Ethical Paradox: Jewish-American Responses to the Armenian Genocide

Ethical Paradox: Jewish-American Responses to the Armenian Genocide Eileen Filmus Research conducted under the mentorship of Professor Alison Brysk and presented at the 2013 Santa Barbara Global Studies Conference Jewish-American communities and organizations have an outstanding record of solidarity and human rights outreach all around the world, from victims of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia to Ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. Why, then, has the Jewish-American treatment of the Armenian Genocide stood out as fragmentary and controversial? This study traces the history of the international response during and after the genocide, and attempts to explain why there is such a distinct variance in the Jewish-American collective reaction to that atrocity. The analysis of this case points to larger questions about the ethics of allegiance and solidarity in international relations. This story takes us back to the Middle Eastern theatre of World War I, particularly the role of Jewish US Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire Henry Morgenthau. The ambassador’s primary purpose was to protect the security of American citizens (mostly Christian missionaries and Jews) in the area; however, nine months into the war, the Ottoman Empire’s massacre of the Armenian minority began and he became preoccupied with the Armenian Question as reports documenting the terror overflowed on his desk. When Morgenthau questioned the Ottoman leaders about the reports, he was assured that what he observed was just mob violence. Since the Ottoman authorities censored Morgenthau’s communication with the US and made it impossible for him to fact-check, he did not want to make a report based on rumor. However, after many visits from desperate Armenians and trusted sources, he

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realized that the killings were of a different nature than wartime violence. Morgenthau called it ‘race murder,’ he said “Turkish authorities have definitely informed me that I have no right to interfere with their internal affairs, still there seems to be a systematic plan to crush the Armenian race” (Samantha Powers). The notion that “diplomatic protocol demanded that ambassadors act respectfully toward their host government... and stay out of business that did not concern US national interests” (Powers) constrained his efforts, almost as much as the fact that the US was determined to maintain its neutrality in the war. Despite Morgenthau’s efforts, President Woodrow Wilson did not draw attention to the killings so as not to arouse demand for US involvement. “Local witnesses urged him to invoke the moral power of the United States. Otherwise, he was told, the whole Armenian nation would disappear. The ambassador did what he could, continuing to send blistering cables back to Washington and raising the matter at virtually every meeting he held with [Interior Minister] Mehmet Talaat Pacha... Once, when the ambassador introduced eyewitness reports of slaughter, Talaat snapped back: ‘Why are you so interested in the Armenians anyway? You are a Jew, these people are Christians...’ Morgenthau replied, ‘You don’t seem to realize that I am not here as a Jew but as the American Ambassador... I do not appeal to you in the name of any race or religion but merely as a human being.’ To which Talaat responded: ‘We treat the Americans all right, too. I don’t see why you should complain.’ “Sensing Turkish sensitivity to the outside world’s opinion, Morgenthau pleaded with his superiors to throw protocol and neutrality aside and to issue a direct government-togovernment appeal ‘on behalf of humanity’ to stop the killings,’ but Washington did not act !2

on Morgenthau’s recommendations” (Powers). As the massacred continued, the Ambassador tried to work around America’s determined neutrality by helping raise funds to transport Armenian survivors to the US. Donations were granted by churches of different sects, the Rockefeller foundation and Morgenthau’s Committee on Armenian Atrocities (whose members were not of Armenian descent). He appealed to American self-interested by arguing what good citizens Armenian refugees would make - but the Turks blocked the exit of refugees. The Turkish horrors started receiving more steady coverage thanks to Morgenthau’s friendship with New York Times publisher Adolph Ochs, who publicized the danger of Armenian extinction, that “unless Turkey is beaten to its knees very speedily there will soon be no more Christians in the Ottoman Empire.” The New York Times published 145 articles on the subject in 1915 alone, contributing to a change in strategy. At this point, the Allies (Britain, France and Russia) began publicizing the massacre and decided that the quickest way to end the killings would be to defeat the Central Powers (Ottoman Empire, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria), who ridiculed the Allied accounts of the terror as “pure inventions” and “gross exaggerations,” echoing the Ottoman claims that these ‘harsh policies’ were a measured response to Armenian wartime treason. Unable to tolerate maintaining a relationship with the perpetrators of the atrocity, Morgenthau resigned in 1916, but he continued to speak out against the killings, giving speeches in the US about the two million Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians that had been murdered by 1918. Jewish Ambassador Henry Morgenthau went down in history as “a tireless champion of the Armenian cause” (Powers). !3

