Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recognized the Armenian Genocide on Tuesday during a podast interview with Patrick Bet-David — a major diplomatic reversal that Israel had resisted for many decades.
As Breitbart News has noted, the Armenian Genocide took place during the First World War, when some 1.5 million Armenians were murdered by the Ottoman Turks.
As Breitbart News explained earlier this year:
Modern historians look upon the events of 1915-1916 as the first of several genocidal events in the 20th Century, while Turkey disputes the allegation that its Ottoman predecessors were attempting to systematically eliminate the Armenian people, as Nazi Germany would later treat the Jews, or the Hutus of Rwanda would treat the Tutsis.
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Ongoing accusations of treachery led the Ottomans to begin forcibly relocating Armenians away from the front lines of combat against Russia – which happened to be where most of the Armenians lived. Many died on the march to concentration camps and many more were killed in the camps.
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The Armenians say the Ottomans wanted to eliminate them because they were an inconvenient Christian people standing in the way of the Young Turks’ vision for a mighty Turkic empire that would stretch from the Caucasus all the way to China.
Israel had long avoided recognizing the Armenian Genocide because of concerns that doing so would complicate relations with Turkey, which had been one of Israel’s only allies in the Muslim world.
But in recent years, with Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan backing Palestinian terror and accusing Israel of genocide for daring to fight back against truly genocidal groups like Hamas, Israel began to shift.
On Tuesday, Netanyahu made Israel’s recognition of the Armenian genocide official — on a U.S. podcast:
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Zionist Conspiracy Wants You, now available on Amazon. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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