Last night I caught Charlie Rose talking to Peter Balakian, translator of the book, Armenian Golgotha by his great uncle Grigoris Balakian, which describes the Armenian genocide of the 19-teens. Balakian said more than 1 million Armenians were "exterminated." Then he echoed Obama and said that until the Turks come to terms with what they did 100 years ago, they will never move forward as a modern democracy that respects minority rights.
Of course I thought about the Nakba of 1948, and the Israeli refusal to acknowledge it. And along with that the oppression of a minority that permeates Israeli society--lately in this amazing report of a one-year-old expelled from a day-care center because she is Arab.
But I also thought about Theodor Herzl on the Armenian issue. Herzl's diary demonstrates that indifference to an indigenous Asian minority is in the DNA of Zionism.
In 1896, Herzl made a trip to Constantinople to try and meet Sultan Abdul Hamid so as to negotiate the purchase of Palestine, which was then part of the Ottoman Empire. Herzl was prepared to offer millions of pounds to resolve the Turkish debt crisis, and get a Jewish state in exchange. The Sultan declined to meet with him (they met a couple years later) but his aides gave Herzl some terms. Could he work on the Armenian issue in the European press? Turkey was getting bashed for its treatment of the Armenians. And Herzl, who always bragged that his pen was not for sale, agreed to do so.
I'm not going to go through all Herzl's work on behalf of the Turks on the Armenian issue now. This is a blogpost, not a scholarly article. But in seeking to "pacify" the Armenians, Herzl visited an Armenian revolutionary in his London apartment, Nazarbek (evidently the poet Avetis Nazarbekian). Herzl:
The house is noisy, second-rate, middle-class elegance, and from time to time wild Armenian faces appear in the crack of the door. They are refugees who find shelter here.
[Herzl then meets Nazarbek] Black, tangled, serpentine locks, black beard, pale face. He mistrusts the Sultan and would like to have guarantees before he submits. His political ideas are confused, his acquaintance with the European situation downright childish...it seems, his word is obeyed by the poor people in Armenia who are being massacred. He lives in London, not uncomfortably. I asked whether he knew who was finally benefitting from all this unrest, Russia or England?
He replied that he did not care; he was revolting only againt the Turks.
The woman [Nazarbek's wife] kept interrupting us, speaking in Armenian and evidently against me. She has a wicked look; and who knows how much she is to blame for the bloodshed...
I promised I would try to get the Sultan to stop the massacres and new arrests, as a token of his good will...
I offer this not as the final word on the Jewish-Armenian relationship. I don't know much about it. Though right in line with Herzl, Abe Foxman took the Turks' side recently, during the flap over recognition of the Armenian genocide.
I offer it chiefly as light on the Israel lobby and its methods. Herzl was playing the Great Game of world politics. He was a genius at it. Thus his concern with Russian and English interests. He didn't seek a mass movement at first; he sought the help of Jewish bankers and editors in his effort to parley with the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire for a colonial chunk of the empire. Herzl didn't want to be a court Jew-- no, he wanted to be a statesman for the Jews, and god bless him-- but he operated in the courts of Europe, not always successfully. And as I have said before, I bet I would have been a Zionist back then.
Face to face with a man representing oppressed indigenous Asians who faced genocidal forces in their society, Herzl was contemptuous. And that Jewish history is still with us. Cultivating the powerful, using financial influence, expressing contempt for an indigenous Asian people--these traits have been hallmarks of the Israel lobby. I say history because it's coming to an end. There are other ways of being Jewish in modern society.
What will be the new relationship between minority and majority? That’s a good question.
So Herzl, backed by a group of financiers, pledged to relieve the Ottoman Empire of its debts in return for the purchase of Palestine?
We are customarily led to believe that the financial class has no political interest other than enacting laws that maximize its profits – a materialist view that is corroborated across the political spectrum by both “realists” and by leftists like Chomsky. Clearly this isn’t the case here.
If anything this is prima facie evidence of the financial class elevating its ethnic interests above it material interests.
Blasphemy I say! Somebody please get a hold of Abe Foxman. I want to see a press release condemning Herzl for propagating these antisemitic conspiracy theories.
