Armenia, Gaza and the bitter ironies of history

Source: Le Monde diplomatique – English edition

Just as the Armenian genocide was one of the 20th century’s earliest, the massacre in Gaza could prove to be the first this century. But defining genocide is not easy. The 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide talks of acts ‘committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group’ (see What’s in a word?, in this issue).

Besides lawyers, historians and social scientists may also be involved. In the late 20th century the new academic discipline of genocide studies emerged, which compares different crimes against humanity. Though all genocides are different, they have common features, notably the fact that they tend to occur in wartime.

The legal definition of genocide is based on objective criteria, but politics is never absent. As historian Perry Anderson points out, international law is the ‘law of the strongest’ (1): both state and non-state actors may have an interest in whether or not a mass crime is classified as genocide.

Each potential new case – including Gaza – extends the scope for comparison, helping us to understand ongoing events. The terms of comparison don’t have to be identical in every respect: between 1915 and 1923, around 1.5 million died in the Armenian genocide. This included two thirds of the Ottoman empire’s Armenian population. Others were raped, enslaved, abducted (children) or forced to convert to Islam.

According to the UN’s special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, six months into the Gaza campaign, the Israeli military had killed more than 30,000 Palestinians and injured 71,000. But that’s not the whole story: the dead included 13,000 children, and more than 80% of the enclave’s population had been displaced (2).

Aggressive ethno-nationalism was the driving force for the Young Turks who seized power in the declining Ottoman empire in 1908, just as it is for Binyamin Netanyahu’s far-right government, which includes fascist ministers. The Young Turk government – and then Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk), who completed the genocide – sought to build a Turkish nation. Similarly, the Israeli government is attempting to establish a Greater Israel between Jordan and the Mediterranean.

Another Hundred Years’ War

The Armenian genocide took place during Turkey’s transition to a nation state and was a result of the Young Turks’ desire (after a period of openness toward non-Turkish elements in the Ottoman empire) to build the new nation on a homogenous ethnic and religious foundation. The ethnic cleansing also affected Assyrians, Greeks and Jews, but in different ways.

Israel’s approach in Palestine is more an instance of settler colonialism, dating back to the late 19th century. But violence is an inevitable part of the Zionist project, and the current offensive in Gaza is the most destructive in a long series of ethnic cleansing operations. Historian Rashid Khalidi says Israel is waging a Hundred Years’ War against the Palestinians (3).

Settlement was part of the Armenian genocide, too. It involved demographic engineering, moving Muslims (notably from the Balkans where Ottoman government forces suffered military defeats during this period) to eastern Turkey’s Armenian provinces; historians of the late Ottoman empire call this ‘internal colonisation’. It was a matter of eradicating the Armenians from the region.

I wrote a poem about Armenian history. Nowadays, I see that we Palestinians are living out something like that once again

Najwan Darwish

Collective memory dates the start of the Armenian genocide to 24 April 1915, but other mass crimes preceded it, notably the Hamidian massacres of 1894-97 and the Adana massacre of 1909. Some historians dispute whether these were part of the same phenomenon as the Armenian genocide. However that may be, the violence continues: last September, Azerbaijan, supported by Turkey, ethnically cleansed 120,000 Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh.

Dehumanising rhetoric was used to prepare the ground for both the Armenian and Gazan massacres: Armenians were referred to as pigs or dogs; Israel’s defence minister Yoav Galant called the Palestinians ‘human animals’. Despite the Tanzimat reforms in the mid-19th century, the Ottoman empire’s Armenians remained second-class subjects. Under Israel’s apartheid-like system today, individuals’ rights vary according to their ethno-religious affiliation.

However, there are two notable differences between the Armenian genocide and Gaza. Despite their subordinate status as a group, some Armenians were members of the Ottoman empire’s economic elite. The segregation imposed on them was hardly comparable to that inflicted on the Palestinians. The West Bank has a separation wall; Gaza is an open-air prison.

