PSCRP-BESA Reports No 218 (July 17, 2026)
by Gershon Kogan
Introduction
The Israeli cabinet’s unanimous recognition of the Armenian Genocide in June 2026 generated predictable reactions: Turkish condemnation, Azerbaijani diplomatic protest, and Armenian restraint. Less predictable — and analytically more revealing — was the response from Tehran. Iranian state media framed the decision not as an act of historical justice but as an Israeli strike against Ankara, a geopolitical maneuver dressed in moral language. The irony was pointed: Iran itself has never formally recognized the Armenian Genocide, despite hosting one of the oldest Armenian communities in the Middle East and despite the fact that the term genocide — ‘naslkoši’ in Persian — was coined by a Jewish jurist, Rafael Lemkin.
This paper argues that Iran’s management of Armenian collective memory constitutes a coherent, if unacknowledged, policy of tolerated memory without formal recognition — a model in which a minority community is granted cultural, religious, and even political space to commemorate its historical trauma, while the state carefully withholds the diplomatic act that would transform private grief into public accountability. This model is not incidental. It reflects a structural logic that governs how the Islamic Republic handles historical memory more broadly: other peoples’ pain is selectively instrumentalized, one’s own geopolitical interests are protected, and — most strikingly — the Jewish Holocaust is actively denied at the highest levels of state. The result is a coherent asymmetry: Armenian memory is tolerated; Jewish memory is weaponized through denial; and Iranian state recognition of either remains diplomatically inconvenient.
A secondary argument concerns the persistent conflation, in Western analytical literature, of Azerbaijanis in Iran with the political positions of the Republic of Azerbaijan. This conflation is historically and empirically unwarranted. Iranian Azerbaijanis have been embedded in Iranian political life for centuries — constituting a substantial portion of the country’s ruling elite, from the Safavid and Qajar dynasties through to the Islamic Republic itself — and their relationship with Armenia’s memory is shaped by an Iranian historical frame rather than a Baku-directed one.
Literature Review
The Armenian community in Iran has received sustained scholarly attention, though rarely in connection with the politics of genocide recognition. Sanasarian’s foundational study of religious minorities in Iran establishes the legal and institutional framework within which Armenians operate: recognized in the constitution, granted parliamentary seats, permitted their own schools and churches, yet subject to informal pressures that constrain public political expression (Sanasarian 2000). Chaqueri’s earlier monograph, the first systematic English-language survey of Armenian-Iranian history, documents the paradoxical centrality of a community that remained politically marginal (Chaqueri 1998). A 2024 article in Iranian Studies updates this picture, tracing how the Islamic Republic’s evolving use of the term aqaliyyat (minority) has affected Armenian self-positioning within Iranian political discourse.
On the specific question of genocide recognition and its relationship to Iranian foreign policy, the most directly relevant recent contribution is Yacoubian’s analysis of Armenian advocacy under regional constraints, which introduces the concept of “muted empathy” to describe Iran’s position: acknowledgment of the Armenian tragedy in cultural and religious spaces, without any formal diplomatic declaration (Yacoubian, Armenian Weekly, 2025). This paper builds on that framework while adding two dimensions absent from Yacoubian’s analysis: the comparative dimension of Holocaust denial as the mirror image of tolerated Armenian memory, and the granular distinction between Iranian Azerbaijani identity and the pan-Turkic solidarity politics of Baku.
The Persian-language scholarship adds a layer unavailable to most Western analysts. Ismail Ra’in’s Qatl-e ʿĀm-e Armaniyan (1978), still the only comprehensive Persian-language study of the genocide, demonstrates that Iranian scholarly recognition of the events of 1915 long predates any official state position — a gap that itself constitutes the central puzzle of this paper (Ra’in 1978). The archival documentation assembled in Tarikh-e Irani (2021) further confirms that Iranian intellectuals and officials acknowledged the genocide in private discourse across the twentieth century, even as state policy maintained strategic silence.
On the theoretical level, this paper draws on constructivist approaches to memory politics, as elaborated in recent scholarship on genocide recognition as a political act distinct from historical fact (Feindt et al. 2014; International Affairs 2023). The French scholarly tradition, particularly the analysis of France’s 2001 recognition law in CEMOTI — a journal devoted precisely to the Ottoman and Iranian world — provides a useful comparative case: recognition as a parliamentary act that outpaced executive preference, driven by a combination of diaspora lobbying and bilateral political friction (Masseret 2001). Ferhadjian’s comparative study of Armenian genocide and Holocaust recognition frameworks in Revue d’Histoire de la Shoah (2003) informs the paper’s treatment of asymmetric memory politics.
