Right on the sorry. Good afternoon, welcome, everybody. I'm delighted to present to you a speaker today, Doctor,
and that Horn was a lecturer in international relations of the Middle East at the University of Harlingen in the Netherlands,
and a fellow, an associate researcher at Peace Research Institute in Frankfurt.
Dr. Brown,
a historian of international relations specialising in the Cold War in the Middle East and his main areas of interest are Israel's diplomatic history,
Turkey's foreign policy, intelligence, history, counter-terrorism, oral history theory and practise Jewish trust,
transnationalism and the memory of the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide,
which will be the topic of the talk today from his forthcoming book with Edinburgh University Press Office,
a critical re-examination of Israel's relationship with Turkey in the last decade of the Cold War.
The book reveals the complicated and often contradictory process of managing the
legacies of the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust in international relations.
And Dr. Banahan is also involved in research led public engagement.
And he regularly writes essays on current affairs for Newsweek, The Conversation, The Jerusalem Post, Haaretz and the National Interest.
And the title of the talk today is If We Stop the Supporting Denial, Israel's Foreign Policy and the Armenian Genocide.
Thank you all for coming. Thank you very much for having me. First of all, thanks a lot for the kind introduction.
I'm so happy to be here in the wrong this in person because.
Yeah, I mean, it's quite obvious why. So what I'd like to do is, first of all, start with the layout of today's talk.
I want to introduce the structure of a stock. Basically, in the first part,
I'm going to introduce to sort of a baseline that we can all come out for and discuss a little bit the conceptual recognition of genocide.
What's the difference between parliamentary and governmental recognition and and how it actually applies to the state of Israel?
And in the second part, which will be more umbilical, I will discuss how it all started, how it all began in the late 70s and 80s.
So basically, this is the the layout I want to proceed with also my argument for today, and it consists of two pillars, actually.
So first of all, I'm arguing what I'm saying now from a historical perspective.
And I want to say that Israel's foreign policy on the Armenian genocide was shaped by decisions taken in the 90s,
but they crystallised already two decades earlier.
OK, and they're the two pillars of this argument is that particularly after Israel lost Iran after the 1979 revolution,
they put all their pressure, all the emphasis on the relations with Turkey of.
I will also explain why. Why is that so important?
And the contested memories of the Armenian genocide, which during the 70s emerged to international relations, then suddenly appeared there.
Were actually the right component at the right time.
OK, what they want to say before I start to talk about Israeli foreign policy on the Armenian genocide,
I want to say first that our starting point is what happened in 1915.
OK, it's very important to start on this because. Yeah, I mean, some people have different assumptions or different understandings of the events.
So basically, like between 1915 in 1923, close to one point five million Armenians were exterminated by the anthrax regime during the First World War.
And this is our premise. This is the starting point of the talk.
It's very important to say that right now because later on we have a different narrative coming to Turkey and talk is diplomats.
And it's really important to mention that to underline this point,
I would also like to say additional point I want to make additional point about is that some of you probably know a few stuff about the topic,
know a few angles about the topic. I will not be able to discuss all of them today in 45 minutes.
What I will try to do is basically discuss a few points and then specifically what
I argued and give a few emphasis on the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs,
engagement with government in general. OK.
So we have a search for problem, so which is why Israel doesn't recognise the Armenian genocide, and it's puzzling because there's a few yeah,
quite the conventional wisdom points about this,
that the Israeli relations with Turkey are too important or Jews and Armenians are natural allies because they are both victims of genocide.
And Israel prefers Azerbaijan over the Armenians and so on.
But this is I think that this is not helping us to actually approach the problem and to help us do that.
I want to actually present here to two questions. What the term recognition, the recognition of the general managers that actually means, OK,
we need to figure out what it means exactly and which of these institutions refuse to recognise the Armenian genocide and why.
OK, so we need the conceptual clarity here.
So scholars for different disciplines actually debating about the term recognition, what it means, sectarianism.