Independence dreams thwarted

In both the Armenian and Palestinian cases, the emergence of a national consciousness among the victims was an important factor. Armenians demanded rights and security in the Ottoman and Russian empires, and later independence. A Palestinian identity developed in the late 19th century among the educated classes in Palestine and was strengthened by the struggle against Zionism. In both instances, massacres thwarted aspirations to independence.

Another similarity between the two tragedies is that the international community has remained largely passive. Historians disagree about the role of the German empire (Turkey’s ally during the first world war) in the Armenian genocide. Some maintain that German army officers were actively involved, others that they could have prevented at least some of the killing. In June 2016 Germany recognised the Armenian genocide in a Bundestag resolution regretting ‘the inglorious role of the German Empire which, as the Ottoman Empire’s principal military ally, made no attempt to stop these crimes against humanity’ (4). The Gaza massacre has also been facilitated by international support, including that of the US, which gives Israel diplomatic protection and supplies it with weapons.

Genocides can also be highly materialistic. The seizure of Armenian property and bank accounts facilitated the emergence of a Turkish middle class, who became the Kemalist republic’s support base. Palestinian lands have been seized partly for settlement, but also for their capital value (5). Before the 1993 Oslo accords, there were fewer than 110,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank. Today there are nearly 710,000.

Israel uses religious arguments to assert the right of Jews to live in Palestine. Religion was a factor in the Armenian genocide too, but probably less central.

The local aspect of the Armenian massacres should not be ignored. One of the paramilitary organisations responsible for the genocide, the Special Organisation, incorporated thousands of common criminals and irregular troops (notably Kurds). But while the Israeli military have bombed Gaza indiscriminately, in the West Bank the abuses committed by Jewish settlers also have a local dimension, with extremists enjoying state protection.

Kill the elite first

The Armenian genocide began with the killing of the community’s elite in Istanbul: the intention was to cause chaos, making it easier to eliminate the rest of the population. Israel’s current military operation is clearly a general offensive against all Gazans, but it also targets intellectuals, as shown by the killing of the poet Refaat Alareer on 6 December, the deaths of 125 journalists (recorded in the UN report) and the partial or total destruction of Gaza’s 12 universities.

A growing number of states, civil society organisations and experts are taking the possibility of genocide in Gaza seriously. Israeli historian Raz Segal seems to have been the first, on 13 October (6). Soon after, Omer Bartov, an Israeli American expert on the Holocaust, suggested that Israel had genocidal intent (7). This January, in the case brought by South Africa, the International Court of Justice ruled by an overwhelming majority that there was a real risk of genocide.

A century after the events, there has been significant progress in getting the international community to recognise the Armenian genocide as such. However, Turkey has yet to admit any responsibility and still refuses to use the term: it accepts that massacres occurred during the first world war but denies there was any intention to eliminate the Armenian population.

Though most debates on the classification of events as genocide revolve around intent, perpetrators rarely declare their aims. Yet Israeli government figures have made many statements that suggest deliberate ethnic cleansing. Netanyahu asked his advisors to formulate a plan to ‘thin’ the Palestinian population of Gaza ‘to a minimum’, and the Israeli military have used AI to target individuals (8). Documenting the methodology will take time, but the intention to annihilate is clear from Israel’s actions.

Conscious of the similarities between the two tragedies, Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish wrote ‘Who remembers the Armenians?’, echoing words attributed to Hitler on the eve of the Nazi invasion of Poland (9). ‘I wrote a poem about Armenian history,’ he says. ‘Nowadays, I see that we Palestinians are living out something like that once again. So here, you see the ironies of history; history mocks us. It shows us that the things we thought people suffered in the past – they’re still in front of you. It says, you think you are writing about the past; you’re really writing about your future’ (10).

The original article: https://mondediplo.com/2024/07/10genocide belongs to Le Monde diplomatique – English edition .