For the Azerbaijani dimension, the paper relies primarily on Shaffer’s Borders and Brethren (MIT Press, 2002), the most rigorous treatment of Iranian Azerbaijani identity and its relationship to Baku’s irredentist politics, supplemented by Souleimanov’s analysis of the limits of secessionism in Iranian Azerbaijan (2011) and Atabaki’s historical study of the competition between pan-Turkism and Iranian nationalism in the region (2006).
A Note on Terminology
The term “Azerbaijani” requires clarification at the outset. In Russian and much of the Western scholarly literature, the word azerbaijanets is applied indiscriminately to both the citizens of the Republic of Azerbaijan and the Turkic-speaking population of Iran’s northwestern provinces of East and West Azerbaijan — as if these two groups constituted a single, undifferentiated ethno-political unit. This conflation is analytically misleading and underlies much of the confusion in Western assessments of Iranian domestic politics.
Persian usage draws a meaningful distinction. The term Āzari (آذری) in contemporary Iranian discourse refers primarily to the inhabitants of the Iranian provinces historically known as Azerbaijan — that is, the population of Tabriz, Urmia, and surrounding areas. The Turkic-speaking population of these provinces more commonly self-identifies, and is identified by others in Iran, as Tork (ترک) — Turks — a term that foregrounds linguistic and cultural affiliation rather than the territorial-political identity implied by “Azerbaijani.” The citizens of the Republic of Azerbaijan, by contrast, are typically referred to in Iran as Āzarbāyjāni (آذربایجانی) or simply as the northern neighbors across the Aras River.
These are not merely lexical distinctions. They reflect genuinely different historical trajectories, political loyalties, and cultural orientations. Throughout this paper, the term “Iranian Azerbaijanis” refers to the Turkic-speaking population of northwestern Iran, while “Azerbaijanis” without qualification refers to citizens of the Republic of Azerbaijan. Where the distinction is analytically significant — as it frequently is — it will be made explicit.
- Tolerated Memory, Withheld Recognition: Iran’s Armenian Policy
The Armenian presence in Iran is among the oldest and most continuously documented Christian minority communities in the Islamic world. Brought to Iran in large numbers by Shah Abbas I in the early seventeenth century — relocated from Julfa in the Araxes valley to New Julfa near Isfahan in a forced but ultimately community-preserving deportation — Armenians became embedded in Iranian commercial, artistic, and diplomatic life in ways that left lasting institutional traces. By the time of the Islamic Revolution of 1979, the community numbered several hundred thousand, concentrated in Tehran, Isfahan, and the northwestern provinces. Today, reduced by emigration to an estimated 100,000–150,000, Iranian Armenians retain a constitutional status denied to most non-Muslim minorities: they are explicitly recognized in the Basic Law of the Islamic Republic, hold two reserved seats in the Majles — one for northern, one for southern Armenians — and maintain their own schools, churches, and cultural organizations under the supervision of the Khalifegari council, the community’s supreme governing body (Sanasarian 2000; Ra’in 1349/1970).
On April 24 of each year, commemorative services are held openly in Armenian churches across Iran. The Cathedral of Saint Sarkis in Tehran hosts the principal ceremony; its courtyard contains a memorial to the victims of the Genocide, inaugurated in 1973 — nearly a decade before the Islamic Revolution and maintained without interruption since. In April 2025, the Armenian embassy in Tehran reported that the ceremony proceeded as usual, with flowers laid at the memorial and prayers offered for the dead. Iranian state television did not cover the event.
This last detail is not incidental. It captures with precision the logic of what this paper terms tolerated memory: the Islamic Republic permits the Armenian community to grieve, commemorate, and transmit its historical trauma across generations, within the bounded space of communal religious life. What it does not permit — or more precisely, what it has consistently declined to perform — is the state act of formal recognition that would transform private Armenian grief into an Iranian diplomatic position.
