On the identity of victimhood – Daniel Blatman in Haaretz:

‘For over a century, Turkey has pursued a policy of denying the Armenian genocide perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire between 1915 and 1918. Its mechanism of denial is evident in many areas, including diplomacy, academic publishing, international public opinion and a co-opted scholarly community.
Its objective is to prevent the use of the term "genocide" when referring to Turkey's actions and to advance an alternative narrative – one that portrays the deportation and mass killing of Armenians as necessary measures taken in response to an internal security threat, rather than as the outcome of a deliberate policy of extermination.’

(…)

‘Among scholars, there's a broad consensus that approximately 1.2 million Armenians were killed or died. The Turkish narrative, however, asserts that the numbers were significantly lower, roughly 350,000, and that many perished from disease, clashes with local tribes or the hardships of the journey, rather than from explicit orders of extermination.’

(…)

‘A similarly dangerous trend is unfolding in Israel regarding the horrific crimes in the Gaza Strip. In June 2024, Dr. Lee Mordechai, a historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, published a report titled "Bearing Witness to the Israel-Gaza War," which has since been updated several times in response to ongoing developments, most recently in July 2025.
The document offers a methodical and detailed account of Israeli actions in Gaza, including actions that may constitute war crimes and potentially even that of genocide. It's based on eyewitness testimonies, satellite imagery, video documentation, reports from international organizations and numerous accounts from both Israeli soldiers and civilians on the ground. It describes the killing of unarmed Palestinians, repeated attacks on refugee camps, targeting of people seeking medical aid, the deliberate starvation of the population and the destruction of infrastructure, including hospitals, water facilities, power stations, universities and mosques. The report further documents tens of thousands of deaths, most of them women and children, as well as mass hunger.’

(…)

‘In an opinion piece published earlier this month in Haaretz, Prof. Michael Spagat, a world-renowned expert in calculating casualties in conflict zones, estimated that the death toll in Gaza has surpassed 100,000. Israel has reduced Gaza to rubble – a place unfits for human habitation. It has indiscriminately killed innocent women and children, targeted doctors and medical and humanitarian aid workers, and created conditions of starvation and deprivation.
This is genocide.’

(…)

‘This approach stands in stark contrast not only to Lemkin's original definition of genocide, which emphasized the gradual, institutional and cultural destruction of ethnic groups, but also to later scholarly interpretations that stress the concept of "cumulative intent."
Genocide does not require a single, explicit directive; rather, it's the result of a process in which rhetoric, policy, political discourse, collective dehumanization and repeated patterns of action converge into mass acts of destruction.’

(…)

‘The comments written by the Yad Vashem chairman are unsettling not only because of his silence, but also because his words are wrapped in a cloak of ostensible institutional integrity, while turning an arrogant back to the sense of historic responsibility that is supposed to inform the memorialization of the Holocaust. "Six million Jews are entitled to an institution that deals with them alone," writes Dayan – suggesting an exclusivity of the memory of murdered Jews as an excuse for hardheartedness, for closing one's eyes and maintaining silence in the face of ongoing war crimes and tens of thousands of slaughtered and starved people. All part of the terrible crime being perpetrated by the descendants of another genocide, the Shoah, among others.’

(…)

‘When a commemorative institution such as Yad Vashem chooses not only to remain silent, but to openly admit its decision to do so, it can no longer be regarded as an institution of memorialization. It becomes, willingly or not, an institution of self-righteousness and denial. And when heinous crimes are perpetrated only a few dozen kilometers away, by the same young people who visited the institution a few years back, and who are now being conscripted into the army, such silence isn't neutrality, it's complicity.
Turkish American sociologist Fatma Müge Göçek examines in her book, "Denial of Violence: Ottoman Past, Turkish Present and Collective Violence Against the Armenians, 1789-2009" (2015), the roots of the denial of the Armenian genocide as a prolonged and ongoing psychosocial process. She asserts the denial is a psychosocial collective response, taking place across four generations of Turks, to dealing with an inconceivable crime.’

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‘For the past three generations Israel too has been constructing an identity of victimhood, ranging from acts perpetrated during the Holocaust to those of Hamas on October 7. It denies its own crimes and is therefore living in a permanently distorted reality. Any attempt to speak about Israel's crimes against the Palestinians is seen as a threat not only to the image of the nation but to its very survival. The defensive narrative has become foundational to Israel's national identity, and any criticism of this narrative is met with the kind of institutional and public violence we are witnessing today.’

Read the article here.

The identity of victimhood is catastrophic for individuals, but mortal for nations.

This construction of this identity will cause denial of ‘inconceivable crimes’ and will produce all kinds of excuses for these crimes.