There's so many definitions to terrorism as much as to genocide and also to recognition.
But most of them actually agree that it's a vital human need and it's very important emotionally and collectively
for groups of people to put certain history will be acknowledged in applying this to the Armenian genocide.
It means that Armenians in the diaspora, especially in the diaspora,
want that the events of 1915 will be recognised by countries, by institutions as genocide.
OK, and they will also combat denialism, just like we are familiar with it for Holocaust denial,
the way in which Jews and Israeli Jews, Jews all over the world combat the Holocaust.
OK, and here we have also a very good example. If we look at the wording of the Armenian genocide resolution,
which was recognised in the American Congress both by the House of Representatives and the Senate in 2010 to 2019.
OK, so I think it's very clear. Let's move forward.
All right. So what's the tension? Actually, legislators give voice to a broader range of values, norms and ethics, and they try to protect minorities.
Right. For this reason, recognition could cause tension between the country's legislative and executive.
And why government actually oppose recognition of the Armenian genocide?
Well, we are responsible for so many important things, for example, and it could cause grave harm to our national interest.
It could, of course, deteriorate the relations with Ankara immediately.
It could draw a lot of economic and it could basically harm relations with Turkey, definitely for the short term, also maybe for the longer term.
So as a result, governments don't really interested in recognising the Armenian genocide and those interests clash between the parliaments.
And it's not specifically about the clash between those two two views of recognising the Armenian genocide.
All right. So how does this apply on Israel?
Well, the Israeli consecutive governments, which it's quite understandable if we apply this concept why they don't want to recognise the genocide,
OK, they have even though they are the state of Israel is built on the ashes of the Holocaust.
And even though it could actually cause a little bit of harm or some harm to Israel, combat against anti-Semitism and the Holocaust denial,
we have clear interest not to do this in specific periods of the relations with Turkey.
However, yeah, theoretically speaking,
the Knesset should do that because these are two separate institutions and two separate interests based on this conceptual framework.
OK, so they represent a broader range of views, cultures and standpoints within the Israeli society.
All right.
What I would like to offer is a conceptual framework to examine the questions which I just presented and look at them from three different periods,
consecutive but different periods, each of which has its own specific events, interest factors and so on.
The first period is the formative years of the late Cold War with Cold War dynamics in the Middle East.
The second period is the post-Cold War period.
And I called the first period as the formative years, which I mentioned before.
And the second is the policy, because this is when decision makers actually sat down and said we should protect Turkey's narrative for this.
And these reasons back in the first period will actually no real discussions about the policy.
Everything was done quite far away from Israel. And there will be different views about this policy.
And I will elaborate on that a little bit later today. Third period comes form.
And once the administration when the other one came to office and I called them,
they contested this because there were so many clashes between Israel and Turkey,
so many different situations, or because, well, Israel could easily press the button,
the parliament could press the button and it just pursuit of them.
So it's very interesting to know why. So let me give you a really broad overview about what happened in each of those periods.
Well, in the late Cold War period, in the formative years,
we have a Romanian bellmen in their spine launching an international campaign to recognise the Armenian genocide.
I will break it down a little bit later, what it means.
And we have a very complex political situation in the Middle East with the 1979 Iranian revolution,
the peace accord between Israel and Egypt and the military coup in Turkey in 1980.
So we have almost two years that a lot of things happening in the background of all of this.
It actually started a little bit earlier. There are many the small campaign started in the mid 70s, but it's quite short, intense period.
If we look at the second period, look, there's so many different factors happening here.
We have the establishment of the Republic of Armenia.
We have the above conflict with Israel began to emerge.
Also, Israel has some interest in that conflict, but it's beyond our conversation today.
I'm just giving you a short bullet point list of things.
And the Knesset, this is very important for our adopted the Knesset tried to pass the first,
I'm sorry, parliamentary bill on the Armenian genocide in 1989.
Specifically, it was Meretz Party, a left wing Liberal Party, a very small party.
