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ABSTRACT
This article puts forth the argument that Israel’s desire to repair its deteriorating relations with Turkey between 1980 and 1985 drove Israeli diplomats to leverage Armenian terrorism as an issue of shared concern with Turkey. Specifically, the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (hereafter, ASALA), apparent affiliation with a similar brand of Palestinian terrorism, which was supported by the Soviet Union, was used to court Turkey. This overlooked factor also provides a template with which to understand Israel’s policy on the contested memories of the Armenian Genocide during the 1980s. In the context of a late Cold War superpower rivalry, this article demonstrates how Israeli diplomats assigned the US to mediate between Ankara and Jerusalem. This context highlights the degree to which Cold War dynamics were two-sided: how regional powers such as Israel attempted to influence the policies of the superpower US in the later Cold War years through leveraging global terrorism for diplomatic gains with Turkey.
Acknowledgments
An earlier version of this paper was presented in April 2016 at the international conference ‘Armenians and the Cold War’ at the Armenian Research Center at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. Another version of this paper was also presented in September 2016 at the international symposium 'Missing Memorials and Absent Bodies: Negotiating Post-conflict Trauma and Memorialisation' at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. I am grateful to the organisers and the participants of these events and especially to Luisa Gandolfo and Ara Sanjian for their helpful comments and suggestions on the initial draft of this paper. Earlier drafts of this article benefited greatly from the advice and critical comments of my doctoral supervisor Dan Stone, who I owe endless gratitude for providing me great support during my doctoral journey. I also wish to thank the two anonymous reviewers for Cold War History and the editorial board for their stimulating comments on this article.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 To mention only a few in this rapidly growing literature: Baruch Gilad, ‘Our Neighbors: Turkey and Cyprus,’ in Ministry of Foreign Affairs – the First Fifty Years, ed. Moshe Yegar, Yosef Govrin, and Arye Oded (Jerusalem: Ketter Publishing, 2002), 371–77; Raphael Israeli, ‘The Land of Many Crossroads: The Turkish-Israeli Odd Couple,’ Orbis 45, no. 1 (2001): 65–79.
2 See, for example: George E. Gruen, ‘Turkey’s Relations with Israel and Its Arab Neighbors: The Impact of Basic Interests and Changing Circumstances,’ Middle East Review 17, no. 3 (1985): 33–43; M. Hakan Yavuz, ‘Turkish-Israeli Relations through the Lens of the Turkish Identity Debate,’ Journal of Palestine Studies 27, no. 1 (1997): 22–37; and Mohamut Bali Aykan, ‘The Palestinian Question in Turkish Foreign Policy From the 1950s to the 1990s,’ The International Journal of Middle East Studies 25, no. 1 (1993): 91–110.
3 For more on this see, for instance: Ersel Aydinli and Nihat Ali Ozcan, ‘The Conflict Resolution and Counterterrorism Dilemma: Turkey Faces its Kurdish Question,’ Terrorism and Political Violence 23, no. 3 (2011): 438–57.
4 See for example Ron Schleifer, ‘Psyoping Hezbollah: The Israeli Psychological Warfare Campaign During the 2006 Lebanon War,’ Terrorism and Political Violence 21, no. 2 (2009): 221–38; Ariel Merari, ‘Israel Facing Terrorism,’ Israel Affairs 11, no. 1 (2005): 223–37; and Paul Thomas Chamberlin, ‘Schönau and the Eagles of the Palestinian Revolution: Refugees, Guerrillas, and Human Rights in the Global 1970s,’ Cold War History 12, no. 4 (2012): 595–614 – to list a few.
5 For some works that implicitly touch upon earlier periods of the Cold War in the context of Israeli-Turkish relations, although they do not address terror, see, for example: Roland Popp, ‘Accommodating to a Working Relationship: Arab Nationalism and US Cold War Policies in the Middle East, 1958–60,’ Cold War History 10, no. 3 (2010): 397–427; Manolis Koumas, ‘Cold War Dilemmas, Superpower Influence, and Regional Interests: Greece and the Palestinian Question, 1947–1949,’ Journal of Cold War Studies 19, no. 1 (2017): 99–124.