Moving into the aftermath of the Armenian Genocide, at first we continue seeing a strong Jewish voice in the outcry against the terror, but then we see a transition into the controversial state upon which this study is based. Journalist Larry Derfner writes: “there's always been a strong Jewish angle to the story of the Armenian genocide... While Jews initially stood out... numbered disproportionately among those who called attention to the atrocities, among those who tried to provoke the conscience of the world... Jewish intellectuals and scholars worked to expose and commemorate this brutal episode -- out of a sense of decency, of historical accuracy and also with an understanding that genocides are not a Jewish phenomenon alone, and that the tragedy of a single people is a tragedy also for all humanity... but there's been another quite different strain of Jewish reaction to the Armenian genocide... political and economic ties, as well as a history of Turkish aid for Jews, between Israel and Turkey have caused Jews’ recognition of the genocide to ‘regress’... American and Israeli Jews also have been prominent among those who refuse to define the slaughter of more than 1 million Armenians as genocide. They refuse to blame the Turkish regime of old for the crime -- largely out of respect for Turkey's long history of protecting Jews and out of deference to the current pro-Israel Turkish government.” Unofficial spokesman for the local Armenian community in Jerusalem George Hintlian explains that “Armenians would expect a natural alliance [with Israelis and Jews], or at least empathy, but in the end, a kind of indifference has set in." The conflict came to a head when in 2001, then Foreign Minister Shimon Peres told a Turkish newspaper that the Armenian genocide was “a matter for historians to decide,” and that Israel “rejects attempts to create a similarity between the Holocaust and the Armenian allegations.” Israel’s leading !4

Holocaust scholar Yehuda Bauer responded, “Frankly, I’m pretty disgusted... I think that my government preferred economic and political relations with Turkey to the truth.” While it was Israeli rhetoric that fueled the tension, what is perhaps more surprising is that overall, the American-Jewish community followed suit with a persistent dismissal of the issue. The next part of this paper attempts to explain why that is. Despite the fact that the US Holocaust Memorial Museum does official recognize the atrocity as genocide, as Larry Derfner explains, “for decades, Israel not only “stood silent” about the Armenian genocide, it deployed the American Jewish Committee, Anti-Defamation League and other lobbying groups to back up White House efforts to ensure that Congress stood silent, too. As late as 2007, the ADL fired a senior official for challenging Abraham Foxman’s opposition to a move in Congress for recognition of the genocide.” 2007 was a significant year in the history of this issue, as HR106, the “Affirmation of the United States Record on the Armenian Genocide Resolution,” was up for debate in Congress. The bill, calling for the recognition of the event as a genocide, was opposed by the Republic of Turkey and the administration of George W. Bush. Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice stated: “I continue to believe that the passage of the... Armenian genocide resolution would severely harm our relationships with Turkey.” Signaling a change, President Obama asserted that he stands “with the Armenian-American community in calling for Turkey's acknowledgment of the Armenian Genocide” (Dayen) -- but the bill has yet to be enacted to this day. The couple years following the introduction of HR106 created a change in the dynamic at the issue. “Under the leadership of Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey has !5

shifted away from its strategic partnership with Israel. Its criticism of Israel’s Gaza operation was among the harshest heard, leading to fear that Israel’s strongest Muslim ally is drifting away... The American Jewish community has also felt the chill. In the past, no visit to Washington by a Turkish leader was complete without a roundtable meeting with Jewish leaders. But Erdoğan chose not to have such an event during his last visit, in December [2009]” (Guttman). Guttman explains that the deteriorating relations between Turkey and Israel has led to a change in Jewish responses to the bill: “Some Jewish members of Congress have been among its prominent supporters. But Jewish organizations have marshaled their political clout and moral capital on the issue of genocide to lobby Capitol Hill against the resolution in years past, moved in large part by Turkish warnings that its passage could harm TurkishIsraeli ties... the shift in stance by Jewish groups was notable for its reflection of shifts in the Middle East and of the balance between moral considerations and realpolitik... This year, no major Jewish groups lobbied for or against the resolution.” Washington director of the Anti-Defamation League Jess Hordes further confirms Guttman’s analysis; “inevitably, for some people the enthusiasm isn’t as great as it was in the past, because of concerns about Turkey’s policy on Israel.” Hordes explained that although his organization believes the murder of Armenians amounts to genocide, the ADL opposes attempts to settle the issue through Congress. Like other organizations, the ADL launched no lobbying effort. Nevertheless, there have been community efforts. Rabbi Howard Jaffe organized a Jewish-Armenian online petition calling for passage of the

