June 28 (UPI) — The Israeli government on Sunday voted unanimously to recognize the mass killings of Armenians in the early 20th century as a genocide.
Minister of Foreign Affairs Gideon Sa’ar proposed the vote during a cabinet meeting.
“Despite the extensive and unambiguous historical documentation, the Armenian genocide remains to this day the subject of an institutionalized campaign of denial and minimization, including manipulative rewriting of history, mainly by the Turkish government,” Sa’ar said during the meeting.
“It is widely believed that the Ottoman Empire committed crimes amounting to genocide in a systematic manner, with the aim of destroying the Armenian people.”
The fact that the Armenian genocide happened beginning in 1915 is well-accepted within academic circles. However, the Turkish government has continued to deny the culpability of its predecessor — the Ottoman Empire. More than 1.5 million Armenians were killed between 1915 and 1923.
Ahead of the vote, Turkish Vice President Cevdet Yılmaz described the Israeli resolution as “an attempt to cover up their own crimes.”
In 2024, the Armenian government officially recognized an independent Palestinian state, months after the Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas on Israel that sparked the Gaza war. Armenia said a two-state solution, which is backed by other nations including the United States, is the best option to bring peace to the region.
In response, Israel summoned the Armenian ambassador for a “harsh reprimand conversation.”
Israel joins more than 30 countries across the globe that have acknowledged the Armenian massacres, using the term “genocide,” Politico reported. Among them are France, Germany, Lebanon, Syria and the United States.
President Donald Trump, however, has repeatedly declined to use the term and rejected a 2016 congressional vote to formally and symbolically recognize the genocide.
The last U.S. president to publicly acknowledge the massacres as a genocide was Joe Biden, who, in 2021, marked the 106th anniversary of the atrocities on April 24, Armenian Remembrance Day.
“Each year on this day, we remember the lives of all those who died in the Ottoman-era Armenian genocide and recommit ourselves to preventing such an atrocity from ever again occurring,” Biden said.
“We honor the victims of the Meds Yeghern so that the horrors of what happened are never lost to history,” he said, using the Armenian term for the genocide. “And we remember so that we remain ever-vigilant against the corrosive influence of hate in all its forms.”
