According to the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, Minister Hotovely justified the ‘no’ vote by referring to “…the diplomatic implications that passage of the bill could have, ‘despite the fact that there is no dispute in principle that this involves a historical event that needs to be recognized.’ The matter, she said, should be studied in depth.” MK Ksenia Svetlova, the sponsor of the bill, called the Yezidis a small group of people who are isolated, powerless and defenseless, saying “Even today, when we know that a portion of their people is still in captivity, why not recognize this genocide?" Adding that, "Our country, the State of Israel, was established on the foundations of the ashes of the Holocaust, but what about the holocaust of other people?”
It remains clear to most Israelis that their state, formed as a refuge for persecuted Jews in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, has a special obligation to speak up when other peoples face a threat of physical extermination akin to what the Jews faced. Some members of Knesset voting against the bill even admitted that as with similar past bills seeking recognition of the Armenian genocide, they would have voted ‘yes’ had their party permitted them to vote freely.
With the Armenian genocide bills in Israel, the last of which failed in June of 2018, the intervention of Israeli state officials (and the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs in particular) clearly played a decisive role. Favoring “raison d’état” over morality, the Israeli state disregarded its population’s preference to recognize the Armenian genocide (such bills have a lot of popular support in Israel) in order to avoid further jeopardizing already poor relations with Turkey. Most Israelis find such logic shameful, especially when Turkey’s leaders accuse Israel of genocide for every military action in the West Bank or Gaza Strip.
How can this logic apply to recognition of the Yazidi genocide at the hands of ISIS, however? What “diplomatic implications” does Minister Hotovely fear from such recognition? This columnist can think of no recognized state in the international system that would object to Israel’s recognition of the Yazidi genocide. Does the Israeli Right fear any move to recognize genocides other than the Jewish one?
Perhaps they worry that Israel’s more vociferous critics will use such as ammunition to accuse Israel of genocide against the Palestinians? Israel’s enemies already make such accusations anyhow. The European Union, Canada, the United States, France and Australia have also all recognized ISIS actions against the Yezidis as constituting genocide, and these states make no such accusations against Israel’s repression of Palestinians [in this columnist’s view, reasonable people can see the difference between mass extermination and repression].
All of which still begs the question: What are Israeli Right-wing politicians afraid of when it comes to recognizing the Yezidi genocide? Such a move would be popular amongst most Israelis and would entail no negative “diplomatic implications.”
It therefore seems possible that the members of Knesset voting against this bill did so not out of fear, but out of a sense of Jewish exceptionalism and cultural chauvinism. For them, only the Jewish experience of the Holocaust deserves to be called a genocide. Calling anything else a genocide might detract from that. Like many Right-wing nationalist politicians across the world, they lack sufficient empathy for other groups to recognize such common experiences. While Israeli state relations with Turkey might have blinded people to this sad observation when it came to recognizing the Armenian genocide, no such obfuscation clouds the issue when it comes to the Yezidis. Israel should have likewise recognized the Anfal genocide long ago.
David Romano has been a Rudaw columnist since 2010. He holds the Thomas G. Strong Professor of Middle East Politics at Missouri State University and is the author of numerous publications on the Kurds and the Middle East.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rudaw.