6 Geir Lundestad, ‘Empire by Invitation? The United States and Western Europe, 1945–1952,’ Journal of Peace Research 23, no. 3 (1986): 263–77. In his later work, (1998), Lundestad's further emphasising the degree to which Cold War historiography will greatly benefit from analysis of multiple actors and their interactions rather just one superpower or another; see: Geir Lundestad, ‘How (Not) to Study the Origins of the Cold War’, in Reviewing the Cold War: Approaches, Interpretations, Theory,' ed, Odd Arne Westad (London: Frank Cass, 2000): 64–80, (75).
7 More recently, see Dan Stone's excellent analysis emphasising the prominent role played by the Europeans as part of the grand histories during the early years of the Cold War. Dan Stone, Goodbye to All That? The Story of Europe Since 1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014): 67–8.
8 See for example among others, Douglas Little, ‘The Cold War in the Middle East: Suez crisis to Camp David Accords,’ in The Cambridge History of the Cold War, vol. II, ed. Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010): 305–26; Paul Thomas Chamberlin 'The Cold War in the Middle East' in The Routledge Handbook of the Cold War, ed, Artemy M. Kalinovsk and Craig Daigle (New York: Routledge, 2014): 163–178 .
9 Ibid., 325.
10 Ibid; Galia Golan, Soviet Policies in the Middle East: From World War II to Gorbachev (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
11 For further reading on the Soviets’ policy failures in Iran and Afghanistan, see ibid., and Amin Saikal, ‘Islamism, the Iranian Revolution, and the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan,’ The Cambridge History of the Cold War, vol. III, ed. Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad (Cambridge: In Cambridge University Press, 2010), 112–34.
12 For more on the US treatment of Armenian terrorism of the period, see Oleg Kuznetsov, ‘Armenia, Transnational Terrorism and Global Interests: What Do CIA and DoS Documents Suggest?,’ Caucasus International 5, no. 2 (2015): 47.
13 For detailed discussion on this, see David Kimhi, ‘Israel’s Battle Against its Isolation,’ in Ministry of Foreign Affairs – the First Fifty Years, ed. Moshe Yegar, Yosef Govrin, and Arye Oded (Jerusalem: Israel, Ketter Publishing, 2002), 66.
14 See Alon Liel, Turkey in the Middle East: Oil, Islam and Politics (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University Press, 1994), 48. Alon Liel evaluates that the energy crisis and Turkey’s dependence on Arab countries for fuel was another important factor in downgrading Turkey’s relations with Israel.
15 See Kimhi, ‘Israel’s Battle Against its Isolation,’ 66–7.
16 For work focusing on this aspect of Turkey’s foreign policy, see Aykan, ‘The Palestinian Question’ and Ulrich W. Haarmann, ‘Ideology and History, Identity and Alterity: The Arab Image of the Turk from the Abbasids to Modern Egypt,’ International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 20, no. 2 (1988): 175–96.
17 The Jerusalem Law, passed on 30 July 1980 in the Israeli Knesset, defines the legal status of Jerusalem. The law notes that Jerusalem is complete and united as the capital of Israel, including the territories occupied during the Six Day War of 1967. See the full version of the law at: http://www.knesset.gov.il/laws/special/eng/basic10_eng.htm (accessed 15 May, 2018).
18 See, for example, among others, M. Hakan Yavuz, ‘Turkish-Israeli Relations through the Lens of the Turkish Identity Debate,’ Journal of Palestine Studies 27, no. 1 (1997): 22–37; and Alexander Murinson, ‘The Strategic Depth Doctrine of Turkish Foreign Policy,’ Middle Eastern Studies 42, no. 6 (2006): 945–64.
19 For more on this see Paul Wilkinson, ‘Armenian Terrorism,’ The World Today 39, no. 9 (1983): 344–50; Francis P. Hyland, Armenian Terrorism: The Past, the Present, the Prospects (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991); and Bruce Hoffman, Inside Terrorism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).
