Israel removed the recognition of the Armenian Genocide from the Knesset’s agenda under direct pressure from Azerbaijan, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu personally blocked the vote after being contacted by an adviser to Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported, citing an Israeli source.
Netanyahu intervened after Hikmet Hajiyev, the foreign policy adviser to Aliyev, reached out to the Prime Minister’s Office on Aliyev’s behalf. Israeli officials then assured their Azerbaijani counterparts that the issue had been struck from the Knesset’s agenda and would not be brought to a vote during the final plenary sessions before the parliament’s summer recess last week.
The account fills in what had until now been described only as a procedural “suspension.” Israel’s cabinet unanimously approved the recognition on June 28, but that decision was an executive resolution that required a Knesset vote to become binding state policy. Haaretz’s reporting indicates the vote did not simply run out of time before recess, it was deliberately pulled at the direct request of a foreign government.
How the Vote Was Blocked
The recognition had been proposed and championed by Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar, who introduced it at the cabinet meeting and argued it was not an act of retaliation against Turkey, saying “it was never too late to do the right thing.” According to the Haaretz source, it was Netanyahu, the head of Sa’ar’s own government, who ensured the measure his cabinet had unanimously passed never reached the floor.
Responding to Haaretz, Sa’ar’s office denied that the vote was canceled because of Netanyahu’s intervention, but offered no alternative explanation for why it was not brought to the Knesset. “There is a government decision [to recognize the genocide], and it was approved unanimously,” the statement said. “It will not be changed, and that is the important and historic fact.” Netanyahu’s office and Hajiyev did not respond to Haaretz’s requests for comment.
Inside the Israel-Azerbaijan Alliance
The government that reached into Israel’s parliament to stop the vote was Azerbaijan, the same state that in September 2023 used Israeli-supplied weapons to ethnically cleanse more than 120,000 Armenians from occupied Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh), emptying the region of its Armenian population within days.
Israel has come to regard Baku as one of its most important partners, regionally and internationally, and the depth of that relationship is what Haaretz’s reporting suggests was enough to override a recognition Israel’s own government had already approved. The two states are bound tightly: Azerbaijani crude accounted for roughly 46 percent of Israel’s oil imports in 2025, its single largest source, while Israel has supplied roughly 70 percent of Azerbaijan’s major arms imports in the years surrounding its wars against Armenia, including the loitering munitions and drones that proved decisive on the battlefield. Israeli forces have also operated from Azerbaijani territory against Iran, CNN reported.
Baku’s fury had been building for weeks. Another major Israeli outlet, Ynet, reported earlier this month that Azerbaijan viewed the recognition as Israel “crossing a red line” and felt Jerusalem had failed to reciprocate the support Baku extended during the war in Gaza, a crisis Israeli officials described as deeper than either government had shown publicly.
Baku’s confidence that the measure would be quietly killed was telegraphed openly. The Azerbaijani website Haqqin.az, sold last month to a journalist who had received an award from President Aliyev, published an article about ten days ago claiming Israel had “heeded” Azerbaijan’s concerns. According to that article, which cited sources it described as familiar with the matter, Azerbaijan’s position had been conveyed to Israeli officials, the initiative was halted and effectively “buried,” and steps had been taken to prevent the proposal from being revived.
Baku’s Denial and a Broader Cooling
Azerbaijan had condemned the recognition when it passed last month and called for it to be reconsidered. Its Foreign Ministry said the move amounted to “the distortion of the historical facts surrounding the events of 1915” and reduced “a complex historical issue to a political decision without a sound legal or scholarly basis,” adding that it would deepen divisions rather than advance reconciliation. Baku signaled a broader cooling last week when Aliyev hosted Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Mustafa and reaffirmed support for a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital.
A Pattern of Dilution and Retreat
The proposal Israel’s cabinet approved stipulated that the country would recognize the Armenian Genocide, the systematic killing of 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Empire during and after 1915, and condemn any attempt to deny, minimize, or distort it, joining the 32 countries that have recognized it in various forms. Yet the episode fits a long history of Israeli recognition efforts collapsing under pressure from Ankara and Baku.
Netanyahu’s own record is contradictory. Last year, he acknowledged the Armenian Genocide on a podcast with American businessman Patrick Bet-David and, when Bet-David expressed surprise that Israel had not officially recognized it, said he “thinks the Knesset passed a resolution on the matter.” It had not. Since 2011, the Knesset has held debates and its committees have marked the genocide every few years, an effort originally led by lawmakers Zehava Galon and Aryeh Eldad with unusual solidarity from then-Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin, but none of those symbolic proceedings constitutes official recognition under Israeli law. In 2018, then-Meretz chairwoman Tamar Zandberg proposed a Knesset debate and vote, but withdrew it after the coalition and the Foreign Ministry demanded the word “genocide” be softened to “tragedy” or “atrocities against the Armenian people.” She refused to water it down.
With the Knesset now in recess until after the October 27 elections, the recognition of the systematic killing of 1.5 million Armenians rests once again not on the historical record but on whether a future Israeli government is willing to defy the state that armed their dispossession.
