PODCAST 127: Historian Benny Morris on the Forgotten 19th-Century Genocide of Turkey's Christians
Jonathan Kay speaks to famed Middle Eastern historian Benny Morris, whose latest book explores the ethnic cleansing of Turkey during the last decades of the Ottoman Empire.
Transcript
Jonathan Kay: Benny Morris is one of the world's most well-known historians of Israel and its conflict with the Palestinians, but his latest book represents a new direction for the historian. In The 30-Year Genocide: Turkey's Destruction of Its Christian Minorities, 1894-1924, co-authored with Dror Zevi, Morris presents readers with some shocking facts.
While most of us are familiar with the Armenian Genocide staged by Turkish forces from 1915 to 1917, few know that the Armenian Genocide was one of the final acts in a decades-long campaign of killing and expulsion against all of Turkey's Christian inhabitants, Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians alike.
Last week, I phoned Mr. Morris in Israel and spoke to him about this tragic, but curiously little-known period in history, as well as the latest developments in Israel and the wider Middle East. Here are excerpts from our conversation.
Benny Morris: You're right, I wrote about 10 books on the Israeli-Arab conflict, but I did write an earlier book about something altogether different, about Anglo-German relations in the 1930s before World War II, which was my Ph.D. But during the past 10 years, together with Dror Ze'evi, a fellow professor from Ben-Gurion University, we researched and wrote a book on what we call the 30-year genocide.
That's the name of the book, The 30-Year Genocide, which deals with Turkey's destruction of its various Christian communities, Greeks, Armenians, and Assyrians between the years 1894 and 1924. That was the 30 years in which essentially the Turks got rid of their Christian communities, which had numbered more or less 4 million before that, and constituted 20 percent of Turkey's population in 1894. By 1924, Christians were down to 2 percent of that population, 2 million of them approximately having been murdered by the Turks, and 2 million others expelled.
I, of course, knew about the Armenian Genocide, which took place in the early 20th century. Is this widely known, the numbers you're talking about in terms of the wider purging of Christians? It's true that the focus in the West has always been due to good publicity by the Armenians, if you like to call it that, of whom somewhere between a million and a million and a half were murdered during this 30-year period, most of them in what is called the Armenian Genocide of 1915-1916.
But in addition to these Armenians, the Turks over this 30-year period, in staggered fashion, killed off all the Assyrians who lived in the territory of what is modern-day Turkey, and killed and expelled the two million odd Greeks who lived in that territory during those 30 years. So by 1924, hundreds of thousands, I can't give an exact number, but hundreds of thousands of Greeks had been killed by the Turks and over a million, a million and a half had been expelled to Greece by 1924.
And this was done, incidentally, by three successive Turkish regimes, the regime of Abdul Hamid, the old sultan. During which time, 1894-1896, hundreds of thousands of Armenians were killed. Then in the second bout of violence, which is the one which is most famous, the CUP, the Committee of Union and Progress, or the Young Turks, during World War I, exploited the situation, killed most of the Armenians in their territory, and then under Ataturk, the third Turkish regime, after the end of World War I and after the fall of the Young Turks, Ataturk took care to get rid of the remaining Armenians from Turkey and at the same time killed off or expelled, as I say, something close to two million Greeks as well by 1924.
Jonathan Kay: Were these purges, pogroms, genocides, were they done with a nationalistic or a territorial motivation? Or was there a religious motivation? Ataturk is associated with a rejection of traditional religiosity, so it doesn't sound like any kind of jihad, but what were the ostensible motivations for this?
Mr. Morris: The motives were mixed and changed in terms of emphasis between each of these three different Turkish regimes. But the underlying motive among the perpetrators, those Turks, villagers and townsmen, soldiers and policemen, who actually carried out the murder in these three bouts of violence or massive violence. The underlying motive was religious. That is they were Muslims getting rid of Christians whom they, in some way, envied. The Christians were usually wealthier. They coveted their wealth. They coveted their women and actually took
tens of thousands of their women and converted them to Islam after rape. This sexual motive was also there. It was the economic motive. It was the underlying religious motivation among all the perpetrators. And, growlingly, towards the end of this period, there emerges a nationalist motive in which Turks become more cognizant of their national movement and character and are fighting against the strangers in their midst who are non-Turks, meaning non-Turkish Muslims.
Ataturk, though incidentally, though famous for secularizing Turkey over the decades in which he ruled, the 1920s and '30s, during this period, used and exploited religious motivation and in fact, also used the language of jihad to recruit and mobilize his people to murder the Christians in their midst. So he wasn't exactly a secularist until 1924, until this bout of ethnic cleansing plus genocide took place.
Afterwards, he allowed his secularization to run rampant, but before that, he used religion and the language of religion as a background to this genocide and mass expulsion.