And then we have also in the south a little bit later in the early 90s,
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict seems to be on the right path of resolution with the Madrid conference in 1991 and the Oslo Accords in 1993,
which helped a lot for talking to us alter the relations with Israel.
And and that's, of course, very important to our topic.
And I will get to it first. All right. Let's be let's just look at this.
So Azerbaijan become a very important Israeli ally and trading in oil between Israel and Azerbaijan and the Mavi Marmara,
which is also very familiar event of 2010, the IDF operations in Gaza and the clashes with Hamas.
And, of course, it unfolds to an old one.
And then Netanyahu, very harsh rhetoric right and left you then to go back to war.
And with all during all this period the uniqueness of the Holocaust and ethno nationalist involvement of Netanyahu,
the government administration is very let's say it's very, uh, it's right there.
It's very evident, OK.
So what I would like to do now is take these background aside for a minute and just focus on the first period, OK, actually the formative years,
if we want to discuss this topic later on in the more elaborated and integrated way, we need to understand, first of all, what happened here.
And I would also like to do is focus on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and not on the parliament.
OK, so let's focus on the formative years and see what happens of that.
So far, everyone's following an economic sense. OK.
All right, so Albanians, the Albanians, after the genocide of 1915, 1923,
spread around the globe, creating themselves different communities you can see in the map.
I mean, it's quite obvious we are the main centres of how many invest more in the survivors of
the genocide who sought to basically start their life in a different part of the world,
will silence the first generation of the survivors and the second generation.
The offspring will silent about the trauma, the suppressed trauma of their parents.
And they didn't want to talk about the genocide.
They could also not commemorated as, oh, let's put it this way, they could not really commemorate the Armenian genocide as a global memory.
They could just commemorate the Armenian genocide privately in very small communities.
And of course, it varies from community to community where.
Now. Form nineteen seventy two, three, four, five onwards,
we see the third generation emerging and very much influence form the Palestinian Liberation Organisation
and the armed struggle of the Fatah and the Popular Front of the Liberation of Palestine and of course,
the 1972 Olympic Games. With the murder of 11 Israeli athletes, it influenced the untold in the Middle East.
And we want to actually achieve the same kind of momentum against Turkey.
They were inspired by the achievements of the PLO and other Palestinian organisations with the armed struggle against Israel.
They want to achieve the same the same goals.
So the defeat of terrorism basically looks at and I think the primetime of the 1972 Olympics is the best example of how the world stops.
And in the old world, where we have only television and radio, people stop doing anything they they do and just look at television, they were amazed.
And suddenly the Palestinians could actually draw so much attention to that cause they get exposed,
not just L.A., but many other minority groups, ethnic groups that had the same aspirations.
Um, so it's important to mention in the context of the Palestinians that there are many and see Khatami for the liberation of Armenia,
a Sulla and which operated slightly together with the Palestinians, but basically were inspired by those Palestinians and for those reasons.
So we can actually summarise it into the three R's, OK, they actually want to force Turkey to recognise Armenian genocide.
It's very important. The recognition which which I just mentioned at the beginning, um, reparations like Holocaust restitution form.
It was it was Germany reparations of Turkey for the genocide and restoration of the historical homeland in eastern Anatolia.
These were the three Rs. But they also had, um, and I'll get to it very soon.
We also had an imperialist rageous point of view of terrorism.
They want to it was actually a cultural phenomenon, OK? They want to beat imperialism.
They want to beat the Americans and therefore they in between 1973, nineteen eighty five, a son assassinated approximately 60 Turkish diplomats.
It's contested whether this number is accurate, but approximately 60 and Turkish diplomats and it's quite a lot.
And the family members. So it's not it's not just the diplomats themselves.
Some of them were walking in the street with the children or the wife and both were assassinated, all the whole family.
Think about that. And it mainly happened in Western countries. So and there were consequences to that, which I'm going to discuss in the next one.
