Peter Balakian: It's Time For Israel To Rethink its Rejection Of The Armenian Genocide

There has been speculation about Turkey's shifting international ties ever since the election of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, of the Islamist AKP party, in 2003, and the Gaza flotilla incident of May created a new breach in the long-standing alliance between Turkey and Israel. Among the many issues that have emerged in post-flotilla relations between the two countries is the Armenian Genocide of 1915.

The flotilla episode is fraught with complexities and ironies on both sides. While the Turkish-led mission focused on a grave human rights crisis—Israel's oppressive treatment of Gaza's Palestinians—Turkey's righteous indignation toward Israel both oversimplifies Israel's distress about Hamas and seems glaringly hypocritical in view of its own human-rights problems.

Those problems, which include Turkey's repressive and violent treatment of its large Kurdish population, some 15 million or more, and its record of legal detention, imprisonment, and torture of Turkish intellectuals, journalists, and political activists, constitutes one of the world's worst human rights records, as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch reports repeatedly show, over the past 20 years. Add to that Turkey's occupation of Northern Cyprus in violation of international law and its international campaign to falsify the history of its genocide of the Armenians in 1915, and the ironies multiply.

Source: Tabletmag.com – Complete Article

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