Jonathan Kay: Ataturk is a historical figure who I think has an unusually fervid modern fan club. Do you think that Ataturk, the historical figure as he's presented, is completely different from Ataturk, the real actual ruler of Turkey?
Benny Morris: I think anyone who reads our book and especially the last 200 pages will see that Ataturk was no innocent and no good guy, as historical figures go. He was a mass murderer, essentially, and a mass expeller. Afterwards, he managed to reclaim an image or claim an image of a secularist and forward-looking and Europeanizing leader of Turkey. And he did bring it into the 20th century in terms of changing the alphabet and pushing aside or restricting the power of the Muslim clergy. But as I say, during those years of what they called national liberation, their war of independence, 1919-1924, as he fought foreign armies on Turkish soil, there were Greeks, there were Frenchmen, there were Englishmen, Russians. As he fought off these armies, he took advantage of the situation, as I say, to get rid of the Christians.
What happened to the Palestinians is an obvious historical parallel here, and I'm talking to somebody who made much of his name on taking a fresh look at what happened to the Palestinians in the late 1940s, and of course, for those who haven't read your work, you rejected the idea that it was a top-down conspiracy by the Israeli government and other Jewish actors to purify Israel, but you also rejected the idea that Palestinians were just simply acting on their own autonomy and following orders given to them by outside Arab actors.
I don't find it a parallel, even though, paradoxically, I did address both subjects over my lifetime as a historian, but they're not the same. In Palestine, during the '20s, '30s, and '40s, ending, of course, or culminating in the 1948 War of Independence, in which Israel emerged as a state, there was a clash between two national groups striving for dominance and even complete territorial fulfillment in the territory of Palestine, the Israelis won and the Palestinians lost and the state of Israel emerged and the Palestinians, many of them became refugees and did not gain national independence, but it was a fight between two national groups.
Secondly, it was the Palestinians who launched the war of 1947-48 after rejecting the United Nations compromise proposal of a partition of the country into two states. The Palestinians said no, the Jews said yes, and then the Palestinians started shooting. And when the Palestinian militias were beaten by the Israelis, the Arab armies from around the country, the armies of Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Jordan invaded the country to help the Palestinians and ultimately to try and crush the new state of Israel, which had just been born, and they, too, were defeated by Israel. In this process of defeating the Palestinian militias and defeating the Arab armies, the Israelis did help to create a large refugee problem of Palestinians. Palestinians were uprooted from their homes. 700,000, in fact, were uprooted and, in a sense, driven out of the area which became the state of Israel in the process of the war.
But as the Israeli leaders at the time said, and I think with great justification, it was the Palestinians who caused the refugee problem by initiating a war which they lost. The situation in Turkey, though the Turks did consider their Christian minorities a potential fifth column, and there was some terrorism by Armenian nationalists against Turks and against collaborating Armenians in the 1890s and early 1900s, the Greeks didn't rebel in any way against the Turks, and the Syrians had no national movement. And nonetheless, all three of these Christian minorities were hounded to death, killed off, and exiled. It wasn't two national movements vying for dominance in a particular
piece of territory. It was a majority, a well-armed majority, essentially hounding one another. Three minority groups who are Christians. There was never any prospect of Greek, Syrian, and Armenian Christians somehow taking over the state of Turkey.
That never was the issue. There was fear among the Turks that the Armenians, who had a nationalist movement, would try and take control of certain provinces in which there were large numbers of Armenians, maybe even Armenian majorities, in Eastern Turkey. So there was this fear of a dismemberment of Turkey by Armenians.
This was a serious and real fear. Analogous to the more modern fear of the Kurds forming a breakaway state.
Yes. The irony here, of course, is the Kurds were the great helpers of the Turks in slaughtering the Armenians and their Syrians. The Kurds were sort of auxiliaries and henchmen for the Armenians. Of the Turks and were controlled by the Turks and used them to kill off their Christian enemies And then the Turks turned against the Kurds as well because they weren't proper Turks because they didn't speak Turkish, even though they were Muslims as well.
Turkish scholars, I think in some cases, have been brought up on criminal charges merely for publishing works that explore the truth of what the Turkish government did a century ago.
Did you find it difficult to find? Turkish sources or Turkish scholars, were there people or sources that you wanted to access that you had difficulty with? Did you have to travel to Turkey to do your research? And if so, under what auspices did you do so? You're right to point your finger at the problem of sources in arriving at a proper picture of what happened during those 30 years of Turkish genocide against their Christians.
The Turkish archives have been thoroughly purged. Of any really incriminating evidence, directly incriminating evidence, stories of massacres and mass killings and so on, these don't exist in the Turkish archives. Archives that have all been either destroyed or put in caves where researchers can't access them.
