5-23-11 A voting was held at the plenary session of the Knesset – the Jewish parliament – on submitting the Armenian Genocide recognition bill to the Education, Culture and Sports Committee chaired by Alex Miller.

The voting was initiated by Zahava Gal-On, a native of Lithuania, who, as Israeli journalist Alexander Goldenstein put it, “picked up the Armenian baton from her retired fellow party member.”

According to the Knesset regulations, Miller’s committee has to consider the possibility of recognition of the Armenian Genocide and submit a recognition bill to the parliament for approval.

This is not the first time that the issue is discussed by one of the committees of the Jewish parliament.

In recent years, such suggestions were made almost annually, but the government was traditionally mobilizing the coalition – on the Foreign Ministry’s demand – to ban the discussion of the issue.

What’s different this time?

The thing is that when in the spring of 2008 the issue was put on the agenda the government insisted on passing the bill over to the Defense and Foreign Relations Committee for which it was criticized by the Armenian community of Israel, who thought that the issue had to be viewed by the Education Committee since the Defense and Foreign Relations Committee is greatly influenced by the Turkish and Azeri lobbies.

Deputies of the “Israel is Our Home” party spoke against putting the genocide recognition issue on the agenda. This party unites Jews that emigrated to Israel from the former Soviet Union, particularly from Azerbaijan. Prior to the voting Yosef Shagal, a member of that faction, chairman of the parliamentary association of Israeli-Azeri friendship, said:

“Supporters of the recognition of the so-called “Armenian Genocide” are just a small bunch of Israeli marginals, to whom that issue is perhaps the only opportunity to remind of their political presence.”

And so today, that “bunch of marginals” unanimously voted for submitting the issue to the Education Committee for consideration. This is indeed an essential circumstance.

Until now the discussion of the issue was trusted to the Defense and Foreign Relations Committee, the sessions of which are closed to public. This time the discussion will be held at an open session. But will that be favorable for Israel’s recognition of the Armenian genocide?

The situation is further complicated not only by the pro-Turkish lobby, but also by Israel’s relations with Azerbaijan: trade and hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of investments annually, and when the Azeri oil supply is factored in, the scale of commodity circulation reaches four billion dollars.

The other important issue here is that the perception of the “exceptionality of the Holocaust” is quite strong in the European mind. Back in 2002, Israeli Ambassador to Georgia Rivka Cohen stated in Yerevan: “The Holocaust is an unprecedented phenomenon, and nothing, including the tragedy of Armenians, can be compared with it.”

The Armenian Foreign Ministry expressed its strong protest against that statement.

The statement, however, only strengthened opinions among Armenians that this kind of perception of history is almost a pan-national Jewish mentality.

“That is the reason why many parliamentarians sympathizing with Armenians in their hearts refrain from recognizing the 1915 events as genocide,” says Goldenstein.

Quite recently, one of the Education Committee members, commenting on the prospect of the bill recognition, said:

“If we recognize the Armenian Genocide, we will be asked to do the same for the massacre in the Balkans, Holodomor, they will even remember Pol Pot (a politician from Cambodia who committed genocide against his own people and annihilated several millions in three and a half years) and Idi Amin, the president of Uganda, founder of one of the cruelest authoritarian regimes in Africa). And we believe that the only case of genocide - a systematic and intended extermination of a people – occurred during the Second World War.”

http://armenianow.com/genocide/29850/armenian_genocide_recognition_kne...

Submitted by andie531 on Tue, 2011-05-31 21:28

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