International Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide

The Armenian Genocide was the extermination of at least a million Ottoman Armenians, systematically organized by the Committee of Union and Progress, during World War I.[1] The genocide marked the destruction of the multiethnic Ottoman Empire and the foundation of a Turkish nation-state.[2] Since the creation of the Republic of Turkey, no Turkish government has acknowledged that any crime was committed against the Armenian people;[1][3] attempts to enlist other countries in this denial date to the 1920s.[4] Sociologist Levon Chorbajian writes that Turkey's "modus operandi remains consistent throughout and seeks maximalist positions, offers no compromise though sometimes hints at it, and employs intimidation and threats" to prevent any mention of the Armenian Genocide.[5]

Hilton Tel Aviv, where the conference took place

In 1979, the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide was founded by psychologist Israel Charny, psychiatrist Shamai Davidson, and the Holocaust survivor and public intellectual Elie Wiesel, devoted to the study of genocides against all peoples. In 1982, the institute organized a conference, which was the first major international gathering devoted to genocide studies,[6][7][8] as well as one of the first conferences to deal with the Armenian Genocide.[9][10] The conference was the first time that the Armenian Genocide was debated in the Israeli public arena.[11]

The conference was sponsored by the official Israeli Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem, and scheduled to begin with a torchlight ceremony at Yad Vashem; Wiesel would deliver the keynote address. Of three hundred planned lectures, six were devoted to the Armenian genocide. Other speakers would include Yitzhak Arad, the director of Yad Vashem, and Gideon Hausner, prosecutor in the Eichmann trial.[7][12][13] Half of the invited researchers came from Israel, the rest from other countries.[14] The conference was held at the Hilton Tel Aviv.[15][16]

In 1982, Turkey was one of the few Muslim-majority countries with which Israel maintained diplomatic relations.[17] According to Israeli historian Yair Auron, the Turkish authorities probably learned of the conference from an article in The Jerusalem Post on 20 April 1982 (Yom HaShoah).[6] According to Charny, a few months before the conference, he and the other organizers began to receive requests from the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs to cancel the conference.[13] The conference organizers offered to remove the papers on the Armenian Genocide from the official program while maintaining them in the actual conference, but this compromise was rejected by Israeli officials. Wiesel and Charny were united in their refusal to disinvite the Armenian speakers.[18][19][20] Israeli officials suggested that all parts of the conference not related to the Holocaust could be cancelled, which was also rejected by the organizers.[21]

A group of Turkish Jews visited Israel in order to make the claim that if the conference went ahead, the lives of Jews in Turkey would be in danger.[22] Charny later recalled having been accosted by Jak Veissid, the president of the Turkish Jewish community, who told him that Turkey's border would be closed to Syrian and Iranian Jews fleeing persecution if the conference went ahead.[23][24]

Avner Arazi, Israeli consul in Istanbul, wrote in an internal memo:

The main reason for our reckless attempts to cancel the conference was the hint that we received about Jewish refugees from Iran and Syria crossing into Turkey. [ ...] Veissid found that all the arguments he prepared against the conference were insignificant compared to the issue of the refugees [ ...] Veissid used this argument out of a sense of urgency and responsibility to our Jewish brothers and used it to convince Charny and his other partners to cancel the conference.[25]

Azari added that the Turkish government, controlled by a military dictatorship, did not understand that Israel, a liberal democracy, respected freedom of speech and could not just cancel any conference not to the government's liking.[25] The Turkish government also argued that Armenian participants would undermine the uniqueness of the Holocaust;[26][27] however, this aspect did not prove as salient as the issue of Jewish lives, which is a top priority of the Israeli foreign ministry.[28] At the time, spokesmen for the Israeli foreign ministry acknowledged that they ensured there was no official Israeli participation in the conference and tried to cancel it "out of concern for the interests of Jews".[29][22] Although Azari said that a border closure would be unprecedented, international relations scholar Eldad Ben Aharon concludes that "it is clear that the lives of Iranian and Syrian Jews were at stake; the Turkish Foreign Ministry did not hesitate to use this sensitive situation to exert pressure on Israel".[30]

In the conference program, Charny wrote that:

The goal of the Conference throughout is to project genocide as a universal problem in the history and future of all peoples; to honor the national and historic concerns of each people who has been fated to suffer a tragedy of mass destruction; and at the same time, to correlate these concerns with one another so that every event of genocide also reflects and articulates a concern for the destruction of all peoples.[40]

The conference explicitly stated that it was not value-neutral when it came to genocide, but dedicated to opposing it and acting with appropriate reverence for genocide victims. This view is in contrast to most science, which aims to be objective and value-free.[41] However, the conference marked the shift from viewing genocide as an irrational phenomenon to one that could be studied and understood.[42]

