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<\/a><\/p>\nThe Armenian community of the Old City of Jerusalem make a protest demanding that the Israeli government recognize the historic mass killings of Armenians under the Ottoman Empire. (Kitra Cahana\/ Getty Images)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Speaking on a podcast on Tuesday, Netanyahu also suggested, inaccurately, that the Israeli government had officially recognized the early 20th-century genocide.<\/p>\n
Netanyahu was questioned about the killing of between 600,000 and 1.2 million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during an interview with Patrick Bet-David, a conservative businessman and podcaster of Assyrian and Armenian descent, on Tuesday. Bet-David asked on his \u201cPBD Podcast\u201d why Israel, given its own roots in the Holocaust, has not recognized what many historians consider the first genocide of the 20th century.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn fact, I think we have,\u201d said Netanyahu. \u201cI think the Knesset passed a resolution to that effect.\u201d When Bet-David pressed whether such recognition came from Netanyahu directly, he responded, \u201cI just did. Here you go.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Knesset, Israel\u2019s legislature, has not officially recognized the Armenian genocide \u2014 despite appeals from the community of 5,000 to 6,000 Armenians living in Israel and the Palestinian territories, including some who descend from survivors of the 1915-16 killings.<\/p>\n
In 2016, the Knesset Education Committee called on the government to implement a formal acknowledgment of genocide, but none followed. Politician Tamar Zandberg proposed a discussion and vote on the issue in 2018, but the governing coalition proposed changing her language from \u201cgenocide\u201d to \u201ctragedy\u201d or \u201catrocities of the Armenian people,\u201d and Zandberg withdrew the proposal.<\/p>\n
While more than 30 governments recognize the events as a genocide, Turkey\u2019s government has resisted the charge, interpreting it as an attack on the modern state and contending there was no official policy of extermination against Armenians. Many other countries have avoided the designation to preserve their strategic ties with Turkey, the second-largest standing military in NATO after the United States.<\/p>\n
Israel was firmly in that camp for decades, while also having an additional stake in reserving the term \u201cgenocide\u201d to describe the Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis against the Jews of Europe \u2014 the catastrophe that birthed the term.<\/p>\n
Before Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan came to power in 2003, Turkey and Israel had close diplomatic ties, sharing counterterrorism and intelligence efforts along with trade and tourism. Their relationship deteriorated amid the collapse of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, the 2008-2009 Israel-Gaza War and Erdogan\u2019s professed support for Hamas \u2014 finally imploding in 2010, when Israeli troops raided a Turkish ship leading a flotilla of volunteers and aid to Gaza, killing nine Turks on board.<\/p>\n
Relations between Netanyahu and Erdogan were warming again before Oct. 7, 2023. But they tanked after the Hamas attacks and Israel\u2019s ensuing war in Gaza: Turkey severed trade with Israel, worth $7 billion a year, on the condition of a permanent ceasefire last year.<\/p>\n
In the United States, former President Joe Biden became the first leader to recognize the Armenian genocide in 2021. The move was lauded by two major Jewish organizations, the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League, that had lobbied against the same recognition in 2007. The groups changed their position after the Turkey-Israel alliance fell apart.<\/p>\n
Aram Suren Hamparian, executive director of the Armenian National Committee of America, responded with skepticism to Netanyahu\u2019s recognition of the genocide. He pointed to Israel\u2019s supply of arms to Azerbaijan in the country\u2019s 2023 campaign to capture the ethnic Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, forcing more than 100,000 Armenians to flee.<\/p>\n
Hamparian said Netanyahu\u2019s statement must \u201cbe followed by a sharp break with Israel\u2019s military alliance with Azerbaijan and public pressure on Turkey to abandon its denial and obstruction of justice for the Armenian Genocide.\u201d<\/p>\n
U.S. President Donald Trump announced earlier this month that he had brokered a peace agreement between Azerbaijan and Armenia, setting the stage for Azerbaijan to reduce its demand for imported weapons.<\/p>\n
Hamparian also referenced threats against Armenian Christians who live in Jerusalem, such as attacks from Jewish fundamentalists, along with \u201cserious and sustained violations of international law in Gaza, akin to Azerbaijan\u2019s ethnic cleansing of Artsakh.\u201d Netanyahu\u2019s comment on the Armenian genocide comes as his own country is accused by rights groups and scholars, both internationally and in Israel, of committing genocide against Palestinians. Israel rejects the charge.<\/p>\n