Zionists: Anti-Armenian since the 1890s

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https://medium.com/@thepalestineproject/how-herzl-sold-out-the-armenians-f50d1d5b615f

This article was originally published in haaretz.

http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.654393

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How Herzl sold out the Armenians
The Founder of the Zionist movement supported the brutal Ottoman sultan against the Armenians, believing this would get the sultan to sell Palestine to the Jews.
By Rachel Elboim-Dror | Haaretz | May 1, 2015 |


The Armenian question has occupied the Zionist movement since a mass killing of Armenians was carried out by the Turks in the mid 1890s — prior even to the First Zionist Congress. Herzl’s strategy was based on the idea of an exchange: The Jews would pay off the Ottoman Empire’s huge debt, in return for the acquisition of Palestine and the establishment of a Jewish state there, with the major powers’ consent. Herzl had been working hard to persuade Sultan Abdul Hamid II to accept the proposal, but to no avail.

“Instead of offering the Sultan money,” Herzl’s diplomatic agent Philip Michael Nevlinski (who also advised the Sultan) told him, “give him political support on the Armenian issue, and he’ll be grateful and accept your proposal, in part at least.” The Christian European countries had been critical of the murder of Armenian Christians at the hands of Muslims, and committees supporting the Armenians had been founded in various places, and Europe also offered refuge to leaders of the Armenian revolt. This situation made it very difficult for Turkey to obtain loans from European banks.

Herzl eagerly took the advice. He felt that it was appropriate to try any means possible to hasten the establishment of a Jewish state. And so he agreed to serve as a tool of the Sultan, by trying to convince the leaders of the Armenian revolt that if they surrendered to the Sultan, he would comply with some of their demands. Herzl also tried to show the West that Turkey was in fact more humane, that it had no choice but to deal with the Armenian revolt this way, and that it aspired to a ceasefire and a political arrangement. After much effort, he also met with the Sultan on May 17, 1901.

The Sultan hoped that Herzl, a well-known journalist, would be able to alter the Ottoman Empire’s negative image. And so Herzl launched an intensive campaign to fulfill the Sultan’s wish, casting himself as a mediator for peace. He established ties with and held secret meetings with the Armenian rebels, in an attempt to get them to stop the violence, but they were not convinced of his sincerity, and did not trust the Sultan’s promises. Herzl also made energetic attempts to this effect in diplomatic channels in Europe, which he was very familiar with.

As was his way, he did not consult with other Zionist movement leaders, and kept his activities secret. But in need of some assistance, he wrote to Max Nordau to try to recruit him for the mission as well. Nordau responded with a one-word telegram: “No.” In his eagerness to obtain the charter for Palestine from the Turks, Herzl publicly declared — after the start of the yearly Zionist Congresses — that the Zionist movement expresses its admiration and gratitude to the Sultan, despite opposition from some representatives.

Herzl’s chief opponent on this was Bernard Lazare, a French Jewish intellectual, leftist, well-known journalist and literary critic, who had fought prominently against the Dreyfus trial, and was a supporter of the Armenian cause. He was so incensed by Herzl’s activity that he resigned from the Zionist Committee and abandoned the movement altogether in 1899. Lazare published an open letter to Herzl in which he asked: How can those who purport to represent the ancient people whose history is written in blood extend a welcoming hand to murderers, and no delegate to the Zionist Congress rises up in protest?

This drama involving Herzl — a leader who subordinated humanitarian considerations and served the Turkish authorities for the sake of the ideal of the Jewish state — is just one illustration of the frequent clash between political goals and moral principles. Israel has repeatedly been faced with such tragic dilemmas, as evidenced in its long-standing position of not officially recognizing the Armenian genocide, as well as in other more recent decisions that reflect the tension between humanitarian values and realpolitik considerations.

The writer is professor emeritus of history of education and culture at Hebrew University.

[Haykakan]

Re: Zionists: Anti-Armenian since the 1890s

Why Should We Armenians Want Zionists to `Recognize' Us?

13:39, January 4, 2016
By Markar Melkonian


"Even today I am willing to volunteer to do the dirty work for Israel,
to kill as many Arabs as necessary, to deport them, to expel and burn
them, to have everyone hate us, to pull the rug from underneath the
feet of the Diaspora Jews, so that they will be forced to run to us
crying. Even if it means blowing up one or two synagogues here and
there, I don't care. And I don't mind if after the job is done you put
me in front of a Nuremberg Trial and then jail me for life. Hang me if
you want, as a war criminal..."
These are the words of Ariel Sharon, from an interview published in
the Israeli daily Davar, 17 December 1982.

