My former student Sumit Galhotra has an excellent piece up at HuffPo on marking Armenian remembrance day in Jerusalem:
JERUSALEM — As dusk settled over the Old City one evening recently, Noemie Nalbandian stepped into the dimly lit cathedral of St. James in Jerusalem’s Armenian Quarter. Hundreds of oil lamps hung from the vaulted dome like an army of parachutes in the evening sky. In one corner, Nalbandian lit a candle, performed the sign of the cross, closed her eyes and offered a prayer.
St. James is the center of Armenian life in Jerusalem. Each year on April 24, Nalbandian and hundreds of other Armenians living in Israel gather at the cathedral to commemorate the Armenian genocide. After prayer services, they march to the Turkish consulate singing songs and holding posters demanding that the Turkish government recognize the mass killing of 1.5 million Armenians living under the Ottoman Empire between 1915 and 1923. No Israeli officials were expected at the commemoration; indeed, the Israeli government is itself an unmentioned target of the protests since it, too, refuses to recognize the Armenian genocide.
Nalbandian, an Israeli citizen who works as a nurse and heads the Jerusalem branch of the Armenian Relief Society, the oldest international Armenian aid organization, belongs to the third generation of survivors of the Armenian genocide. During the killings, her maternal grandparents were forced into the desert of Deir ez-Zor, in what is today northern Syria. Unlike many other Armenians who perished in the desert, Nalbandian’s grandparents survived and traveled across what is now Syria and Lebanon, and settled near the Israeli port city of Haifa along with about 100 other families.
Nalbandian and her two brothers were raised in a very patriotic Armenian household in Jerusalem. “From our childhood, we were raised to love our motherland Armenia, our alphabet, our songs,” she said. Nalbandian, who also speaks Turkish, Arabic, Hebrew, French, English and some Spanish, was not allowed to speak anything but Armenian at home.
“We commemorate the 24th of April, 1915, because on that day the Turks rounded up more than 300 [members of the Armenian] elite — doctors, writers and intellectuals — and shot them in the middle of Istanbul,” she said. This was considered the start of the wider genocide. “It took the Armenian years to find themselves, build themselves and asking for recognition for what happened to them,” she said.
Turkey denies that a genocide of Armenians occurred, and argues that lives were lost on both sides as a consequence of war.
Experts reject that argument. In a 2005 letter to the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the International Association of Genocide Scholars affirmed that an act of genocide occurred. They wrote, “We want to underscore that it is not just Armenians who are affirming the Armenian Genocide but it is the overwhelming opinion of scholars who study genocide: hundreds of independent scholars, who have no affiliations with governments, and whose work spans many countries and nationalities and the course of decades.” …
Read the rest here.