Iran has never officially recognized the Armenian Genocide. It does not appear on any authoritative list of states that have done so. This is not, as the Persian-language scholarship makes clear, a matter of historical ignorance or scholarly dispute. Ra’in’s Qatl-e ʿĀm-e Armaniyan (1978), the only comprehensive Persian-language study of the genocide, documents the events of 1915–1923 in detail and leaves no ambiguity about their character. The historical analysis assembled in Tarikh-e Irani (2021) demonstrates that Iranian intellectuals, journalists, and politicians acknowledged the genocide across the twentieth century — from the Constitutional Revolution era through the Pahlavi period and into the Islamic Republic. The gap between private acknowledgment and official silence is not a product of uncertainty. It is a product of calculation.
The calculation is geopolitical. Turkey is Iran’s neighbor, its largest regional trade partner outside the sanctions regime, and a state with which Tehran maintains a competitive but functional relationship across multiple theaters — Syria, Iraq, the South Caucasus, Central Asia. An official Iranian recognition of the Armenian Genocide would constitute a direct challenge to the foundational narrative of the Turkish state, one Ankara would be unlikely to absorb without diplomatic consequences. The Islamic Republic, for all its ideological confrontationalism, has consistently preferred to keep its quarrel with Turkey on terrain of its own choosing. The Armenian question is not that terrain.
The logic extends to Azerbaijan. The Republic of Azerbaijan is Turkey’s closest ally, shares a border with Iran’s most restive Turkic-speaking provinces, and serves as a transit corridor of genuine strategic importance. Any Iranian move that strengthened the Armenian position in the regional memory wars would register in Baku as a hostile act — and would reverberate inside Iran among those segments of the Azerbaijani-Iranian population most receptive to pan-Turkic messaging.
The result is a stable, if morally uncomfortable, equilibrium: Armenian memory is tolerated because suppressing it would alienate a loyal and historically integrated community; Armenian genocide recognition is withheld because granting it would cost more than it would gain. The community is permitted to remember. The state declines to confirm.
This equilibrium becomes considerably more complex — and analytically more revealing — when placed alongside Iran’s position on the Holocaust. Here the Islamic Republic has not chosen strategic silence. It has chosen active denial. Holocaust denial in Iran is not a fringe phenomenon: it has been articulated from the highest levels of state, institutionalized in academic conferences, and incorporated into the ideological repertoire of the revolutionary establishment (USHMM 2016; ACIS 2019). The 2006 Tehran conference on Holocaust “revisionism,” convened under presidential auspices, was not a diplomatic miscalculation — it was a statement of position.
The juxtaposition is striking. Armenian memory: tolerated, contained, depoliticized. Jewish memory: actively negated, weaponized, deployed as an instrument of anti-Israeli and anti-Western messaging. In both cases, the Islamic Republic’s posture toward historical atrocity is determined not by the weight of evidence or the demands of moral consistency, but by the political utility of each position at any given moment. Other peoples’ pain, in this framework, is a resource to be managed — allocated, suppressed, or amplified according to the needs of the state.
This is not, it should be emphasized, a uniquely Iranian phenomenon. The politics of genocide recognition are instrumentalized across the region and beyond, as the timing of American, French, and now Israeli recognition of the Armenian Genocide amply demonstrates. What makes the Iranian case analytically distinctive is the simultaneity of the three positions — tolerated Armenian memory, withheld Armenian recognition, active Holocaust denial — within a single state apparatus, and the coherence with which all three serve the same underlying strategic logic.
- Tabriz Is Not Baku: Iranian Azerbaijanis and the Limits of Pan-Turkic Solidarity
The Azerbaijani diplomatic protest against Israel’s recognition of the Armenian Genocide — a formal note from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs demanding reconsideration of a decision made by a sovereign state regarding events in which Azerbaijan had no historical part — requires explanation. The Republic of Azerbaijan was never a constituent territory of the Ottoman Empire. Its population played no role at all in the deportations and massacres of 1915–1923. By any conventional standard of diplomatic logic, the recognition of the Armenian Genocide by a third party is not Azerbaijan’s affair.
The explanation lies not in history but in bloc politics. Baku’s reaction was a reflex of pan-Turkic solidarity: an attack on the Turkish historical narrative is perceived, in the political culture of the Republic of Azerbaijan, as an attack on the Turkic world as a whole. The Armenian question is furthermore inseparable, in Azerbaijani domestic politics, from the legacy of the Karabakh conflict — three decades of war, ethnic cleansing of over 800 thousand Azerbaijanis, tragedy of Khojaly, and Armenian narratives of victimhood that have made any Armenian claim to historical justice politically toxic in Baku. For a significant portion of the Azerbaijani information space, the logic is nearly automatic: if Armenians are speaking, one must deny; if Turkey is under pressure, one must defend. The diplomatic note was less a considered foreign policy position than a conditioned response.