20 See, for example, the excellent short discussion on how the Armenian diaspora treated the terrorists as members of ‘memory movements’ who were part of the Armenian mainstream and as heroes rather than as radical and marginal terrorists; see Yona Waitz, ‘Memory in the Shadows of Genocide: The Memory of the Armenian Genocide in the Armenian Community in Jerusalem’ (PhD thesis, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2010), 98 [in Hebrew]. According to Razmik Panossian, some of the violence against the Turkish diplomats was aimed at shaking ‘Armenians out of their torpid state, and to put the Armenian cause (Genocide recognition and lost lands) back on the agenda of world politics’ – Razmik Panossian, The Armenians From Kings and Priests to Merchants and Commissars (London: Hurst & Company Publications, 2006), 310.
21 See the Oxford English Dictionary refer to terrorist activity as needing to be perpetrated systematically and carried out by a political party. The Oxford English Dictionary, Compact Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 3268. For a broad discussion on terrorism definitions see Hoffman, Inside Terrorism, 1–42. Hoffman also proposes that the broadest accepted contemporary application of the term terror is its political usage and to gain power.
22 Maxime Gauin, ‘Remembering the Orly Attack,’ in Uluslararası Hukuk ve Politika Cilt 7, Sayı: 27, (2011): 114.
23 This internationalisation of the Turkish response to the accusations by Armenians are extensively discussed in Fatma Müge Göçek, Denial of Violence: Ottoman Past, Turkish Present, and Victims of the Armenians Collective Violence Against the Armenians, 1789–2009 (Oxford University Press, 2015): 428–56; and Doğan Gürpınar, ‘The Manufacturing of Denial: the Making of the Turkish “Official Thesis” on the Armenian Genocide between 1974 and 1990,’ Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies 18, no. 3 (2016): 217–40.
24 Fatma Müge Göçek, ‘Reading Genocide: Turkish Historiography on 1915,’ in A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire, ed. R. Suny et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 49.
25 The PLO was not a unitary actor but a conglomerate of Palestinian organisations formed initially at the behest of Egypt and taken over by Fatah in 1969, leading eventually to support for a peace process with the backing of the Western Bloc for a two-state solution with Israel. For an excellent analysis of the phases of Palestinian nationalism during 1948–2005, see Helga Baumgarten, ‘The Three Faces/Phases of Palestinian Nationalism, 1948–2005,’ Journal of Palestine Studies 34, no. 4 (2005): 30–2.
26 Ibid., 27.
27 Oral interview with Daniel Mokady, 30 October 2016, Modiin, Israel.
28 Some works in the field of terrorism and political violence have been focusing on the interconnections between Palestinian and Armenian terrorists of that period. This warrants a discrete study of its own; see, for example: Wilkinson, ‘Armenian Terrorism’; Hyland, Armenian Terrorism; Hoffman, Inside Terrorism.
29 At the time this document was written, Alexander Haig was the US Secretary of State (1981–1982). Previously, Haig was the Deputy National Security Advisor under Henry Kissinger, before acting as Supreme Allied Commander of NATO forces in Europe (1974–1979).
30 Jerusalem to Washington DC, Re: Assessment of Current Bilateral Relations with Turkey and Background Information to the American Secretary of State in Turkey, 10 December 1981, ISA/MFA, 00038OP.
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid.
33 For more on the close engagement between Turkey’s military, civil society, and political establishment see, for instance: Nilüfer Narli, ‘Concordance and Discordance in Turkish Civil-Military Relations, 1980–2002,’ Turkish Studies 12, no. 2 (2011): 215–25; and Murat Kasapsaraçoğlu, ‘Harmonization of Turkey’s Political, Economic, and Military Interests in the 1950s: Reflections on Turkey’s Middle East Policy,’ Turkish Studies 16, no. 3 (2015): 332–48 – to mention a few.
34 For more on Haig’s position as the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO forces in Europe, see Harvey Sicherman, ‘Patriot: Alexander M. Haig, Jr.,’ Orbis 54, no. 3 (2010): 339–55.