Herzl may have been a Jew, but he was also white middle-class, and all the racism that comes with it (not to mention the sexism). Jews have historically ghettoized themselves, still doing it now. Israelis are champions at this- when we get out of the country, the first thing we do is look for the nearest Jewish community and Rabbanut and still refer to non-Jews as “goys”. This quote certainly embodies a hefty part of what it means to be Jewish, and comes as no surprise.
The irony is that Herzl’s description of this Armenian couple sounds, well , anti-semitic. Change the ethnicities and this could be some Anglo-Saxon of the time period making condescending racist remarks about a family of Jewish radicals.
The organized Jewry’s attitude with regard to the Armenian genocide is shameful.
In 2001, then-Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres made the astonishing claim that the Armenians – 1.5 million of whom were slaughtered by Ottoman Turks in 1915 – never experienced a genocide. He went so far as to refer to the Armenian account of the mass slaughter as “meaningless”.
In 2007, Bernard Lewis, one of the main propounders of the concept of a “new antisemitism,” had this to say to Haaretz: “The meaning of genocide is the planned destruction of a religious and ethnic group, as far as it is known to me, there is no evidence for that in the case of the Armenians.” For remarks in a similar vein published in Le Monde, Lewis had been found guilty of genocide denial by a French court the previous year.
See more examples here.
It looks like “First they came” had never been written.
Would one play “the great game” unless one accepted the premise of the game?
Also note the response:
So it is possible to be oppressed and still refuse to accept the premise of game.
There were other options. Herzl played the way he did because he made choices based on his class background and his political orientation, not because the condition of the Jews necessitated it.
Phil, you write that “indifference to an indigenous Asian minority is in the DNA of Zionism,” and you characterize that as “an original sin of Zionism.”
This seems strange to me, because quite clearly the indifference of zionism extended then, as it extends today, to every non-Jew on earth. Zionism’s relations with non-Jews have always been very purely instrumental, and not moral at all. As such it is zionism itself that is the sin, and not merely some particular detail of its self-serving tribal machinations.
The Yishuv was not oblivious to the mass murder campaigns orchestrated against Armenians, nor were the Zionists. Herzl’s seminal “Der Judenstaat” – the foundational manifesto of zionism – was published only three months after the Hamidian Massacres, which saw several hundred thousand Armenians massacred in Anatolia.
Herzl said nothing, and quite understandably so, since at the time he was still currying favor with the Turks, and banking heavily on a deal whereby the Sultan would grant the zionists control of Palestine in exchange for the assumption of Turkish debts by the World Zionist Organization. He seemed more than content to allow his fellows (Jews, Armenians and Greeks enjoyed close relations under the Ottoman millet system) to be slaughtered en masse, and in silence, if his silence would further the zionist scheme. There was virtually no Jewish protest on behalf of the Armenians during the several episodes of mass murder leading up to the final genocide, and even during the genocide, significant numbers of Jews from Palestine fought in the Turkish army and presumably assisted in the killing. It seems to have been forgotten that the Zionist leadership at the time, along with most of the Yishuv, were firmly pro-German and pro-Turkish.
The only noteworthy exception to the shameful silence of the Yishuv was the Nilli Group, a small familiar network of Jewish spies in Palestine who from 1915 to 1917 – motivated by the murder of Armenians – betrayed the Yishuv’s formal alliance with the Turks and Germans to provide intelligence to the British. (Interestingly, as late as 1991 their work remains controversial; segments about the Armenian genocide were censored by the Israeli government from a documentary about the Nilli Group).
After the genocide, a few dissenters who had placed themselves on the margins of the zionist movement began to speak out about what had happened to the Armenians, including Israel Zangwill. In general, however, the fate of the Armenians was only cynically deployed by zionists as an unfortunate case history demonstrating the untrustworthiness and violent nature of the goyim. Arch-racist Jabotinsky’s 1936 “Evacuation Plan” – in reality an “invasion plan”, whereby the entire and sizable Jewish populations of a number of Eastern European countries would be forcibly relocated to Palestine – was promoted using the fate of the Armenians as an example of what would befall Jews who rejected zionism.