What makes this response analytically significant is what it reveals about the assumed unity of the “Azerbaijani” world — an assumption that Western analysts have been too quick to make and too slow to interrogate. The conflation of the Republic of Azerbaijan with the Turkic-speaking population of northwestern Iran is not merely a terminological imprecision, as noted above. It is a substantive analytical error with real consequences for the assessment of Iranian domestic stability, minority politics, and the reach of pan-Turkic ideology inside the Islamic Republic.
The Turkic-speaking population of Iran’s East and West Azerbaijan provinces inhabit a historical frame that is Iranian before it is Turkic. The provinces of Azerbaijan have been part of the Iranian political and cultural space, under various dynasties and designations, for centuries. The Safavid dynasty, which established Twelver Shi’ism as the state religion and laid the foundations of modern Iran, was itself of Turkic-speaking Azerbaijani origin and conducted its court in both Persian and Azeri Turkish. The Qajars, who ruled Iran from the late eighteenth century until 1925, were likewise of Turkic origin. In the Islamic Republic, the pattern continues: the late Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was an ethnic Azerbaijani from Tabriz; his son Mojtaba Khamenei, widely discussed as a potential successor, is Azerbaijani by descent; the current President Masoud Pezeshkian was born in Mahabad and identifies as Azerbaijani. Far from being a marginalized periphery, Iranian Azerbaijanis have been, and remain, among the most politically integrated communities in the country.
This integration shapes, in fundamental ways, how Iranian Azerbaijanis relate to the Armenian community — and to the Armenian historical narrative. For much of the population of Tabriz, Urmia, and Julfa, Armenians are not the enemy constructed by Karabakh wars. They are old neighbors. The concentration of Armenian churches, monasteries, and historically Armenian neighborhoods across East and West Azerbaijan is not incidental: it reflects centuries of coexistence in a shared provincial space. The monastery of Saint Stepanos near Julfa, the Church of Saint Mary in Urmia, the Armenian quarter of Tabriz — these are not foreign implants but local landmarks, integrated into the fabric of regional life (Ra’in 1349/1970).
This is not to suggest that pan-Turkic sentiment is absent among Iranian Azerbaijanis. It exists, it has organizational expression, and it is attentive to signals from Ankara and Baku. Atabaki’s historical analysis documents the long competition between pan-Turkist and Iranian nationalist currents within Azerbaijani political identity, a competition that has never been fully resolved (Atabaki 2006). Shaffer’s more recent and more provocative account argues that the potential for Azerbaijani separatism in Iran is systematically underestimated by analysts who take Iranian state claims of minority integration at face value (Shaffer 2002). These are legitimate scholarly positions that cannot be dismissed.
What they do not establish, however, is that the pan-Turkic tendency is dominant, or that Iranian Azerbaijanis as a whole share Baku’s reflexive anti-Armenian posture. Souleimanov’s careful empirical analysis of secessionist sentiment in Iranian Azerbaijan concludes that pan-ethnic solidarity with the Republic of Azerbaijan, while present, does not translate into political mobilization at a level that threatens Iranian territorial integrity — and that the reasons for this lie precisely in the depth of Azerbaijani integration into Iranian institutions (Souleimanov 2011). Grebennikov’s analysis of why Azerbaijanis support the Iranian state reaches a similar conclusion through a different methodological route (Grebennikov 2010).
The implications for the present argument are direct. When Israel recognized the Armenian Genocide, the Azerbaijani state responded with a diplomatic protest rooted in the story of Karabakh and pan-Turkic bloc solidarity. But that protest does not speak for the Turkic-speaking population of northwestern Iran. Tabriz is not Baku. It does not share Baku’s historical grievances or its political allegiance to the Turkish alliance. For many of its inhabitants, the recognition of the Armenian Genocide is not an attack on their identity — it is, at most, a distant diplomatic event involving a community they have lived alongside for centuries.
The Western analytical tendency to treat “Azerbaijanis” as a unified transnational actor — with Tabriz as a southern extension of Baku’s political will — misreads the evidence and, more consequentially, misframes the political dynamics of one of Iran’s most strategically important regions.