At the time he made these remarks he was the Minister of Defense of
Israel. In that capacity, he presided over the slaughter of 17,000
civilians in Lebanon, among them Armenians, as well as the massacre of
thousands of unarmed civilians, many of them women and children, in
the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps just outside of Beirut. Sixteen
years later, he would be elected Prime Minister of Israel. On 18 April
2002, U.S. President George Bush praised Sharon as `a man of peace.'

The present Prime Minister of Israel, Benyamin Netanyahu, is widely
considered to be more of a `hard-liner' than Sharon. Under his
leadership, the Zionist military has: subjected the densely populated
Gaza Strip to incessant bombardment at the cost of thousands of
civilian lives; subjected millions of people who have been under
military occupation for more than half a century to collective
punishment; and lied American taxpayers into a trillion-dollar war in
Iraq that has so far resulted in well over one million deaths, and
turned the lives of tens of millions of children into a living hell.

Thoughtful people might pause to consider what kind of a country would
elect monsters like Netanyahu, Sharon, and Menachem Begin to their
highest office.

In addition to serving as Prime Minister, Netanyahu also serves as a
member of the Zionist legislature, the Knesset. It is under these
circumstances that a delegation from the Armenian National Assembly
paid a visit to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv on December 12 to 14. The
purpose of the delegation's visit, we were told, was to urge members
of the Knesset to `recognize' the Armenian Genocide. The Armenian
delegation announced that Israel and Armenia, together with `the
international community,' must `continue their struggle to prevent
crimes against humanity.'

For informed and decent people in `the international community,' the
overriding message that this visit conveyed was the cretinism and
hypocrisy of Armenian officialdom.

Armenia and Israel: Not Much in Common:

The National Assembly delegation's advertised humanitarian aim in Tel
Aviv is worse than garbled. Here are several of the ways that this is
so:

--For one thing, Israel has never SURVIVED genocide, for the simple
reason that Israelis have never UNDERGONE genocide. Jewish people, of
course, were subject to a horrendous, genocidal campaign of
annihilation perpetrated by the German fascists. We bow our heads to
honor the victims of the Holocaust, and the tens of millions of
Russians and other victims, too. We must never forget them, and we
must guard against those who would trivialize Hitler's crimes.

But most Jews are not Israelis, and more than 60% of Israeli Jews,
including the Mizrahim, trace their ancestry back generations to lands
thousands of miles distant from the European theatre of WWII. In any
case, the lesson holds for Israelis as it does for Armenians and
everyone else: it is indecent to rationalize ethnic cleansing by
pointing to past victimhood.

For people who are not steeped in Chosen People mythology, racial
arguments for the `right of return' to any land should be no more
convincing than religious arguments. The relevant principle (in
Palestine and in Mountainous Karabagh, too) should be
SELF-DETERMINATION, not genetics or religious arguments. But even if
we were to accept the Zionists' own racial suppositions, they still
lose the argument: molecular geneticists report that Palestinians
have as much claim to be genetic descendants of the ancient Israelites
as do Israeli Jews.

--For another thing, the Republic of Armenia and Israel are two very
different polities: Israel is a colonial settler state, and Armenia
is not. Like the Afrikaners of South Africa, Israelis are a modern
nation of settlers and descendants of settlers who founded a garrison
state.

By concocting far-fetched parallels between Armenia and Israel, the
small and diminishing number of Armenian Friends of Israel lend a
helping hand to Turkish nationalists who propagate the lie that
Armenians are interlopers, with nothing but a mythological connection
to the land of Armenia. This is strikingly similar to Zionist
mythology, which depicts Palestinians as recent interlopers in the
Land of Israel. The truth is that Armenians--unlike most Israeli
Jews, but very much like Palestinians--are not a PRODUCT of foreign
colonial domination; rather, they have ENDURED foreign colonial
domination.

--Israel is a garrison-state, and Armenia is not. An imperial power
lavishly subsidizes Israel as a remote-control device, to control the
resources, markets, and populations of a strategically crucial region.
American taxpayers subsidize luxury housing for foreign settlers on
stolen Palestinian land. Israelis receive billions of dollars of U.S.
aid annually, as well as credits, tax-deductible contributions,
technology transfers, the protection of the Sixth Fleet, and
unqualified diplomatic cover from the United States of America. (See,
for example, Shirl McArthur, `A Conservative Estimate of Total U.S.
Direct Aid to Israel: More Than $130 Billion,'WRMEA, Oct./Nov. 2013.)