OK, so this was not just promoting the three Rs was also to promote the anti-Western agenda.
OK, I'm completely Sankei Westrick.
So. These these were familiar photos from the late 70s and 80s.
Every month, two months, three months, a very big funeral in Turkey.
That looks like that I mean, it's very, very often these images were very familiar to many and many people within in Turkey back in the time,
and the Turkish newspapers look just like that back in those years.
And it caused a lot of concern in Turkey. So Turkey suddenly needs to explain to the world what what's happening here,
why so many Turkish diplomats being assassinated and why it's so important, why those countries, the four countries need to protect Turkish diplomats.
So it's not just a Turkish affair. It's not just the Turkish problem.
It's also the host country problem to protect those Turkish demands.
They also had to explain the world what happened in 1915 and to create the sort of response will calculate the response to the events of 1915.
They also building on the cooperation with the hosting country with regards to counterterrorism initiatives.
OK, the Israeli diplomats recognise that very well,
and they built a whole thesis based on that those needs, specifically the counterterrorism alliance, OK,
to provide Turkey a sort of a possibility to align with Israel,
encountered the Palestinian terrorism of the time, which was a major problem for Israel back in those years.
And especially, of course, the first Lebanon war is a prominent example of that problem.
So all of a sudden, we have two narratives of the 15, we have the Armenian genocide and we have the Armenian question,
Turkey asked the minister of foreign affairs, a veteran diplomat,
to become suddenly scholars and to retrieve or to at least argue that they retrieved documents
from the Ottoman archives and to argue that what happened in 1915 was not a genocide at all.
It's a question, how many Americans were killed? How did they actually how did they find themselves in the desert and so on?
I'm not getting into those details because they not really what matters is what matters,
that we suddenly have two accounts of the same events and we have a diaspora community that for one thing,
and they are not gathered under a nation state. Yet we don't have the Republic of Armenia and we have a quite strong country member,
a NATO member with a lot of good allies in the West, some of which are very critical of Turkey.
But still, Turkey was very important to the group, an ally of the West.
And suddenly we have a totally different setting, OK?
And it was it's very important to also mention here that the effects on Turkish diplomats and the attempt
to force Turkey to recognise them and address it was not just an act that operate the pressure on Turkey.
It was a pressure on Turkish identity, because since nineteen twenty three, since the Republic of Turkey was founded by the Kemal Ataturk,
very important part of Turkish identity was based on the notion that the Armenian genocide never happened and denying it in history,
curriculum, books and so on and so forth was very important, integral part of the identity.
OK, so it was not just an attack on Turkey because the text on the Mustafa Kemal secular heritage, OK.
Good. So we have those veteran diplomats who right at the United Historiography and we
have a campaign in international forums that argue against the Armenian genocide
and the alleged Armenian massacre in Mexico is very important term because Israeli
diplomats will embrace this term and will never use the word G and the G word,
and they will try to stick to the Armenian massacre. And that's very important.
And we have a disputed history, as we mentioned. OK, now we are shifting the focus to Israel because after this very important background,
we can look at Israel a little bit and understand what happened,
what drove Israel and the Israeli foreign ministry to support the Turkish account of 1950.
This guy this gentleman over here that we've been going on for as prime minister of Israel was very much in
favour of the periphery doctrine in order to create a sort of a doctrine of foreign relations for Israel.
He believed that Israel needs to break the hostility in the Middle East and try to create the alliance with other non Arab Muslim countries.
So if you look at the. The map of the Middle East, because it's Egypt, Jordan and Syria, of course, Iraq, we have two very big,
large Muslim countries in the region on the external perimeter of the Middle East.
We have Turkey and Iran. And although no one was also on the Sudan and Ethiopia, we are focussing on Iran and Turkey,
those who are also a very important American ally in the Middle East.
So together with Israel, we have a very important right triangle here and focussing on just one moment on Turkey.
And it's not only Iran.
