PSCRP-BESA Reports No 215 (July 2, 2026)
It is well known that the Knesset has traditionally preferred not to adopt resolutions dealing with issues of historical memory. A clear example is the repeatedly debated, yet never adopted, bill recognizing the Armenian Genocide.
On Thursday, June 25, 2026, an unusual diplomatic development attracted the attention of both the Israeli public and international observers. On that day, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar announced on his official X account that he intended to submit, at the next cabinet meeting, a draft resolution calling for Israel’s official recognition of the genocide committed against the Armenian people by the Ottoman Empire during the final years of the First World War. Three days later, the resolution—which, according to the foreign minister, represents “a moral and historical obligation” of the Jewish state and also condemns “the denial, minimization, or distortion of historical truth”—was unanimously approved by the government. The next step, it was announced, will be a vote in the Knesset.
Previous Attempts
In fact, the issue of the Armenian Genocide has been raised in the Israeli parliament on numerous occasions. Among the officially registered parliamentary lobbies in the Knesset is an Armenian lobby. However, unlike Gideon Sa’ar—who recently returned to the ruling Likud party and positions himself as a right-wing politician—the leading voices within this lobby have traditionally come from the political left.
These included Zahava Galon, leader of the left-wing Meretz party, who initiated parliamentary committee discussions on the issue, and Tamar Zandberg, then leader of the moderately left-wing Labor Party (Avoda), who introduced legislation seeking official recognition of the 1914–1916 events in Ottoman Turkey as genocide.
Another prominent figure from Israel’s left, the late Yossi Sarid, sought to introduce the study of the Armenian Genocide into the national school curriculum. Outside this political camp, one may also mention Yaakov Margi, a veteran member of the ultra-Orthodox Sephardic Shas party. As chairman of the Knesset Education, Culture and Sports Committee, he secured the committee’s adoption of a resolution recognizing the Armenian Genocide during one of its sessions in the summer of 2016. He also called on both the government and the Knesset to follow suit—though without any tangible practical outcome.
Russian-speaking members of the Knesset also contributed to efforts aimed at securing Israel’s official recognition of the Armenian Genocide. Among them was Alexander Tzinker, a native of Yerevan who represented the Democratic Choice party in the Knesset from 1999 to 2003. Democratic Choice was a center-left splinter faction that had broken away from Yisrael BaAliyah, the political movement established in 1996 by immigrants from the former Soviet Union.
Another notable supporter was Ze’ev Elkin, originally from Kharkiv, who left Likud together with Gideon Sa’ar in 2021 before returning to the party alongside him three years later. It should be noted, however, that today, as Co-Chairman of the Azerbaijan–Israel Joint Commission, Elkin has completely distanced himself from this issue.
During the speakership of another Russian-speaking Likud politician, Yuli Edelstein, toward the end of the previous decade, there were also plans to bring a similar resolution before the Knesset plenary. Like previous initiatives of this kind, it would not, in principle, have been binding on the government. Nevertheless, these plans, too, ultimately failed to materialize.
There were two main reasons for this.
The first was that, although the average Israeli is deeply sympathetic to the tragedies suffered by other peoples—and generally believes that the Jewish people, with their centuries-long history of persecution, are uniquely capable of understanding the suffering of others—very few are willing to equate those tragedies with the Holocaust of European (and North African) Jewry.
Numerous sources of Russian origin maintain that following the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878, Russian intelligence used the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire to advance its geopolitical interests by encouraging demands for autonomy and by arming Armenian partisan units that later took part in the fighting during the 1914–1917 campaigns. By contrast, before the Holocaust, Germany’s Jews neither sought territorial autonomy nor engaged in subversive activities; on the contrary, the overwhelming majority sought to integrate into German society.
The Ottoman authorities carried out the mass killing of Armenians on their own territory during wartime—and there can be no justification for these atrocities. At the same time, unlike Nazi Germany, the Ottoman government’s objective was not the systematic extermination of every Armenian in the world. Moreover, despite significant restrictions, a substantial Armenian community continued to exist in Istanbul throughout that period. Whatever their personal views on the Armenian Genocide issue, Israeli politicians have long felt compelled to take these distinctions into account.
The second reason was Israel’s complex relationship with Turkey.
During the era of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and his successors, when Jerusalem and Ankara maintained what was effectively a strategic partnership—including close military and security cooperation—Israeli leaders deliberately avoided touching an issue that remained extremely sensitive for Turkish nationalism. Israel traditionally maintained a position of neutrality, viewing the matter as an “internal dispute” between Turkey and Armenia that should be addressed through historical research and the opening of archives, rather than through political campaigns and parliamentary declarations.
