The Israeli government’s unanimous decision to recognize the Armenian Genocide deserves to be welcomed with gratitude and relief. It is a historic act of moral clarity which removes an unnecessary burden from the relationship between two ancient peoples whose histories have long echoed one another.Â
Assuming the Knesset gives this recognition permanent expression, ensuring that it becomes not only the decision of one government but the settled position of the State of Israel, then Israel will have completed a long and honorable process. Israelis and Armenians can finally begin to move beyond a moral question that should never have divided them.
For years, the question of the Armenian Genocide was raised by scholars, public intellectuals, civil society figures, Knesset members, ministers, and presidents who understood the ethical weight of the Armenian case. Israel Charny, Amos Oz, Haim Gouri, S. Yizhar, Amnon Rubinstein, Elie Wiesel, Reuven Rivlin, Yuli Edelstein, Yair Lapid, Tamar Zandberg, Yossi Sarid, Haim Oron, and many others kept alive the conviction that recognition was both a moral imperative and a Jewish one.
What prevented it was geopolitical calculation. Successive Israeli governments avoided formal recognition in order to protect strategic, military, diplomatic, and intelligence ties with Ankara. In recent years, Azerbaijan joined Turkey’s efforts to prevent recognition, adding another obstacle. The result was that the Armenian Genocide was treated as a foreign-policy bargaining chip.
The closure we are witnessing is a chance for Israel to align state policy with the moral standards it has long demanded from others, and to honor the generations of Israelis who have argued for recognizing historical truth.
People gather at a memorial site to commemorate the dead in the 1915 mass killing of Armenians, in Yerevan, 2006 (credit: Photolure/Armenia/Reuters)Recognizing a long overdue truth
The campaign for denial, of course, stretches back decades.
The story stretches back more than four decades. At the 1982 International Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide in Tel Aviv, Turkish pressure led organizers to exclude discussion of the Armenian Genocide. In the decades that followed, Meretz leaders, especially Yossi Sarid, kept the issue alive, while Haim Oron repeatedly brought it before Knesset committees. In 2011, the Knesset held one of its first serious debates on recognition and referred the matter to the Education Committee, an important step that nevertheless fell short of official policy.
The momentum continued. As Knesset Speaker, Reuven Rivlin strongly backed recognition, and in 2015 Speaker Yuli Edelstein publicly endorsed it during the centenary commemorations in Armenia. The Knesset Education Committee formally recognized the Armenian Genocide in 2016 and urged the government to do the same. Yet further initiatives—including Yair Lapid’s proposal, Tamar Zandberg’s bill, and legislation introduced in 2020 and 2021 recognizing the genocide and establishing an April 24 memorial day, ultimately failed to become law.
Later, as rhetoric toward Turkey hardened, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu personally used language indicating recognition, but personal or rhetorical recognition was never the same as state recognition.
Now, with the government’s unanimous approval of Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar’s proposal, recognition has moved for the first time from individuals’ gestures to state policy.
Israeli recognition of the Armenian Genocide, and condemnation of denial, minimization, and distortion of historical truth, carries a significance that few other external acts of recognition can match. Perhaps only recognition by Turkey itself would have greater symbolic weight. Israel is not just another country in this matter. It is the state of the Jewish people, founded in the shadow of catastrophe and built upon the imperative that denial must never be allowed to prevail. When Israel recognizes the Armenian Genocide, it does not dilute the memory of the Holocaust. It strengthens the moral language through which all peoples defend historical truth against erasure.
This recognition also comes at a moment of acute vulnerability for Armenia. The country remains weakened by the devastating 2020-3 wars against the Azerbaijan-Turkey axis and is still absorbing the trauma of the destruction of Artsakh/Nagorno-Karabakh, the ethnic Armenian enclave whose population was forced to flee in 2023. Armenia is being pressed into a normalization process in which peace threatens to resemble historical amnesia.
Turkey continues to present itself as a responsible regional leader while refusing acknowledgment, remorse, or reconciliation. Azerbaijan seeks not only the political consolidation of its victory but also the erasure or neutralization of the Armenian memory attached to Artsakh and to the long arc of genocide, dispossession, and survival.
In this context, clear and vocal Israeli recognition is not a gesture against peace. It is a safeguard against a coerced peace built on the surrender of identity, memory, and moral truth. Armenia seeks, against great odds, a stable and dignified peace for its children. But peace is not made stronger by demanding silence from the wounded. It is made stronger when truth is recognized, and memory is allowed to survive.
For Armenians, the Israeli decision is meaningful also because Armenia never made recognition a precondition for friendship. Armenian officials understood that Israel faced difficult geopolitical constraints, even when those were painful to witness. Armenia continued to argue for closer ties with Israel, including during periods of disagreement, because the relationship between the two peoples rests on something deeper.
Jews and Armenians share a deep connection with one another
Jews and Armenians understand one another in ways that few peoples can. Both carried their identities through centuries without sovereignty. Both endured persecution while preserving rich civilizations. Both entered the twentieth century only to become victims of extreme violence. Both rebuilt themselves against extraordinary odds. These parallels create a special moral intimacy.
Indeed, the histories have long been intertwined. Raphael Lemkin, the Jewish lawyer who coined the word “genocide,” saw the Armenian case as central to his understanding of the crime. Franz Werfel’s The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, written by a Jewish author as a warning in the age of Hitler, became one of the great literary monuments to the Armenian tragedy and later inspired Jewish resistance fighters during the Holocaust.
That is why this moment should be received not with bitterness over how long it took, but with gratitude that it has finally arrived. The delay was painful, and the compromises that produced it should not be forgotten. But neither should the courage of those Israelis who refused, over many decades, to let the Armenian Genocide disappear from public conscience. They helped prepare the ground for this day, and they deserve to be honored.
The Israeli government has taken a courageous and commendable step. The Knesset should ensure that this recognition endures as the permanent and democratic expression of the State of Israel. More importantly, Israelis and Armenians can now move on, and forward. There are far too few moments in our region when history bends toward reconciliation rather than division. This is one of them, and it deserves to be welcomed.
Grigor Hovhannissian is the former Ambassador of Armenia to the United States and Mexico and the former Deputy Foreign Minister of Armenia.