On Thursday night, Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar announced he will bring a resolution to the Israeli Cabinet on Sunday, June 28, calling for the official recognition of the Armenian Genocide. “Recognizing the genocide perpetrated against the Armenian people in the final years of the Ottoman Empire is both a moral and historical duty,” Sa’ar wrote on X, adding that Israel must “firmly condemn any denial, minimization, or distortion of the historical truth.” The resolution will then go before the Knesset for a vote. Israel would become the 35th country to formally recognize the genocide.

The move comes as Israeli-Turkish relations have grown explosively tense, with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan escalating his rhetoric and threatening Israel. Even President Trump weighed in this week, saying Erdoğan had been “a leading candidate” to join Iran in the recent war. Sa’ar’s move is recognition that the era of quietly appeasing Turkey’s regime— at the cost of historical truth — is over.

What Actually Happened

Beginning in April 1915, the Ottoman Empire, controlled by the radical nationalist movement known as the Young Turks (İttihat ve Terakki Cemiyeti — the Committee of Union and Progress), launched a systematic campaign to exterminate its Christian minorities. The genocide began with the arrest, deportation, and killing of hundreds of Armenian intellectuals, leaders, and educated figures in Constantinople. What followed were death marches into the Syrian Desert, mass executions, and forced conversions to Islam. Scholars estimate that 1.5 million Armenians died.

But the Armenians were not alone. The Young Turks sought to purge the Ottoman Empire of all Christian minorities — this included Assyrians and Greeks, with a total death toll exceeding 2 million people. It is believed that between 1913 and 1922, under the successive regimes of the Young Turks and Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk), more than 3.5 million Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek Christians were massacred in a state-organized campaign of destruction aimed at wiping out the emerging Turkish Republic’s native Christian populations. Scholars have called this the Christian Holocaust, describing it as the precursor to the Jewish Holocaust in World War II.

These were different phases of a single, broader agenda of Christian extermination in Asia Minor. The slogan driving the campaign was explicit: “Turkey for the Turks.” This was explicitly a war of Muslims against Christians.

The Cynical Irony of “The Young Turks”

Here is a detail that deserves far more attention than it receives: The most prominent left-wing internet media outlet in America is named The Young Turks — directly after the movement that orchestrated the mass murder of over 1.5 million Christians.

Cenk Uygur, a Turkish-born political commentator and co-founder of the show, wrote an article in 1991 in The Daily Pennsylvanian titled “Historical Fact or Falsehood?” in which he denied the Armenian Genocide, asserting: “The claims of an Armenian genocide are not based on historical facts.” He has since recanted — but only under sustained public pressure — and has refused to rename the show.

Armenian-Americans have criticized the show’s name because the original Young Turks political movement in the Ottoman Empire was directly responsible for the Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek genocides. Aram Hamparian, Executive Director of the Armenian National Committee of America, has stated of Uygur: “Denying a genocide, belittling its survivors, and then naming your political show after its perpetrators should be troubling not only to Armenian Americans, but anyone concerned about human rights.”

This is the same Cenk Uygur who has repeatedly accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. On his program, Uygur accused Israel of genocide and claimed, “they lie to you, on purpose, to help Israel steal more land.” He also posted that Israel is “worse than Hamas.” A man who denied one of the most thoroughly documented genocides in history — and built his brand on the name of its perpetrators — has made accusing Israel of genocide a centerpiece of his programming.

Ana Kasparian: An Armenian on a Show Named After Her People’s Killers

Ana Kasparian, born in Los Angeles to Armenian immigrant parents, is the prominent co-host of The Young Turks. For Armenians, the name “Young Turks” represents the attempted erasure of an entire people. The tension between the show’s branding and Kasparian’s background raises an important question: How does an Armenian journalist reconcile working for a show named after the group that perpetrated the genocide against her own ancestors? Kasparian has not publicly answered that question satisfactorily. The show goes on, the name stays, and the accusations against Israel continue.

The Occupation Nobody Protests

While pro-Palestinian activists fill Western streets demanding action against Israel, Turkey has illegally occupied over 36% of the territory of the Republic of Cyprus since its military invasion in 1974 — in violation of international law and multiple United Nations Security Council resolutions. Turkey implemented a systematic policy of settling the occupied part of Cyprus with more than 160,000 Turks from the Turkish mainland, in a deliberate effort to change the demographic profile of the island and eliminate every trace of Greek and Christian heritage.

No protests. No boycotts. No university encampments for Cyprus. The silence exposes what the noise is actually about.

Genocide: Real Numbers vs. Political Theater

The Armenian Genocide alone killed 1.5 million people. Add the Assyrian and Greek dead, and the Young Turks’ campaign of Christian extermination eliminated more than 3.5 million human beings. These were Christians killed because they were Christians, in a deliberate, state-organized program with explicit goals and documented orders.

In Gaza, Israel’s critics have weaponized the word “genocide” against a military campaign Israel launched in response to Hamas’s October 7 massacre — a war fought against a terrorist organization that deliberately embeds itself in civilian infrastructure. The comparison is not merely wrong. It is a calculated inversion of history, deployed by people who, in some cases, denied a real genocide while building careers on the name of its perpetrators.

Israel’s recognition of the Armenian Genocide is more than a diplomatic statement. It is a declaration that truth matters — and that no amount of political pressure can make murder disappear from the historical record. The nation that has experienced its own genocide and that built its modern existence on the principle of never again, is now saying those words on behalf of another people who were nearly erased from the earth.