My colleague Droz Evi, who is an Ottomanist and knows Turkish, went through their archives and found almost no evidence. Sometimes they make mistakes and they oversee, uh, you know, they don't pay attention and don't classify a certain document, which does actually show Turkish criminality. But most of these documents have been hidden or destroyed by the Turks over the last century in a series of purges of the documentation. The Turkish Military Archive, which deals with the war, the Ataturk's war against the foreign invaders and his destruction of the Greek community and the remaining Assyrians and Armenians, that archive, the Turkish Military Archive, is completely closed to all researchers, the one in Ankara.
Nobody knows what exists here because it's closed. But there is a massive amount of documentation of what happened in Turkey during those 30 years, in Western archives, the British, the French, the Americans, the Germans, all had consuls all around the country for most of the period. The Germans had military advisors in Turkey during the second half of the period.
The Americans had consuls and ambassadors. And there were lots of missionaries, especially American missionaries, but also Canadians, Swedes, Danes, in various parts of Turkey who actually witnessed what happened, wrote what happened down in reports to their embassies or to their governments or to their superiors in the various states.
Missionary societies to which they belong. As the consuls, of course, wrote reports to their ambassador or directly to Berlin and London and Washington. The problem with investigating this subject wasn't lack of documentation, it was a surplus of documentation. You have to wade through enormous amounts of material, American, British, German, French.
Which is what we did to get the specifics, to get the details of what happened in each area, in each of these periods. Incidentally, the Germans, from the early 1900s until 1918, were allies of the Turks in the First World War. They also supply enormous amounts of material about the war. what the Turks were doing.
The German government, of course, didn't try and rein in the Turks because they were allies, but the consuls actually wrote from Trabzon and various other towns what was happening in their areas, so we know exactly what happened. Generally, today, the Turkish government and some pro Turkish, if I can call it that, Turkish scholars dismiss All of this as Western propaganda, what the missionaries reported, what the consuls reported, what the ambassadors and visiting businessmen reported, they dismissed this all as Christians writing about how Christians were being persecuted by Muslims, and therefore it's not true.
But this is total nonsense. The Germans, as I say, were allies, but nonetheless, they wrote what was happening, and we have these records. And there's nothing the Turks can actually say or do to eliminate the truth of this.
Jonathan Kay: How much of that criticism is good faith and how much of this is stuff that they have to say in order to keep their jobs at universities or even avoid criminal prosecution for slandering Turkey?
Benny Morris: Well, it's true. It's more or less illegal to talk about the Armenian genocide. And as you say, very few people even know about the Greek and the Syrian genocides committed by the Turks. But I assume that most of these Turkish scholars or so-called scholars were brought up in Turkey, were educated in Turkey, and probably believe their narrative that this is all a conspiracy by Western Christians to blacken their Muslim names. But I assume many of them also know there's truth in what the Western documentation shows, German documentation, French documentation, etc. But they, of course, can't say it because they'll lose their jobs, or they will even be thrown in jail. There are some good Turkish scholars, such as Taner Akcam, who write completely honestly, but they live abroad. Taner Akcam, for example, was in fact jailed by the Turks, but then he moved to Germany eventually, has a teaching professorship in America, and has published very good books about what the Turks did to the Armenians. What we did, Dror Ze'evi, and myself, was we broadened the perspective, we broadened the field, by, I think, demonstrating that what happened to all three Christian groups, Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians, was in fact one large policy and its implementation, which was to get rid of the Christians from Turkey. Using whatever excuses existed, different excuses at different points in time, but essentially excuses to carry out this policy of Turkification, as Ataturk called it. In other words, turning Turkey into a Turkish Muslim society.
Jonathan Kay: In some ways your project reminds me a little bit of a book that came out a few years ago by Princeton scholar Gary Bass called The Blood Telegram, Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide, which was about the millions of people who were killed in what was essentially the Pakistani Civil War. And I remember reading that and being horrified by it. But I also remember thinking about how arbitrary our historical memory is. Because there are certain genocides, and not just genocides, but certain mass displacements of humanity that get encoded in institutional memory. Is there any rhyme or reason to what mass purges of humanity stick in the craw of history and become historical movements to reverse them, or at least to gain justice for them, whereas others seem to be completely forgotten. I'm wondering if you have a theory about how some of these movements become memorialized and become international movements decades and generations later, whereas some are simply forgotten.