35 Oral Interview with Oğuz Çelikkol, Istanbul, Turkey, 21 July 2017.
36 Jerusalem to Ankara, Washington DC, London, et al., 15 June 1982, 657, ISA/MFA, 00033ZB.
37 Ankara to Jerusalem, 15 June 1982, 695, ISA/MFA, 00033ZB.
38 Ibid.
39 Ibid.
40 For a more detailed account of that event, see Göçek, Denial of Violence, 446.
41 Liel to Öztürk, Ankara, 8 June 1982, 695, ISA/MFA, 00030TJ.
42 Report, 29 April 1982, 8364/1, ISA/MFA, 00033ZB.
43 Öztürk to Liel, Ankara, 9 June 1982, 695, ISA/MFA, 00030TJ.
44 Immediately after the Argov assassination attempt, the Israeli Knesset approved the Israeli Defense Force (hereafter, IDF) to enter Southern Lebanon to secure the northern border of Israel. The operation, entitled Operation Peace for Galilee or Mivtsa Sheleg [in Hebrew], is a synonym for the first Lebanon War. See Israel’s Israel Cabinet Decision, 6 June 1982, to launch the operation: http://mfa.gov.il/MFA/ForeignPolicy/MFADocuments/Yearbook6/Pages/3%20Israel%20Cabinet%20Decision-%206%20June%201982.aspx (accessed 5 April 2018).
45 Ankara to Istanbul, 15 June 1982, 690, ISA/MFA, 00030TJ.
46 Ibid.
47 Ibid.
48 Ankara to Jerusalem, 9 June 1982, 681, ISA/MFA, 00033ZB.
49 Oral interview with Alon Liel, 3 September 2015, Jerusalem, Israel; Ankara to Jerusalem, re: Armenian Terrorism, 19 August 1982, 2365, ISA/MFA, 0003676. With respect to Liel’s oral account, Oleg Kuznetsov has argued recently (2015) in his work, based on retrieved CIA documents, that: ‘The achievements of IDF in southern Lebanon and Beirut in 1982 led to the destruction and uprooting of the existing infrastructure of Armenian terrorism.’ See Kuznetsov, ‘Armenia, Transnational Terrorism,’ 47.
50 London to Jerusalem, Re: Intensifying Security to the British Embassy, 12 September 1982, ISA/MFA, 0003676.
51 Jerusalem to the Embassy in Washington, DC, Re: Dr Henry Kissinger’s Visit to Turkey, 5 June 1983, ISA/MFA, 0003679, 1.
52 Ibid.
53 Ibid.
54 Bibi to Bar-On, Re: Kissinger, 7 June 1983, ISA/MFA, 0003679.
55 Among many works on this topic: for example, Aharon Bregman, Israel’s Wars: A History Since 1947 (London: Routledge, 2002). The Sabra and Shatila massacre took place between 16 and 18 September 1982, in the course of Israel’s occupation of the south of Lebanon and Bruit, when the IDF and a Christian minority right-wing party entered the Palestinian camps and massacred 762 and 3500 civilians.
56 On the rapidly developing historiography on Özal’s foreign-policy doctrine, see: Erkan Ertosun, ‘Change and Leadership in Foreign Policy: The Case of Turgut Özal’s Premiership in Turkey, 1983–1989,’ Mediterranean Quarterly 27, no. 2 (2016): 47–66; and Sedat Laçiner, ‘Turgut Özal Period in Turkish Foreign Policy: Özalism,’ USAK Yearbook 2 (2009): 153–205.
57 See footnote no. 26.
58 Further reading on the federal initiative, ‘A Campaign to Remember’, see the United States Holocaust Memorial Council report, 12 February 1987, ISA, MFA, 000A4GO, 1. For a meticulous analysis of the ethnic competition driven by public funding issues surrounding a museum similar to USHMM, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR), see A. Dirk Moses, “The Canadian Museum for Human Rights: the ‘Uniqueness of the Holocaust’ and the Question of Genocide, Journal of Genocide Research, 14:2 (2012): 215–38.
59 For more about Helmut Kohl’s government attempts to influence the concept of the USHMM, see Jacob S. Eder, Holocaust Angst: The Federal Republic of Germany and American Holocaust Memory since the 1970s (New York: Oxford University Press 2016): 84–153.