Israeli governments attempted to adhere to this approach even after the rise to power, during the first decade of this century, of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Islamist government. Initially regarded as relatively moderate, Erdoğan’s regime gradually became increasingly radicalized, promoting the doctrine that modern Turkey is the rightful successor to the Ottoman Empire and therefore entitled to political leadership in territories that had once been under Ottoman rule.
This vision naturally entailed dismantling Turkey’s strategic partnership with Israel. Erdoğan embraced that course all the more readily because it aligned with his own increasingly radical Islamist worldview, his pronounced antisemitic tendencies, and his deep hostility toward the Jewish state. Added to this was Ankara’s support for radical Islamist regimes, such as Qatar, as well as terrorist organizations including Hamas and Syrian branches of the Islamic State.
The decisive turning point in Turkish-Israeli relations came with the highly publicized May 2010 “Freedom Flotilla” incident, in which a convoy of vessels attempted to breach Israel’s naval blockade of the Gaza Strip—a blockade that, according to the conclusions of the UN Panel of Inquiry at the time, was legally justified. Documents recovered by Israeli commandos after boarding the Turkish flagship Mavi Marmara indicated that Erdoğan himself had personally supported the organizers of the operation.
It was generally during periods of deteriorating Turkish-Israeli relations that the above-mentioned initiatives to recognize the Armenian Genocide resurfaced. Nevertheless, successive Israeli governments continued for many years to avoid unnecessarily escalating tensions and sought, wherever possible, to preserve a business as usual relationship with Ankara. Given Turkey’s continued interest in maintaining—and even expanding—its trade and economic ties with Israel, Israeli policymakers hoped that relations would eventually normalize. Indeed, from time to time, during the intervals between Erdoğan’s recurrent anti-Israel campaigns, they did.
Why Now?
As we can see, the situation today is fundamentally different. What is at issue is no longer the personal initiative of individual politicians or symbolic parliamentary gestures, but rather a formal declaration by the foreign minister and a decision adopted by the Government of Israel—something that has never happened before.
The Foreign Ministry’s June 28 press release refers to earlier “relevant statements” by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and by Israel Katz during his tenure as foreign minister. However, it provides no indication as to whether those statements contained any concrete commitments.
Clearly, much has changed since Hamas’s brutal October 7, 2023 attack on Israel. Following the launch of the IDF’s Operation Iron Swords—which became the catalyst for the current full-scale war in the Middle East—Ankara’s anti-Israel and antisemitic rhetoric reached unprecedented levels. This included repeated, highly inflammatory, and entirely unfounded accusations that Israel was committing “genocide” against the population of the Gaza Strip.
Against this backdrop, the Jewish state’s official recognition of the genocide committed by the Ottoman authorities against the Armenians more than a century ago appears to be a diplomatic response based on the principle of measure for measure. Sa’ar, however, sought to reject any interpretation of his initiative as an act of political retaliation, insisting that his decision was motivated solely by “a moral and historical obligation.”
Jerusalem is also deeply concerned about the current regional strategy pursued by the Turkish leadership. Many Israeli policymakers believe that Ankara is attempting to replace the anti-Israel Shiite Islamist axis led by Iran and its terrorist proxies—which has been significantly weakened by the IDF and the Israeli-American alliance—with an equally anti-Israel Sunni axis led by Turkey.
From this perspective, Sa’ar’s move can also be interpreted as part of the ideological groundwork for a possible future direct confrontation with Ankara, including in Syria.
If this assessment is correct, many in Israel will likely find such an approach understandable. This remains true even if, alongside broader national interests, Sa’ar is also motivated by domestic political considerations—specifically, securing a favorable position on the Likud electoral list, where not everyone has welcomed the return of the former party defector with open arms.
Viewed more broadly, however, the long-term effectiveness of such a move remains far from obvious.
The Azerbaijani Context
Beyond the Turkish dimension, the entire story has another important—and considerably less encouraging—aspect: Azerbaijan.
As we have previously noted, relations between Jerusalem and Baku have, in recent years, evolved into a genuine strategic partnership. Azerbaijan is Israel’s principal supplier of energy and participates in natural gas exploration projects off Israel’s Mediterranean coast. In return, Azerbaijan imports advanced Israeli agricultural and civilian technologies and has become one of the largest purchasers of Israeli defense products. These systems played an important role in Azerbaijan’s victory during the Second Karabakh War in 2020 and in the rapid conclusion of military operations in September 2023. It is also widely believed that Baku provides Israel with an important platform for intelligence activities directed toward Iran.
Beyond the bilateral partnership itself, Azerbaijan’s leadership views cooperation with Israel within the broader framework of its regional and extra-regional strategic interests.
