System Of A Down singer Serj Tankian has criticised Israel for recognising the Armenian genocide of 1915 and ’16 as the country continues its military actions in the West Bank and Gaza, which have been described as genocide by a United Nations commission.
In a video statement released via the social media account Vocal Politics, the Armenian-American vocalist says “fuck you” to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet, after they acknowledged the Ottoman Empire’s mass killing and deportations of Armenian Christians during World War I.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates that between 664,000 and 1.2 million Armenians died as a result of the Ottomans’ actions between spring 1915 and autumn 1916.
In a statement on Sunday (June 28), Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar said Israel had “fulfilled a moral duty by recognising the historical truth, and rejecting attempts to deny it”. The decision still requires ratification by the Israeli parliament.
Tankian takes issue with the timing of the recognition, as Israel had for many years refused to recognise the Armenian genocide. According to French newspaper Le Monde, the country avoided the topic to preserve its political relationship with Turkey.
However, that relationship has soured in recent years, as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan became a vocal critic of Israel’s military engagements with Palestine, which intensified following Palestinian nationalist terrorist group Hamas’ attack on the Nova music festival in October 2023. An estimated 1,200 people died in the attack.
Tankian also accuses the Israeli government of having previously used pro-Israel lobby group the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) to discourage the US from recognising the Armenian genocide. The US ultimately recognised the genocide in 2021.
The singer says in the video (via The PRP): “For many years, Israel’s government used AIPAC to lobby the US Congress to not recognise the Armenian genocide, to prevent Congress from recognising the Armenian genocide, due to their relationship with Turkey, their intelligence sharing with Turkey, et cetera.
“Today, the Netanyahu cabinet decided to recognise the Armenian genocide of 1915: a genocide that led Hitler thinking that he could do what he could do to the Jews in the 1930s and 1940s.
“The fact that this government is already committing genocide in Gaza and Lebanon decided to recognise the genocide of my grandparents is the worst fucking thing that they could have done to Armenians – by using our history, our genocide, our pain to their political advantage.
“Fuck you.”
Last September, a UN commission found that Israel was committing genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Genocide is defined in the 1948 genocide convention as the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.
Israel strongly denied that it was committing genocide against Palestinians, calling the findings an “attempt to delegitimise and demonise the state of Israel”.
Then, earlier this month, a UN commission of inquiry accused Israel of deliberately targetting children in Gaza, leading to genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. Israel denied the allegation, calling it a “libellous sham”.
According to a BBC report on June 23 this year, at least 73,035 people have been killed by Israelis in Gaza since the Nova festival attack, including more than 21,280 children. This is based on data released by the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry, whose figures are seen as reliable by the UN.
The Vocal Politics video is not the first time that Tankian has spoken out against what he sees as modern-day genocide. During System’s headline set at the Sick New World festival in Las Vegas in April, he sang the traditional Armenian prayer Der Voghormia in remembrance of the Armenian genocide’s victims and said onstage, “The problem is that genocide still occurs today, around the world. We have not learned our lesson of people over profits.”
System are currently touring Europe, supported by Queens Of The Stone Age and Acid Bath. The shows kicked off with a 29-song performance at Strawberry Arena in Stockholm, Sweden on Monday (June 29). The band will play at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in London on July 13 and 15.