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genocide resolution. He argues that Israel does not face real danger even if the resolution passes. Jaffe believes that “we can’t be held hostage to Turkey’s immoral behavior.” In December of 2011, the Knesset had its first open-door debate on the issue, where “nobody was reported to have questioned whether the deliberate killing of 1.5 million Armenians in 1915-’16 should be called a genocide, nor whether the Ottoman Empire was the guilty party, nor whether modern-day Turkey inherited that guilt. For once, all this was taken for granted, as it has been for decades by virtually all historians, notably Holocaust and genocide historians” (Derfner). Now that “Israel’s relations with Turkey are ice cold, there’s a lot less to lose by recognizing the Armenian genocide, and a great deal of satisfaction to be gained” (Derfner) - but many believe it’s too little, too late. They believe the sudden change in attitude is inauthentic, hypocritical and downright embarrassing - that since most members of the Knesset have been silent for this long, they should just stay silent. While discussion of this issue has largely died down, our analysis of its causes and complexities illuminates some fascinating aspects of the ethics of international relations. Author Michael Galchinsky speaks to the trajectory of Jewish-American activism in a more general sense: “At first, and then sporadically thereafter, many activists saw no conflict between their support for international human rights and their commitments to Jewish nationalism and domestic pluralism... Diaspora Jewish activists enthusiastically embraced international human rights in the 1950s and 1960s, but since the mid-1960s, and especially after Israel’s Six-Day War in 1967, their enthusiasm has declined due to the conflicts among their commitments to international human rights, Jewish nationalism, and domestic pluralism... [The trend] can be accounted for through analyses of the external !7

pressures Jews have experienced... such as the rise of an anti-Zionist alliance at the UN and the threat posed to Israel by Palestinian nationalists and Arab states... and internal pressures... such as American Jews’ suburbanization and move toward political centrism or neoconservatism, or the fragmentation within the Zionist national consensus during the past quarter century... While Jews have made important contributions, the level of their antigenocide activism is one indication, among others, that Jewish NGOs’ commitment to human rights has declined since the mid 60s.” In attempting to explain why the American-Jewish response to the Armenian genocide has been so heavily impacted by Israel, we can look to Galchinsky’s paradigm regarding the legacy of the Holocaust, which helps in our analysis, but also prompts even more questions. The Holocaust is taught in the US as victimization, but in Israel as resistance. How does this affect how each group identifies itself as a community? As Galchinsky explains, different lessons have been learned by different Jewish individuals and communities. The first group has taken from the Holocaust an indiscriminate “never again” form of activism, the doctrine being that we must express compassion and solidarity for universal human rights at all costs. The second group takes on a defensive pro-Zionist response and as an extension of the resistance-based Holocaust memory in Israel, this group sees the localized self-defense of Israel as paramount, as it is a concrete symbol and formula for the greater defense of the worldwide Jewish race. The third group is in between the first two on the axis, subscribing to a sort of bounded or limited activism that says we should promote human rights, but only up until the boundary of where it begins to affect Israel.