Conclusion: The Politics of Selective Memory and the Limits of Moral Consistency
The Israeli recognition of the Armenian Genocide has been analyzed, in most Western commentary, as a bilateral event: a decision about Israel’s relationship with Turkey, freighted with the history of a once-functional alliance and the bitterness of its collapse. This paper has argued that the more revealing story lies elsewhere — in the responses of actors whose reactions were, in different ways, more structurally significant than Ankara’s predictable outrage.
Iran’s response — sardonic commentary from state media, framed around Israeli hypocrisy — was analytically coherent but self-undermining. It drew attention, whether intentionally or not, to a contradiction at the heart of Iranian memory politics: a state that tolerates Armenian commemoration within its borders, actively denies the Holocaust at the highest levels of its government, and withholds formal recognition of the Armenian Genocide as a matter of geopolitical convenience. These three positions are not contradictions. They are, as this paper has argued, expressions of a single underlying logic: historical memory is a resource to be managed, not a moral obligation to be discharged. Armenian grief is useful as a marker of communal loyalty and religious pluralism; Armenian recognition would be costly in Ankara and Baku. Jewish memory is useful as an instrument of anti-Israeli mobilization; its affirmation would undermine the ideological foundations of the revolutionary state. The asymmetry is not accidental. It is policy.
Azerbaijan’s response — a formal diplomatic protest against a decision about events in which Azerbaijan had no historical part — illustrates a different view: own local grievances from over three decades long conflict with memories of Khojaly atrocities, and the subordination of historical judgment to bloc solidarity.
What it is not is a position grounded in historical engagement with the events of 1915. And it is emphatically not a position that can be attributed, without serious analytical distortion, to the Turkic-speaking population of northwestern Iran, whose historical relationship with the Armenian community is shaped by centuries of coexistence.
These findings carry implications beyond the specific case of Armenian genocide recognition. They suggest, first, that the politics of historical memory in the Middle East and the South Caucasus cannot be adequately analyzed through the lens of bilateral relationships alone. The recognition or non-recognition of historical atrocities is embedded in regional alliance structures, domestic minority management strategies, and long-term ideological investments that cut across conventional diplomatic categories. Iran’s Armenian policy makes no sense as an isolated decision; it makes complete sense as one element of a coherent, if unstated, framework for managing historical truth as a political instrument.
They suggest, second, that the category “Azerbaijani” requires disaggregation in any serious analytical treatment of the region. The Republic of Azerbaijan and the Turkic-speaking population of northwestern Iran share a language and elements of a cultural heritage. They do not share a political identity, a historical memory, or a relationship to the Armenian question that can be treated as interchangeable. Western policy analysis that conflates the two will systematically misread both Iranian domestic politics and the regional dynamics of the South Caucasus.
They suggest, third, that the moral force of genocide recognition depends, in no small part, on its independence from political convenience. The timing of Israel’s recognition — whatever the weight of moral considerations that informed it — invited precisely the kind of cynical framing that Iranian state media deployed. This is not an argument against recognition; the Armenian Genocide is a historical fact. It is an argument for the proposition that recognition has its fullest moral weight when it is demonstrably not an instrument of current policy — when it precedes, rather than follows, the diplomatic rupture that makes it convenient.
References
Persian / فارسی
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French / Français
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English
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- Shaffer, Brenda. Borders and Brethren: Iran and the Challenge of Azerbaijani Identity. MIT Press, 2002.
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- Grebennikov. “Why Do Azeris Support the Iranian State?” CPSA, 2010.
- Zarifian, Julien. The United States and the Armenian Genocide: History, Memory, Politics. 2024.
- Resende, E. & Budryte, D. (eds.) Memory and Trauma in International Relations. Routledge, 2014.
- “Constructivist memory politics: Armenian genocide recognition in Latvia.” International Affairs, Oxford Academic, 2023.
- “The Armenian Community and Changing Iranian Perceptions of Minority.” Iranian Studies, Vol. 57, Issue 2, 2024.
- Yacoubian. “The politics of Armenian Genocide recognition and regional constraints in the Middle East.” Armenian Weekly, 2025.
- US Holocaust Memorial Museum. “Holocaust Denial and Distortion from Iranian Government and Official Media Sources, 1998–2016.” USHMM, 2016.
- Alliance Center for Iranian Studies, Tel Aviv University. “What is Behind Iran’s Advocacy of Holocaust Denial?” ACIS Iran Pulse, 2019.