60 A more detailed account on the Israeli/Jewish paradox, see Eldad Ben-Aharon, ‘The Question of “Restorative Justice” in the Context of International Relations: the Israeli Policy on the Armenian Genocide Revisited (1980s–2010s),’ in Just Memories: Remembrance and Restoration in the Aftermath of Political Violence, ed. C. de Gamboa and B. van Roermund (Intersentia Press, forthcoming)
61 For more about the militant Jewish survivors and the ‘hierarchy of victimhood’ at the USHMM, see Eder, Holocaust Angst, 86. A key aspect of this exclusion of the Armenians from the museum exhibition (as well as of non-Jewish victims of the Nazi regime) was the fostering of a ‘hierarchy of victimhood’ by militant American Jewish Holocaust survivors.
62 Eldad Ben Aharon, ‘The Geopolitics of Genocide in the Middle East: Israeli-Turkish-American Relations, Ethnic Lobbying, and the Contested Memories of the Armenian Genocide During the Last Decade of the Cold War (1978–1988)’ (Ph.D. diss., Royal Holloway, University of London, forthcoming, 2019).
63 Ibid.; and Christopher Walker, Armenia: The Survival of a Nation (London: Routledge, 1980), 380–1.
64 Oral Interview with Yitzhak Lior, 26 June 2016, Ramat Gan, Israel.
65 Ankara to Jerusalem, re: Turkey/Terror, 29 December 1985, ISA/MFA, 0003BPU.
66 Ibid.
67 Jerusalem, Re: The Turkish-Israeli Relations, January 1986, 292, 3, ISA/MFA, 000XCSV.
68 Ibid.
69 Anat Kurz and Ariel Merari, ASALA: Irrational Terror or Political Tool (Jerusalem: Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies and Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1985).
70 Ankara to Istanbul, Re: Turkey-Israel, 27 January 1986, 0003BPU, 1.
71 Ibid., 1; Yitzhak Rabin was IDF commander-in-chief, politician, and then Prime Minister (1974–1977, 1992–1995); Mordechai Gur was also commander-in-chief (1974–1978) and became a politician.
72 Ibid., 1.
73 Ibid.
74 Ibid.
75 Ibid., 2; Ben Aharon, ‘The Geopolitics of Genocide.’
76 Jerusalem to Ankara, Re: Your Conversation with Yiğitbaşıoğlu-Armenians, 3 February 1986, ISA/MFA, 0003BPR.
77 Oral interview with Gideon Ben Ami, 20 October 2016, Jerusalem, Israel.
78 Mokady, 30 October 2016.
79 Ankara to Jerusalem, Re: Turkey – Meeting of National Security Research Institute, 29 June 1987, ISA/MFA, 000X44Y, 2.
80 Ibid.
81 Ibid.
82 Ibid., 6.
83 For more detailed discussion on the Israeli diplomats’ concentrated efforts to block the Armenian Genocide resolution in the European Parliament, including Milo and Lior’s accounts, see Eldad Ben Aharon, ‘Between Ankara and Jerusalem: the Armenian Genocide as a Zero-Sum Game in Israel’s Foreign Policy (1980’s−2010’s),’ Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies (published online 24 November 2017): 1–18.
84 Ibid., 7.
85 Ibid.
86 Mokady, 30 October 2016.
87 Ankara to Jerusalem, 29 June 1987, ISA/MFA, 000X44Y, 2.
Additional information
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Eldad Ben Aharon
Eldad Ben Aharon is a third-year PhD student in the Holocaust Research Institute at Royal Holloway, University of London. His dissertation examines the contested memories of the 1915 Armenian Genocide in light of the late Cold War period and Great Power politics, specifically focusing on Israeli-Turkish-American relations. During the academic year 2017/18, Ben Aharon was a guest lecturer at the Institute for Area Studies (LIAS), Leiden University and at the Department of History at University of Utrecht. His main areas of interest are genocide and mass violence, the Armenian Genocide, Israel’s clandestine diplomacy, the international history of the Cold War, modern Middle East Studies, and oral history. Ben Aharon holds the Global Excellence Scholarship of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation for Armenian Studies (2017–2019). He has published his research in the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies (2015) and the Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies (2017).