It was Heydar Aliyev, the first president of independent Azerbaijan, who developed the country’s geopolitical doctrine in which Israel occupied a clearly defined and important place. The fundamental contours of the long-term strategic partnership between the two countries were formulated at the highest level as early as 1997. At that time, for most other former Soviet republics—and, until almost the end of the 1990s, even for Moscow, despite retaining some assets in the Middle East remained a relatively peripheral issue, both in itself and within the broader regional context.
It is telling that Heydar Aliyev’s son and successor, President Ilham Aliyev, who inherited his father’s geopolitical vision, has on several occasions acted as an intermediary in efforts to normalize Turkish-Israeli relations. Those efforts were repeatedly undermined by Erdoğan himself, who consistently derailed the process from within—but that, of course, can hardly be attributed to Aliyev.
The significance of the level of partnership that Jerusalem and Baku have managed to achieve over recent decades has been demonstrated by Israel’s current war against radical Islamist regimes. Despite pressure from the Turkish leadership, Azerbaijan has continued—and continues—to provide Israel with critically important energy supplies and other services, while discreet defense cooperation, against the backdrop of shared challenges and threats, continues to develop.
But now a serious rift may be emerging in relations between the two countries—if it has not already appeared. As in Turkey, the issue of the Armenian Genocide is received very painfully in Azerbaijan, though in a different context. The long-standing confrontation, including three rounds of armed conflict between Baku and Yerevan, is largely connected to the expulsion of more than 800,000 Azerbaijanis from Karabakh in the 1990s, the massacre in Khojaly—which, according to Yerevan’s official narrative, was a response to the Armenian pogrom in Baku on the eve of the collapse of the USSR—and three decades of occupation of roughly 20 percent of Azerbaijani territory.
The reconciliation process between Azerbaijan and Armenia, launched in Washington on August 8, 2025, rests on a painfully difficult decision by both sides to abandon the continuation of a long and bloody conflict. The desire to open a new chapter in relations, reinforced by a major joint economic project—the TRIPP corridor promoted by President Trump—enabled the parties to set aside the pain of past tragedies.
The revision of Israel’s previously cautious approach to this explosive issue, in a certain sense, brings old disagreements back to the center of the agenda. In effect, what Tehran and Ankara were unable to do—damage or downgrade the strategic partnership between Azerbaijan and Israel—may now be facilitated by the Israeli government’s demarche, initiated at Sa’ar’s prompting.
The Israeli foreign minister’s position and the government’s vote have caused bewilderment and sharp criticism within Azerbaijan’s Jewish community, which in recent years has served as a kind of bridge for Azerbaijani-Israeli cooperation. Thus, one member of the community, a local businessman, told the Israeli publication IsraLife that, in his view and in the view of his colleagues, Gideon Sa’ar had effectively shot Israeli-Azerbaijani relations in the foot. The leaders of all three Jewish communities—Sephardic, Ashkenazi, and Mountain Jewish—sent letters to the Knesset and, separately, to Israel’s religious parties, asking them to take measures to ensure that recognition of the genocide is not adopted in a parliamentary vote.
It is also worth noting separately that Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan reacted rather sharply to Sa’ar’s initiative. “Even if Turkey itself recognizes the genocide, we will not consider ourselves obliged to comment on such an event, so as not to undermine the peaceful trends in relations between our countries or turn this process into a political weapon against Turkey.”
As a result, commentators who share this view believe that advancing the Israeli foreign minister’s bill will strengthen Erdoğan’s standing among Islamist circles in Turkey, worsen the attitude of many Azerbaijanis toward Israel, and is unlikely to improve relations between Jerusalem and Yerevan. Armenia is clearly interested, within the framework of the new “Western vector” of its foreign policy, in developing relations with the Jewish state as part of the “collective West.” But as Pashinyan’s reaction shows, not by this route.
What Next?
Does all of the above mean that Israelis should ignore the humanitarian and moral dimensions of the Armenian Genocide? Of course not. The question is rather whether elected officials, before taking steps and making statements whose benefit to their own country may be questionable, should first leave the consideration of such controversial issues to specialists, followed by a calm public discussion of historical narratives within the societies of the countries concerned.
It should be noted that the Jewish state does have experience in reaching understandings on such extremely difficult issues. One example is the Holodomor of the 1930s, a subject that for many years overshadowed otherwise generally positive relations between Israel and Ukraine. In Israel, the events of those years are viewed as a tragedy of the peoples of Ukraine who fell victim to a criminal regime, among them Jews as well—the residents of Jewish collective farms, who, like Ukrainian peasants, were decimated by famine. This was precisely the point of contact that Israel and Ukraine were able to find, although, of course, other views also exist there. What is very important is that all these “grievances” remain on the far periphery of bilateral relations.
There is no reason why the same approach could not be applied within the Jerusalem-Baku-Yerevan triangle. The main thing is to avoid sharp, ill-considered steps without first coordinating one’s position with long-standing and loyal allies.