogan said in a televised address following a cabinet meeting in Ankara, in remarks carried by the state-run Anadolu news agency.
He went further in denying the historical record, saying, “Our history is free from genocide, massacres, oppression and colonialism,” and adding that in Turkey’s “great history, there is only a place for mercy and justice.”
The remarks were Erdogan’s first public response since the Israeli cabinet voted unanimously on Sunday to recognize the mass killing of 1.5 million Armenians during the final years of the Ottoman Empire as genocide. They escalated the language of Turkey’s Foreign Ministry, which a day earlier had branded the recognition a “political” maneuver to divert attention from Gaza while pointedly declining to name the Armenian people at all.
Turkey, the Ottoman Empire’s successor state, has for more than a century rejected the genocide label, arguing that the death toll has been inflated and that those killed were victims of wartime civil unrest rather than a systematic campaign of extermination. Those claims are rejected by genocide scholars, who point to Ottoman documents ordering the deportations, the systematic nature of the killings, and the near-total destruction of Armenian communities across Western Armenia. Ankara has lobbied aggressively to stop other governments from recognizing the systematic annihilation of the Armenians as genocide, an effort the Israeli resolution explicitly condemned as an institutionalized campaign of denial and minimization. Historians widely regard the killings as the first genocide of the 20th century, and 32 countries have formally recognized them as such.
Armenia, for its part, stayed on the sidelines, with Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan saying his government saw no need to respond and telling reporters that avoiding the “weaponization” of the genocide served Armenia’s national interest.
Israel’s recognition still requires approval by the Knesset, which is expected to begin its pre-election recess around July 16, leaving the measure’s path to a final vote uncertain.