Iran under the Shah and the relations with Israel were based on an intelligence sharing and also training of the Shah's secret police by the Mossad.
And it was a very important listening post to the Arab world, of course.
And after 1967, we have very Ashqelon oil pipeline and we are talking about a major investment of almost three decades in Iran, very important.
And it was a very important pillar of Israel's foreign policy in the region.
And generally speaking, there was a lot of investment in the relations with the Shah and the Israelis to send their best,
best trained diplomats to those countries, especially to Iran, because of the sensitivity,
because of the importance of the relations within which and after in the late 70s become taking a totally different path.
OK, so the late corbo in the Middle East. We certainly have a turning point, a very important turning point.
Doing most of the 70s, we have called alliance between Israel and Turkey,
mainly because was Islamic leaders in Turkish politics that were dominating and trying to construct
hawkish foreign policy towards an anti-Western and Islamic position very close to what happened in Iran.
And then we have in 1979, Islamic revolution in Iraq. So this.
These events are very important because all this this dynamic is very important to our story, because this is where the Armenian genocide,
which I just discussed, comes as a valuable a valuable component to 1979 was a defining moment in the Middle East.
If we look now in the discussions of what's going on in the Middle East, it's all about Iran, it's all about the nuclear nuclear plan,
and it's all about making sure that Iran is not the danger to the middle,
to the security of the Middle East, but maybe also to the security of lot of the world.
Right. It was a defining moment because it was also there was a sort of a domino effect on what happens in Turkey.
Right. Which I just mentioned, those Islamic factions in the in Turkey.
And we have the 19, we call it, in the literature of the 1979 moment.
OK, so together with Turkey, Iran had a major role in the regional stability of the Middle East, not only for Israel, but also to the Americans.
And Israel lost three decades of massive investment in Iran under the Shah, which went down the drain in 1979.
So Israel was making sure that the image we see here.
Will not continue to an Islamic revolution in Turkey as well.
So Israel and Israeli diplomats were anxious for the positive momentum of a revolution ending momentum in the
Middle East and the fact that both Iran and Turkey could be we can say goodbye to them for quite some time.
And Turkey suddenly become an important ally in the Middle East to Israel's most
strategic ally and a vital country to the security of Israel in the Cold War,
in the Middle East. Luckily, luckily.
The 12th of September, 1980 was a turning point in terms of what happens in Turkey.
The military couldn't stop the chaos, stopped the revolutionary momentum and.
Created a sort of a different reality,
but they stopped the Islamic revolutionary momentum and they established a new government led by General Honore of one and at least this well,
let's say very negative momentum from his only point of view stopped.
OK, Turkey did not become a second Iran. That's for sure.
But for Israel, it's from an Israeli standpoint, even though the talk is the military elite were quite, let's say,
neutral towards Israel and even potential they potentially because of strategic point of view of the military,
they were actually facing another problem, working through this energy crisis between 1978,
in 1980 and the fact that it served to shift this a crisis, to shift focus, foreign policy, formerly neutral foreign policy.
And even if a positive foreign policy towards the West and Israel towards an anti-Israel
stance because of the Arab pressure will sort of give Turkey all its energy needs.
And they demand that actually those Arab leaders to boycott Israel and Turkey had to take
a sort of a calculated decision how to position themselves in this complex situation.
So what they did go back to this and what they did is basically not shutting down the embassy entirely.
They decided to demote the relation who is out to the lowest possible representation.
They they sent the ambassadors back and put it to administrators as diplomats and
that the people in charge of the responsible of the affairs in the in the embassy,
but it's the lowest representation possible. So they kept something from for the future.
They didn't have the relationship, but they could show they could wave to the Arab countries if we send an ambassador back.
We did what you asked us to leave us alone. OK, so not only was he was the Israeli ambassador to the embassy in Ankara in those years,
when I interviewed him, he actually discussed many other factors,
but he mentioned how it felt to sit there and basically be able to do nothing with all this pressure coming from Jerusalem.