All of this by way of ensuring Americanimperialist domination of oil,
the Suez canal and vast capital markets, hemming in Russia and Iran,
and propping up local clients, notably the House of Saud, the Egyptian
army, and corrupt regimes in the Gulf. Recognizing this, U.S.
Secretary of State Alexander Haig described Israel as `the largest
American aircraft carrier in the world.' When the Zionist garrison
ceases to fulfill this function, it will cease to exist.

Israel's Crimes against Humanity:

As for the pretended aim to `continue their struggle to prevent crimes
against humanity,'let us acknowledge the obvious: the Zionist regime
is itself responsible for crimes against humanity, and these crimes
are not limited to Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria. Tel Aviv has
supported far-flung tyrannies, wars, and death squads, from Taiwan to
Zaire, and from Nicaragua to Namibia and apartheid South Africa.

Indeed, the Israeli military has armed and supported perpetrators of
genocide. In the1980s, when even the Congress of the United States of
America refused to provide arms to the blood-soaked Rios Montt regime
in Guatemala, Israel stepped in to arm the Guatemalan military and the
death squads. Up to 200,000 Guatemalans were killed by the death
squads and the Guatemalan military, including tens of thousands under
Rios Montt, and (as the Catholic Church and the United Nations have
documented) tens of thousands of others have been raped and tortured.

The Mayan people of Guatemala have committed no crime against
Armenians. Why then should Armenian delegates fawn over those who
helped to murder them? And in the name of `preventing crimes against
humanity,' no less! If the National Assembly delegates were genuinely
concerned about preventing crimes against humanity, they would have
stayed home and condemned the Zionist regime.

And of course, we may add nuclear blackmail to the long list of
unprosecuted Zionist crimes against humanity. They have never signed
a nonproliferation treaty, and they have never permitted international
inspection of their nuclear facilities. In collaboration with their
strategic partners and ideological twins in apartheid South Africa,
the Zionists developed and tested nuclear weapons, and since then they
have produced hundreds of nuclear warheads which they have deployed on
bombers, missiles, and Dolphin II-class `Doomsday Submarines.'
Yerevan might well be located within one of their blast zones.

Fawning over Our Enemies:

Zionists have time and again distinguished themselves as enemies of
the Armenian nation. The decades of active denial of the Armenian
genocide is the LEAST of their offenses. We know about the
decades-long strategic alliance between Tel Aviv and Ankara, and the
ongoing military aid and intelligence that Tel Aviv has provided to
the Republic of Azerbaijan. There is much more to say about this, but
no room here. Instead, let us note several lesser-known
considerations:

--Zionist collaboration with Turkish ethnic cleansers goes back to the
earliest days of the modern Zionist movement: according to an entry
in the diary of Theodore Herzl (an entry dated August 30, 1899), for
example, the founder of modern Zionism intervened `to muffle the
Armenian business' in the European press, in the wake of the massacres
of the 1890's. (For more about the relationship between the early
Zionists and the Ottoman Sublime Port, refer to Marwan R. Buheiry,
`Theodor Herzl and the Armenian Question,' in Journal of Palestine
Studies, Vol. 7, No. 1 (Autumn, 1977); Yair Auron, The Banality of
Denial: Israel and the Armenian Genocide (2003).)

--Zionist occupation has destroyed the ancient Armenian Quarter of
Jerusalem. For more than sixteen centuries, the Armenian community in
Jerusalem managed to survive invasions, crusades, and colonial
domination, but seventy years of Zionist occupation, confiscation, and
oppression has all but eliminated our ancient presence in the Holy
Land. One hundred years ago, the Armenian community of Jerusalem
consisted of perhaps 20,000 members. After the occupation of East
Jerusalem in 1967, those numbers have dwindled, until today the
community consists of only several hundred members.

[Haykakan]

Re: Zionists: Anti-Armenian since the 1890s

The Armenians of Palestine do not want to be under Zionist occupation.
Yasser Arafat, the late Chairman of the Palestine Liberation
Organization, was expressing a widespread wish among Armenians in
Palestine when, at the 2000 Camp David Summit, he rejected an American
proposal to put the Armenian Quarter of Jerusalem under Zionist
authority. `My name is not Yasser Arafat,' he said, `It is Yasser
Arafatian.'"I will not betray my Armenian brothers."

--Zionist occupiers treat Palestinian Armenians with the same contempt
that they treat other Palestinians. Settlers regularly insult
Armenians, desecrate religious sites, physically attack the clergy,
and spit on priests.