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This last group of bounded activists characterizes the Jewish-American response to the Armenian genocide, and more generally speaking, limited activism sets the framework for how we can compare and contrast Jewish-American responses to different human rights violations: We would expect Jewish communities to condemn (or at least unequivocally recognize) the Armenian Genocide because of the shared experience, but unlike the human rights abuses of Darfur, for example, in which the Jewish-American community has made an enormous effort, the Armenian Genocide poses a crucial conflict of interests, and so, if the Holocaust is taught to Israelis as resistance, then the American-Jewish communities who subscribe to the idea that protecting Israel is protecting all Jews will act accordingly in the political sphere. Thus, the treatment of the issue of recognition by Israel and by extension, the American-Jewish community, has been a source of controversy. Because the genocide’s perpetrator, Turkey, was one of Israel’s few friendly neighbors, Israel needed its support and thus for decades Israel and the American-Jewish community’s general response implied that protecting Israel was more important than speaking out for universal human rights. Is this sort of limited activism ethical? Is it hypocritical to acknowledge some human rights struggles and not others? Is it valid to say that recognizing the genocide does not change the lost lives of the past, but that in trying not to anger Turkey, we were protecting the current lives of Israeli citizens, and according to those that subscribe to limited activism, the international Jewish community? Some believe that directly or indirectly supporting Israel and thus its military is condoning human rights violations toward Palestinians, that perhaps not appeasing Turkey would make them pressure Israel to rethink its actions. But the aim of those actions is protecting its people, !9

however protection would not be necessary if the establishment of the State of Israel did not affect Palestinians the way that it did, contributing to its tense neighbor relations. Yet the creation of Israel arose out of human rights struggles that Jews themselves faced... Ultimately, this discussion is cyclical. Allegiance certainly trumped solidarity in this case, but what factors determine whether that is ethical or not? Analogously, what factors justify foreign intervention humanitarian or otherwise? If the Armenian Genocide was perpetrated after Israel was created, would the Jewish response be consistent with its long-standing non-recognition after the fact? Or would the eminence of an immediate human rights atrocity (justifiably?) outweigh political factors and generate solidarity? Through a realist lens, if the state’s main priority is protecting its own, and if defending Israel supposedly represents protection of American Jews, was it ethical to neglect universal human rights principles in favor of political gain? US Advisor George Kennan asserts that “because a statesman’s primary duty is to secure the vital interests of the state, foreign affairs are essentially amoral.” Through a liberal lens, would it have been unethical to promote universal human rights if it could have been detrimental - even indirectly - to its people? Author Mark Amstutz writes: “Kennan thinks that because interests such as security, political independence, and national well-being are essential to the survival and economic viability of states, they have no moral quality. But what should vital interests be amoral? Are not human wants and interests rooted partly in morality? And does not the pursuit of foreign policy goals involve moral judgment? As Arnold Wolfers has wisely observed, international relations are not beyond the scope of morality but are themselves based on moral norms.” !10

For some, protecting the future of Jews by not angering the Turks is moral, because ultimately, political (and even economic) interest is rooted in morality. In other words, the decision of some Jews to downplay the Armenian genocide can be considered a moral decision because even though it does not represent a quest for truth, it rewards Turkey for its support in the past, and helps ensure its support in the future, a rare ally in the Middle East to Israel. For others, this sort of contiguity, whatever its reasons, is completely immoral. They believe that the value of truth and justice should transcend whatever the given political climate calls for. What we know is that international ethics is not a game of right and wrong because individuals’ opinions will never be uniform. Ethics lies on a scale, morality is relative, and people can only decide for themselves just how moral a given action is. 



 
 
 
 
 


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SOURCES: Amstutz, Mark R. International Ethics: Concepts, Theories, and Cases in Global Politics. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999. Print. Brysk, Alison. Dayen, David. “ Another Year, Another Genocide Vote, Another Set of Tensions with Turkey.” Firedoglake. 05 Mar. 2010. Web. Galchinsky, Michael. Jews and Human Rights: Dancing at Three Weddings. MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008. Print. Power, Samantha. A Problem From Hell, America And The Age Of Genocide. New York: Harper Perennial, 2003. Print. Yeghiayan, Vartkes. Pro Armenia: Jewish Responses to the Armenian Genocide. Glendale, CA: Center for Armenian Remembrance, 2012. Print. Derfner, Larry. "Recognition of Suffering, Far Too Late." The Jewish Daily Forward. Forward Association, 30 Dec. 2011. Web. Guttman, Nathan. "Jewish Lobby Sits Out Vote On Armenian Genocide." The Jewish Daily Forward. Forward Association, 10 Mar. 2010. Web. "H.Res. 106 (110th): Affirmation of the United States Record on the Armenian Genocide Resolution." GovTrack.us. Civic Impulse, 22 Sept. 2010. 
 
 
 


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