Do something, try to engage with them, try to make appointments, try to talk to those generals, try to do something.
He was so frustrated he could not do anything and he did not have access to that equipment enough to the elite of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
And he was waiting so anxiously that they would sign the bill for calling to talk about something.
It's important because. Then Israeli minister of foreign affairs back in July.
I understand that there's a potential here of a crisis between if we we I mean,
them would try to sell as sort of a thesis that there is a cooperation between PLO and Salah.
Right. Then maybe they would like to come to fill it with us against this mutual connexions,
OK, mutual and the cooperation, of course, these two organisations are also different.
And of course, to achieve.
But they were trying to focus on the anti imperialist agenda of both organisations and the fact that they both operated from Lebanon.
OK, that's very important. So geographically speaking, the proximity of the operations of Assad and the PLO and other organisations of
Palestinian concessions and the fact that Beirut became the hub for southern Lebanon,
became the hub of regional terrorism, was the mutual interest for both Israel and Turkey to cooperate on that specific and point.
So I want to.
There's so many examples I could give you, but I decided to focus on this specific world for an Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs document,
which explained to Israeli people not only in Turkey,
but also throughout Europe, how to basically sell the thesis,
how to explain to Turkish diplomats and to other diplomats how this cooperation actually works.
So they mentioned, for example, specific people, specific character with which pelota with which Israel had to engage with in the past,
and they try to basically explain that they had to supply people, supply the revolutionary propaganda to the Armenians and inspired them.
OK, and emphasise again that the issue of Lebanon, the importance of Lebanon,
the geographical proximity and the fact that they were also doing some corporations for each other.
So many of them felt betrayed also and always used to do some work for PLO and vice versa.
So that that actually emphasised the need for both Turkey and Israel to cooperate on this issue and make it as an as a mutual problem.
OK. All right, we are moving further in 1993, the peak of our many until and actually declines, it was mainly because of this explosion in Paris,
the Orly airport attack, which in many of the SARS attacks on Turkish diplomats or Turkish targets.
There were some casualties and by third parties, but specifically in this event, 55 people were injured.
And that was so suddenly there was some criticism already about how justified the terrorism and objectives of ASALA.
But still, they got quite a lot of support from government and their support for fighting an important cause, identi identity because of it.
And that's why when it but this affair definitely and also drew a lot of criticism from Muslim countries.
And suddenly the Armenians did not did not look so friendly and nice and cool in fighting for an important cause.
They were actually doing quite a lot of criticism.
And therefore, this is well, we see how the Albanian fellow is in decline and a new agenda for the commemorative agenda emerge.
And, well, some Armenian scholars and lobbies, especially in the United States, but also in Western Europe and especially in France, for example,
they were trying to transform this commemorative the three hours into a more traditional commemoration and death and to, for example,
present the Armenian genocide papers in international forums,
try to explain exactly based on research what happened, what happened in 1915, for example,
they were trying to establish part of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which was just in their foundation during the early 80s.
It was open to public in 1991, but during the 80s,
there were a lot of discussions whether or not what should be actually there and the commemorative part of the museum,
how the museum should present the events of the Holocaust and also other genocides.
The Armenians were trying to basically and enter or be part of the exhibition mentioning the Armenian genocide of 1915.
So we see how they shift the momentum, try to shift that momentum and become more powerful at least,
and to draw less criticism and draw less negative negative views on what happened with the terrorism period.
But they didn't succeed. Well, because. Israel was very much involved in those operations and trying to block the Armenians and for the Turks.
And this is also very important, the perspective of this whole Armenian genocide, recognition and part.
And, of course, from the Israeli perspective, a Jewish perspective, the uniqueness of the Holocaust,
the importance of Jewish suffering in the Holocaust was not really part of the agenda of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs back in the 80s.
They did not discuss it amongst themselves. I mean, when I read so many documents, I didn't notice any any discussions around it.
