For the first time, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced on Tuesday that he recognizes the Armenian Genocide during World War 1.
Netanyahu’s comments came in an interview on the PBD Podcast, hosted by Patrick Bet-David.
Bet-David initiated the discussion by contrasting the near-universal recognition of the Holocaust with the lack of broader acknowledgment for the Armenian and Assyrian genocides.
“For anybody that doesn’t recognize Armenian-Assyrian genocide, if there’s any country that I would have expected to be on the list that recognized the Armenian and the Assyrian and the Greek genocide, it would be Israel,” Bet-David said.
He then directly asked the Prime Minister, “Why haven’t you yet recognized the Armenian, Assyrian and the Greek genocide that the Turkish did to that community?”
In response, Prime Minister Netanyahu stated, “In fact, I think we have, because I think the Knesset passed a resolution to that effect.”
Bet-David expressed uncertainty about the official nature of the recognition, asking, “I don’t know if it’s come from you, though. I don’t know if it’s come from the prime minister of Israel.”
Netanyahu then offered a direct confirmation, saying, “Yeah, I just did.”
For many years, Israel has refrained from recognizing the Armenian Genocide due to its good relations with Turkey, but those have significantly deteriorated since the start of the war.
The Knesset was scheduled to hold a vote on recognizing the World War I mass killings of Armenians by the Ottoman empire as genocide. However, then-Meretz MK Tamar Zandberg, who initiated the motion, said the vote was cancelled because of government opposition.
Armenians have long sought international recognition for the 1915-1917 killings in the Ottoman era as genocide, which they say left some 1.5 million of their people dead.
Turkey — the Ottoman Empire’s successor state — strongly rejects that the massacres, imprisonment and forced deportation of Armenians from 1915 amounted to a genocide.
Netanyahu’s change of heart on this issue comes as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has increased his verbal attacks on Israel since the start of the war in Gaza on October 7, 2023.
The two countries had been on track to restore strained ties before Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel.
In March, Erdogan blasted Israel and described it as a “terror state” after it launched surprise strikes on terrorist targets in the Gaza Strip.
In June, the Turkish President claimed that Netanyahu’s government represents the most significant threat to Middle East security.