On occasion they have done much worse. The siege of the Church of the
Nativity in Bethlehem from April 2 to May 10, 2002 is just one of many
outrages against besieged Christians in Palestine. For thirty-nine
days, the Zionist army laid siege to one of the holiest sites of
Christianity, under the pretext of searching for `suspected
Palestinian militants.'(All of this, aside from the fact that even if
these `suspected militants' were in fact militants, they were entirely
within their rights, under international law and the Geneva
convention, to resist occupation of their land by a foreign invader.)
During the siege, Israeli Army snipers killed seven persons seeking
refuge inside the church; on April 4, they shot the bellringer of the
Church, and on April 10, they shot an Armenian monk in the church.

--Over the decades, Tel Aviv's warmongers, operating with the impunity
of superpower protection, have destroyed homes and lives and
depopulated Armenian neighborhoods in Lebanon and Syria. They have
fomented civil wars that have gutted Armenian communities, and they
set the stage for wars in Iraq and Syria that have annihilated ancient
Christian communities in these countries.

Our `Clever' Fools:

One might think that moral and legal arguments (for what little they
may otherwise be worth) should be paramount when it comes to making a
case for genocide recognition. If so, then such considerations should
stand on their own, without getting mixed up with considerations of
diplomatic advantage. But of course there are practical
considerations, too. And these, too, demonstrate the foolishness of
the Armenian delegation's errand.

The Zionists and their masters in Washington have set in motion wars
in Iraq, Libya and Syria'wars that have already claimed as many lives
as the Armenian genocide. They and their surrogates have created
millions of refugees and turned the lives of tens of millions of
children into a living hell. They have successfully fomented murderous
Wahhabi hatred of Shiite Muslims, and over the past several years we
have witnessed them step-by-step setting the stage for the emergence
of Daesh.

And now, having succeeded in their strategic aim to destroy every Arab
army that was able and willing to defend its territory against their
aggression, they now turn their attention to Iran. The Zionists and
their neocon confederates in Washington want war with Iran. And so do
their strategic allies in Ankara.

No wonder, then, thatyear after year, opinion polls have confirmed
that Israel is one of the most hated countries on Earth. In Latin
America, Russia, India, and China, large majorities of respondents to
recent public opinion polls express `negative views' of Israel.
Europeans, on the whole, dislike Zionism and Zionists, and over years
the antipathy has only increased. Even in the super-tolerant
Scandinavian countries there is widespread disgust with their impunity
and duplicity. Indeed, even in the thoroughly indoctrinated United
States of America, one third of the respondents to recent public
opinion polls have expressed a `negative view' of Israel.

In the course of committing one atrocity after another over the course
of decades, Zionist leaders have beenpoisoning the well for future
generations of Israelis. America will not remain the sole undisputed
superpower forever. Unfortunately, it appears more and more likely
that when the American empire wanes, Israelis will follow the
Pieds-noirs of Algeria onto ships and airplanes and into oblivion.
People who care about Armenia most assuredly should not take
inspiration from the brutal--and ultimately doomed--Zionist project.

The Armenian delegates met with members of the Knesset, in their
official capacity as functionaries of the Zionist garrison state. To
portray this visit as `non-political' is dishonest and naïve. Their
errand is absurd on the face of it: to beg functionaries of a brutal,
genocidal regime to `recognize' a genocide! What is it that these
unelecteddelegatesthink they are doing? Do they think they're being
modern and clever? What message exactly do they think they are
sending?

The Armenian delegates have sullied the reputation of the Armenian
nation and brought a disgraceful end to a year that might otherwise
have had a redeeming significance. The last thing decent Armenians
want is for the legislature of a brutal garrison state to `recognize'
the Armenian genocide. The National Assembly Committee has wasted the
resources of an underfunded state to jeopardize the good will of our
most helpful allies, neighbors, and trading partners.

There are some Armenians who care more about the welfare and dignity
of our nation than jumping through hoops for the entertainment of a
distant imperialist power. It is time these Armenians raise their
voices, to demand that the Republic of Armenia abide by the
international cultural boycott of the Zionist regime.

Markar Melkonian is a philosophy instructor and an author. His books
include Richard Rorty's Politics: Liberalism at the End of the
American Century (1999), Marxism: A Post-Cold War Primer (Westview
Press, 1996), and My Brother's Road (2005).

http://hetq.am/eng/news/64843/why-should-we-armenians-want-zionists-to-recognize-us.html