The conference was held from 20 to 24 June in Tel Aviv, as planned, with around 250 or 300 of a projected 600 researchers attending.[16][18][7] According to Armenian-American historian Richard Hovannisian, it was "crippled" but went forward "with a renewed sense of purpose".[8] Charny considers it "a landmark conference intellectually and spiritually".[43] Auron writes that the conference became a rallying point for Armenian Genocide recognition and for academic freedom.[17] It included films on the Armenian Genocide by J. Michael Hagopian and academic research by Hovannisian, Marjorie Housepian Dobkin, Vahakn Dadrian, Vahé Oshagan, and Ronald Suny.[16][10][35] The contributions related to the Armenian Genocide were later developed into a book edited by Hovannisian, The Armenian Genocide in Perspective (1986).[8]

Many scholars from around the world, working in a variety of disciplines, attended,[44] including genocide scholars Helen Fein, Leo Kuper and James Mace, linguist Jaroslav Rudnyckyj, literature professor John Felstiner, theologians A. Roy Eckardt and Franklin Littell, philosophers Ronald E. Santoni and Ronald Aronson, Jewish studies scholar Alan L. Berger, international law scholar Louis René Beres, human rights activist Luis Kutner, as well as the Tibetan politician Phuntsog Wangyal and the Armenian Apostolic archbishop in Jerusalem, Shahe Ajamian. The presentations were organized into "Scenarios of Genocide Past and Future", "Case Studies" (examining the Holodomor, the situation in Tibet after the Chinese annexation, the Soviet Gulag forced labour camp system, the Romani genocide, and the Cambodian genocide), "Dynamics of Genocide", "Arts, Religion, and Education", and "Towards Intervention and Prevention".[35] Several presentations proposed early warning systems to pick up on the risk factors for genocide before it occurred.[45] The conference proceedings contained a representative sample of work in genocide studies and prevention, and were influential in the later development of the field.[46]

A few weeks before the conference opened, Israel invaded Lebanon. The organizers of the conference issued a statement opposing the war.[47]

The controversy was reported in the international press.[7] Overshadowed by the war with Lebanon, the conference received brief coverage in Israeli newspapers[16] although some Israeli journalists criticized their government's actions. In Davar, Nahum Barnea explained: "For years we spoke of the conspiracy of silence that the nations of the world maintained about the Holocaust for reasons of expediency or political exploitation, and now we know that this can also happen to us."[38] In Haaretz, Amos Elon condemned the behavior of Yad Vashem and Israel's refusal to recognize the Armenian Genocide, stating, "What would Hausner and Arad say if the Italian government (in order to avoid hurting its German creditors-claimants) decided that in an international scientific conference on genocide in Rome, the Jewish Holocaust of 1940–1945 would not be mentioned?" Arad replied that he disagreed with the organizers' comparison of the Holocaust with other genocides, especially the Armenian one. Elon concluded, "Participants returned to their home countries with a certain impression of Yad Vashem, its moral stature, and its political and intellectual independence."[48]

Auron notes that because of the efforts to cancel it, "the conference became an arena for playing out a series of moral dilemmas and moral choices".[17] In The Yale Review, Terrence Des Pres considered the cancellation attempt one of the most blatant examples of "power ordering knowledge" and, in this case, "the heroes of knowledge withstood the minions of power".[49][10] Genocide scholars Roger W. Smith, Eric Markusen, and Robert Jay Lifton cite the conference as part of Turkey's willingness to go "to extraordinary lengths, including threats and disruption of academic conferences, to prevent Jews from learning about the Armenian genocide".[50][51] Hovannisian states that "people of good conscience prevailed, refusing to put political considerations over moral or humanitarian impulses".[52] Charny wrote that the state could legitimately interfere in academic freedom to a certain extent when weighty interests were at stake, but that the Israeli government's behavior crossed a line when it lied to conference participants, prevented newspapers from reporting that the conference had not been canceled, and hinted that it would fund the transfer of the conference to another location without intending to follow through.[53] Charny recalled that he nearly lost his job at Tel Aviv University because of his role in the conference.[43]

On 21 June, Monroe H. Freedman, the legal counsel of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, told The New York Times that, the previous year, a Turkish diplomat (Mithat Balkan) had told him that if the Armenian Genocide were included in the planned United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, "the physical safety of Jews in Turkey would be threatened and Turkey might pull out of NATO".[22][29][36] Although Balkan denied this, Turkish interference in the museum and threats to Jews have been documented in other sources.[29][54][55]

Turkish diplomat Kamuran Gürün told the Israeli consulate in Istanbul that he thought the Israeli intervention to prevent the conference primarily benefitted "the Jews", as presentations on the Armenian Genocide undermined the uniqueness of the Holocaust. Arazi told him that reason for the Israeli intervention was "our commitment to relations with Turkey".[26][27] In 1983, Israeli diplomat Alon Liel cited Israel's interference in the conference to appease Turkish anger over a program on the Armenian Genocide broadcast on Army Radio, the official radio station of the Israel Defense Forces, during which Yehuda Bauer had discussed similarities between the methods of extermination of the Nazis and the Young Turks.[56] On later occasions, Israel has also given in to Turkish demands regarding the Armenian Genocide.[6]

• Official conference materials
• Charny, Israel W.; Davidson, Shamai, eds. (1982). The Book of the International Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide: Tel Aviv, June 20–24, 1982. Institute of the International Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide. OCLC 234076986.