The Banality Of Payback

An education ministry circular particularly annoyed Israel by telling Turkish schoolchildren to observe a minute’s silence in solidarity with Palestinian children. In the event, the Israelis persuaded the Turks to cancel a proposed essay and drawing contest for schoolchildren to air their feelings of hatred towards Israel. Israeli officials were apparently poised to respond by proposing a programme in Israeli schools for discussing the genocide of Armenians by Turks in the first world war. ~The Economist

This last item jumped out at me as I read this article. Israeli policy has dictated a certain avoidance of the question of the Armenian genocide and Ankara’s continued denial of it, and generally “pro-Israel” forces have rallied against any efforts to have the genocide recognized by Congress for this and other reasons. Last year, the ADL was caught up in a fairly serious controversy when it tried to discipline one of its chapters for daring to acknowledge that the Armenian genocide was something other than an unfortunate wartime incident, and grudgingly the ADL leadership was compelled to make vague statements that paid some attention to the reality of the genocide. As Turkish-Israeli relations sour over other matters, it might just work out that the genocide resolution in Congress will meet with less resistance this time around and could pass in the House if it continued to have President Obama’s support.