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With no clear end in sight to the widening cycle of conflicts across the Middle East, from Israel’s actions in the West Bank and Lebanon, its exterminatory policy toward the Palestinians of Gaza, to U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran, the broader consequences of U.S. policy in the region, and the lingering aftershocks of Syria’s civil war, Armenians find themselves walking a delicate tightrope. Whereas officials in Yerevan embrace a position of caution to avoid rankling parties on either side of the conflict, Armenians across the region find themselves in the crossfire of missile barrages, drone strikes, and potentially multiple major ground invasions.
Since the opening salvo of Israeli strikes last June, numerous headlines from various Armenian outlets reassured readers that their communities have remained relatively unscathed. These statements intend to comfort Armenians concerned about the war’s destructive outcomes, while also preserving the famed “positive neutrality” adopted by the Armenian community during the Lebanese Civil War. An alternative interpretation, however, raises serious questions about the political dangers “No Armenian Casualties” poses to our collective ability to interpret, analyze, and respond to the humanitarian realities unfolding in Iran, Palestine and Lebanon.
You Can’t Be Neutral On a Moving Train
The source of this confusion is the sloppy effort by lobbying groups, individual analysts, and commentators to squeeze Armenia and Armenians into the racial-religious ideological construction of Western civilization. It’s no secret that American and Israeli leaders justify their militarist actions through a civilizational paradigm that casts Iran, Hamas, and Muslims writ large as existential threats to Western civilization. In justifying their genocide in Gaza and Palestine, Israeli officials have repeatedly linked their operations to a broader effort to secure the West from radical Islam, rhetoric Netanyahu has spent the last 30 years refining to win support from European and American allies. In acts that undoubtedly reflect the Trump administration’s broader worldview, American military commanders lace their statements with Christian nationalism to propagandize soldiers in the ongoing bombardment of Iran.
Where do Armenians fit in this picture? The historicization of the Armenian Genocide is a poignant starting point for understanding the position of Armenia and Armenians within this ethno-religious framework. The roots of this process lay in Raphael Lemkin’s paradigm-shifting creation of the term “genocide” and the extraordinary legal and political implications it carries. The establishment of the term had profound consequences on the subsequent historicization of the genocide and the campaign for its recognition. As historian Ronald Grigor Suny explains, “European Jews were victims of a different kind: they were innocent and agentless, targeted solely on racial grounds. And this crime in the Holocaust template, without cause, except racial hatred, was elevated to a higher level than mass killings that had political causes and motivations.” This left the Armenian community in the United States, for example, in an awkward position in its quest for recognition. Suny continues: “To fit the new archetype of genocide sanctified by the Holocaust, genocide scholars, particularly Armenians, would struggle to portray the Armenians as agentless, innocent victims murdered on the basis of their ethnoreligious identity. They played down their own revolutionary movement, their resistance to Ottoman repression and Kurdish predations. In other words, to qualify fully for genocide, a crime had to be based on hatred of the identity group rather than their politics.”
In other words, a Manichean portrayal of innocent Christians slaughtered by barbaric Muslims had to be constructed to achieve public recognition and historicization of the Genocide, in a manner akin to the Holocaust. This process is itself under increased scrutiny for its detachment from the colonial roots of fascism, where the structural apparatus for mass violence that states can produce first emerges. As genocide scholar Zoe Samudzi argues, “genocide remains this rare kind of political transgression, rather than… a mass annihilating violence that is a quotidian part of nation-state processes.” What “No Armenian casualties” thus signals is a patriotic impulse that treats Armenian suffering as exceptional, and the Aghet, by extension, as the crime of all crimes. In the process, we weigh every other instance of mass violence against our own experience. As such, we discount and outright dismiss genocidal violence as it unfolds before our very eyes. To then raise the issue of racism, genocide, and human rights without connecting our own histories and struggles to other movements internationally is not only a major tactical error, but an epistemic act of autoenucleation.
For what purpose? The narrativization of the Genocide in relation to Armenian history doesn’t necessarily belong to any one actor; and the motivations behind such narratives likely range from sheer opportunism to genuinely well-meaning attempts to reckon with history. In this context, our suffering and history become merely a tool to be wielded by this or that state, moribund political parties that call themselves “revolutionary,” or self-appointed “community leaders” who seem to believe their cash donations or corporate connection buy them astute political analysis (hint: they do not). Should we only care about genocide and war if Armenian loss of life is involved? It is not as if Armenians lack empathy or understanding of the horrors of genocide, war and displacement. Rather, choosing to remain silent or inactive in the face of these events is an explicitly political act.
When, for example, Armenia is lobbied as a bastion of Christian civilization, it is not necessarily Armenians who always benefit from such narratives. This kind of reactive strategic essentialism inadvertently fuels the race war fantasies of white supremacists in Europe and North America who deludedly believe in their imminent replacement, and who currently hold the reins of the most powerful military force in the world. In reality, doubling down on a persecuted Christian complex, without interrogating the consequences of what inclusion in Western civilization actually means according to its purported defenders, is equal parts politically immature and irresponsible. Should we imagine ourselves members of a civilization in which mass forced starvation, indiscriminate bombings, and institutionalized torture are normalized behavior of states? To resign ourselves to narratives, some self-imposed and others externally reproduced, which reinforce a hegemonic conception of Western civilization, threatens to foreclose the possibility of grassroots solidarity and prevents us from conceptualizing political alternatives which reject this abhorrent status quo. Alternative paths, as a handful of Armenian writers, artists, and academics have exhibited, are available if we are collectively willing to carve them out, though they are currently blocked by patriotic myopia, long-held assumptions, and ghettoized political thought.