It was actually proposed quite a lot by Turkish diplomat that the Jews in the
United States and Turkey and the minister visiting minister of foreign affairs
should actually adopt the Turkish narrative because it will be beneficial to the
thesis of the uniqueness of all of building a sort of hierarchy of victimhood,
the Jews first and then all the others. OK, but it's really important to say that we are back in the time we did not play an important role.
It becomes very important later on in the third period with their nationalist
agenda of the government and the Israeli parliament in doing all the good.
All right. So Turkey's energy problems are solved, is helping the minister of foreign affairs,
I should emphasise, and helping Turkey to block Armenian initiatives,
recognise the Armenian genocide, especially in the United States, but also other third party countries.
And we suddenly have a situation where the Armenian genocide and the contested memories of the Armenian genocide,
where Israel responded at the beginning to this whole situation is ad situation.
Right. How do we what do we do? How do we manage this crisis with Turkey?
We lost the. Now we need to to deal with Turkey. OK, so let's let's walk with this counter-terrorism initiative.
All right. Let's help them cancel this conference. All right. Let's do this. Let's do that.
Suddenly this policy or this behaviour is starting to be a norm.
OK, so there was actually expectations for me as I build on those successes, the previous successes,
that Israel will be the defender of an international forums and defend Turkey.
And we know about the Armenian question and a question about Armenian massacre.
OK, so this war, this war,
the formative years and I'm going back to this slide and I also and hear the text from the Armenian genocide resolution from the Israeli Knesset.
It's a more updated one, but the idea stayed the same from nineteen eighty nine.
And I mentioned that all of that happens during the late 70s, early 80s and the 80s unfolds to this position will now suddenly there are two fronts.
The front in the Knesset where the Ministry of Foreign Affairs should do something about this, because the Armenian genocide looks at Turkey.
Right. And we still have to defend Turkey in international force.
So suddenly the minister of foreign affairs has to actually go to France to to deal with.
So they the minister of foreign affairs, actually made sure that every time those bills will try to pass,
they will try to do something about it in the sense that they will,
for example, take the discussion form the Education Committee to the Foreign Affairs and National Security Committee.
OK, so this is where they have more presence and this is how they can actually monitor the discussion.
There is no media presence in there in that the electoral committee.
So it was far more easy for them to go in or to actually control the situation in the Knesset.
And I would like to recap and talk a little bit again about my argument.
So I argue to that from historical perspective,
the formative years will actually the period in which the Israeli policy on the Armenian genocide actually crystallised.
But it was not a decision making. It was not based on any any calculated strategy.
It was basically ad hoc policy, responsive policy to a crisis.
And suddenly the Armenian genocide, the contested memories of the genocide will just there is an opportunity.
But this unfolds into the 90s and the millennium period, which turns into a more calculated and a clear strategy and decision making.
All right. So here I wrote that and I like to focus on again on the Israeli government's consecutive governments.
It's quite clear why they won't recognise the genocide.
They will not take such a bad decision for Israel's strategic interest and for many important interests,
other interests with their country, for example, other junk that in conflict with the Republic of Armenia.
So they will not do this and they will not take those chances and do something that is not beneficial to them.
However, the Knesset should have done that,
or we should have expected from the Knesset to do it because they are supposed to
represent those in a range of political and cultural views in Israeli society,
and they still refuse to do so.
It's a different discussion to talk about what's going on in the Knesset and how we support for military reform and for peer to peer.
But it really requires a separate and separate the.
I would like to thank you for, uh, yeah, for attending and of course, listening to my talk.
And I want to just say that this stock was based on my dissertation, which, as you have mentioned, will turn into a book next year.
And it was based on a number of interviews, articles and journal articles, journal articles,
which I mentioned in the news outlet, the articles, short essays, which I wrote in the last few years.
And you can find them, in my opinion, page. But of course, I would love to hear from you, of course, questions.
And we can continue to elaborate on that. Thank you very much.
This is.