After the establishment of Israel, successive Israeli governments went to enormous lengths not only to deny the Armenian genocide, but to work in collusion with Turkey to undermine international efforts to memorialize the historic crime. Generations of zionist scholars have gone to extraordinary lengths to “explain” why the Holocaust is unique and cannot be compared to other historical genocides, and as such have been deployed for decades to cast doubt on the historicity, extent, and significance of the Armenian genocide. Zionist scholars continue to dominate and stifle discussion of the Armenian genocide within the field of genocide studies, and Israel has played a creepy role in hosting genocide themed conferences at which Armenian scholars are systematically marginalized.
To this date, Israel continues to desecrate the memory of the Armenian genocide by tossing it about like a political football whenever they get their racist panties in a bunch. For a particularly nauseating but highly instructive example, check the January 2009 article in Huffpo called “Israel May Retaliate Against Turkey by Recognizing the Armenian Genocide.”
“Enraged by the abrasive tone of Turkey’s condemnation of Israel’s attack on Gaza, Israeli officials and Turkish analysts are now raising the possibility that Tel Aviv may retaliate either by recognizing the Armenian Genocide or refusing to help Turkey to lobby against a congressional resolution on the genocide. In a January 5 editorial, the Jerusalem Post escalated the level of Israeli displeasure by questioning Turkey’s credibility on passing judgment on other countries: “On balance, we’re not convinced that Turkey has earned the right to lecture Israelis about human rights.” Finally, Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister, Majalli Whbee angrily lashed back at the Prime Minister of Turkey. Several Turkish media outlets quoted Whbee as stating: “Erdogan says that genocide is taking place in Gaza. We [Israel] will then recognize the Armenian related events as genocide.” Whbee, a member of the Israeli Knesset and a close confidante of Prime Minister Olmert, issued the following warning to Turkey: “We, as Israel, hope that Prime Minister Erdogan’s statements will not damage our relations. But, if Turkey does not behave fairly, this will have its consequences.” While it is unlikely that Israel would reverse its long-standing refusal to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide, it may decide not to accommodate future Turkish requests to have American Jewish organizations to lobby against a congressional resolution on the Armenian Genocide.”
Pure disgustingness. Zionism in a nutshell.
For more on the grotesque history of Zionism’s silent complicity, check out Yair Auron’s 1990 book “The Banality of Indifference: Zionism and the Armenian Genocide.”
Donald, above, writes: “The irony is that Herzl’s description of this Armenian couple sounds, well , anti-semitic. ”
Herzl and the foundational zionists were absolutely anti-semitic in any meaningful sense of the word. The entire project of zionism was concieved by a bunch of incidentally Jewish European guys who had concluded that Jewish diaspora culture as a whole, with all it incredible diversity and cultural wealth, was worthless, dirty, backwards, and “abnormal.” They didn’t think of anti-semitism as an eruption of violent, irrational impulses, or as expressions of misguided class resentments. They thought of anti-semitism as a perfectly appropriate, natural, reasonable response of normal people to the presence of such obviously inferior people.
The entire zionist project, far from being a project to protect Jews as it is generally understood in the US, was a project to destroy Jewish culture, to annihilate Jewish communities, to annul non-Hebrew languages and cultures, to erase a thousand years of unique and extraordinarily rich and fruitful cultural symbioses, to sweep it all into a dustbin, so that a new kind of Jew would emerge – one modelled after the European enlightnement, and using assimilated European Jewish men as the template to which all the Jews of the world must conform.
Within Israel, Zionism’s war against Jewish culture continues to play out against Mizrahim – the vast array of cultures and peoples called “arab Jews” – the people Ben-Gurion famously despised as “human dust,” and who were promptly deployed to the margins of the zionist state, where they could act as a human buffer zone to absorb the violence and frustration of the millions of neighbors that Zionism had wronged.
Anyone who has done modest research into the mindset of early Zionists in the later score years of the 19th Century can see
that the concept of the New Jew was a parallel development within Germany to the concept of the Aryan Superman; both milked old ancient mythical history. Hitler is on record as confident that it wouldn’t matter what he did with the Jews in light of nobody cared about what happened to the Armenians. “Who remembers them today?” he said, as recorded in this Table Talk. So, that was then, this is now, and doesn’t
it seem like the Zionists are just sleep-walking in Hitler’s wake?
Have to agree with Anomalous. The original sin of Zionism, even before they even realized that Arabs existed, was their contempt for Jews.