Just look at this genocider…

The Israeli government, on the initiative of Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar, has decided to recognize the events of 1915 as the "Armenian Genocide." The justification for the decision is just like a stand-up show joke: "Historical and moral responsibility."

Israel and morality, Zionism and moral responsibility, Netanyahu and a humanitarian feeling toward non-Jewish people who lost their lives one way or another 11 years ago.

What can we say; frankly, the fact that the butcher of Gaza, the perpetrator of a plainly ongoing genocide, has used this subject in this way can be counted as a great support for Türkiye. Genocidal Israel of course deserves no thanks or appreciation in any way or on any matter. But this absurd outburst of its is like a confession exposing what kind of international political abuse the Armenian genocide issue has been subjected to until now. Though neither knowingly nor willingly, it has provided great support to Türkiye. If there were a court for the charge of genocide that Türkiye too accepted, the one who would testify against Türkiye, as long as it was Israel...

Today Israel is the one responsible for one of the greatest mass slaughters in history to be broadcast live in Gaza.

Before the eyes of the world. Every day, every hour, every minute, Israel is the perpetrator of a savagery in which children are killed, hospitals are hit, doctors are targeted, and teachers, journalists, aid workers, women and the elderly are systematically destroyed.

What it does is not learned from archives to be opened a hundred years later. It is not drawn from the contested interpretations of historians. It does not rest on assumptions. It is entered into the record in person. It is filmed. It is documented. It enters the reports of international organizations. It turns into court files.

While all this is happening, the Netanyahu government's getting up and putting the "Armenian Genocide" card on the table against Türkiye will not create an opinion against Türkiye; rather it is like a hostage taken by a murderer as a last trump card to escape. That hostage, the claims of the Armenian genocide, must be rescued from the hands of murderers like him.

Was this not, essentially, the moral standing of the Armenian genocide claims for years? All the countries that accepted these claims in their parliaments had countless crimes against humanity in their fresh colonial baggage. Those who are, for some reason, chiefly responsible for the absence of democracy in the Islamic world and for the survival of bloody dictators had made an event more than a century old the gateway to cleansing themselves of all their sins. None of them had a speck of empathy or concern for the sufferings of a hundred years ago. In fact, nobody truly knew what had happened a hundred years ago. But they found in imaginary historical fictions a superiority they attributed to themselves today.

A political language that fails to see the crimes committed today before the eyes of the world, and instead hands out morality over events from a hundred and eleven years ago, whose parties have all passed into history, whose witnesses are gone, whose circumstances are still debated, and which are open to new interpretations as new documents emerge, ends up exhausting people's trust in all human rights discourse.

Indeed, quite apart from everything else, these moves carry a distinct disrespect against the common conscience of humanity. For those who remain silent before a crime committed today and then presume to lecture humanity in the name of events a hundred and eleven years ago do not strengthen the sense of justice; on the contrary, they thoroughly assault it.

The interesting part is that, because for years Israel reserved the concept of genocide exclusively for itself as the Holocaust, it never would consent to accept the formulation "Armenian genocide." Not only the Armenians but the genocide claims of no other people were ever taken into account by Israel. Because only its own kin could have lived through that event.

More precisely, Israel put preserving the monopoly it had established even over the magnificent political gains it derived from genocide claims above everything else. In this way, by appearing to stand by Türkiye against the Armenian lobbies in the US, it also kept running up a continuing debt for Türkiye. Thus it gave an astonishing performance in profiting from every side of genocide discourse.

For years Türkiye too felt indebted in the face of this fraudulent-swindling attitude of Israel. Yet even then we always said it. The only thing Türkiye can do in the face of debts run up by these swindling attitudes is not to fall for this game and not to recognize that debt. To decipher these frauds and expose the hypocrisy behind so-called genocide sensitivities, fine. One must constantly extract debts for the present from a subject that belongs to history, but throw in their faces the hypocrisy of being indifferent to today's genocides.

Meanwhile, bringing whatever happened with the Armenians to the present as a matter of such a debt does not solve the problems of Turks and Armenians. For peoples who still have to live together, remaining stuck in the past constitutes the greatest obstacle to building the future together.

At this point, in my opinion, the stance of Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan was the most reasonable and most elegant response possible. When his statements are read carefully, it is seen that Armenia too is slowly noticing this abuse.

Instead of presenting Israel's decision as a diplomatic victory, he preferred to keep his distance from turning the Armenian issue into a tool of geopolitical struggles. His stance was the manifestation of a consciousness that over the past hundred years the Armenian issue has been used mostly by others rather than by the Armenians.

Sometimes in Russia's calculations, sometimes France's, sometimes America's, and today Israel's. This is what Pashinyan sees: the suffering of the Armenian people being turned into a tool for other states to settle accounts with Türkiye.

This issue can be carried onto a meaningful ground only by being discussed between Turks and Armenians. Indeed, some statements coming from Yerevan in recent years also show that the will to build the future outweighs living as a captive of history. None of these countries has a speck of empathy, compassion or closeness toward the Armenian people. France's sending Armenians as minesweepers to the front lines in the Second World War, for instance, has shown sufficiently that they do not. Let us not even touch on the others.

In this respect, by serving as the occasion for Pashinyan's stance to be voiced, Israel has, unknowingly and unwillingly, served the emergence of the truth. We are not going to thank it, of course.