Benny Morris I don't have a theory and I don't really have an explanation. It's actually quite baffling. In the case of the displacement of 700,000 Palestinians during the 1948 war, essentially by Israel, I think the reason for the memorialization of this is that the Palestinians were very literate people, as compared especially to their fellow Arabs. And the Arab world in general took up arms, uh, propagandistically, in response to the displacement, on behalf of the Palestinians and so perpetuated the narrative and the knowledge of the narrative, exaggerating what happened, if you like, but of displacement and broadcast it to essentially the West. And they managed to convey this to Westerners, and then the Westerners adopted this. One of the reasons for this probably is the centrality of the Holy Land in Western culture. It's important to the Christian world what happens in Palestine, what happened 2,000 years ago and what happened 100 years ago. A second reason is probably the great economic strength of the Arab world over the past 50 or 100 years. So this has also been projected into the West, the narrative, and adopted by Western newspapers, journalists. Why? Something much, much, much more important. Worse, which happens in Burundi or Rwanda or something and millions of people or a million people are killed and nobody cares about it. Nobody talks about it is because it's somewhere where nobody knows where it happens and nobody cares where it happens in darkest Africa and what happens inside Russia. The killing of millions of kulaks or billions of people from the Crimea or the Caucasus in the 1920s and 30s and 40s by Stalin. It's difficult to say why exactly some things are memorialized in the West, some are not. It's a baffling subject.
Jonathan Kay: I want to go back to what you said about the displacement of the Palestinians because I know that several years ago there was a real effort made by Zionists and by Jews generally to say look it's true, this thing happened to the Palestinians. But there was a roughly equal number of Jews who were expelled and dispossessed in Arab countries around the same period in the 1940s. That movement never seemed to really take off on anything like the same scale as the Palestinian movement. And I think in part that's because a lot of people said it's true, they were dispossessed, but Israel built this thriving society and many of these Jews emigrated to places like Canada and the United States and European countries where you can't generalize, but by and large, they've built successful diaspora societies.
Jonathan Kay: How much of this is based on the fate of what happens to people after they leave?
Benny Morris: In the case of Israel-Palestine, certainly, you put your finger on it. What emerges, what happens, the denouement is important. In the case of 700,000 Palestinians who were uprooted from their homes, most of them, incidentally, from one part of Palestine to another, not from Palestine out of Palestine, they remained refugees. They were left in shanty towns and camps and lived in poverty and misery, taking UN donations, living off Western charity, essentially. And their numbers, of course, grew. Today, there's 6 million Palestinian refugees on the rolls of the United Nations. And it supports them and with money, with free education, with free medical services and so on. And of course, their demand to return. They've made it an essential ethos of the Palestinian national struggle to return to their homes and villages and towns and fields and whatever in what became the state of Israel. More or less in equal numbers, seven to 800,000 who were uprooted from the Arab world, from Syria, Egypt, Yemen, over the years 1948 to 64, all of them essentially, they resettled. Most of them, incidentally, in Israel, a small number in France and Britain and Canada and so on, and no longer are refugees. Nobody considers them refugees and they, incidentally, leaving those Arab countries, they were dispossessed. They lost all their property much as the Palestinian Arabs lost all their property when they were uprooted from their homes in Palestine in 48. So there's an equal number but one people remained essentially a refugee people and the other became Israelis or, as you say, went off to Canada or England or France and became Frenchmen or Englishmen or Canadians and they live their normal lives today.
Jonathan Kay: I have an Armenian Canadian friend who I went to school with and I've been emailing with him of late and he expressed his frustration at trying to draw attention to the deaths and the destruction that were wrought by the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict, which has played out in recent months. And of course, there's different opinions on which side is at fault there. And he was talking about how it's impossible to really get a lot of attention there because you had the US election, you had the pandemic. I can't remember a U.S. election when the word Israel was used less than during this election cycle, which to some extent is a healthy thing, but it also strikes me that there's just this morbid resignation about resolving the Palestinian situation. What's your take on that?
Benny Morris: Well, you're right. Look, the Palestinian situation in which a large number of Palestinians, a large proportion of the Palestinian people, have been living under Israeli military government since 1967. It's been going on for 50 years and somehow the world has resigned itself to this situation. There doesn't seem to be a path open leading to a resolution, be it through a one-state solution or a two-state solution. And there is almost no terrorism at all by Palestinians against Israel, inside Israel or along Israel's borders. So the problem has sort of left the news cycle. People basically say, this is my feeling as well, that we're just going to see more of the same. Israel will continue to rule over a people or part of a people who don't want to be ruled by Israelis, but there's no solution in sight. This seems to be the situation. Israeli withdrawal from the territories will endanger Israel's security. Everybody in Israel understands that. The West Bank, if Israel withdraws from it, will become another Gaza Strip from which rockets are occasionally lobbed into Israel. The Palestinian leadership, the Hamas and the Fatah, don't want a two-state solution. They want all of Palestine. They claim all of Palestine, even though they sometimes, towards America or the Europeans, say, no, no, we're willing to have a two-state solution. But this is all nonsense. They want all of Palestine, as Israelis and I myself see it. As you say, the world is engulfed in crises, at the moment there's this terrible ongoing medical crisis which pushes aside all foreign news from the American news cycle, and also from Europe. Everybody's focused on health, and in America, you had this ridiculous election. That's also pushed everything on the side. So when you're talking about American attention to what's happening in the Middle East, they couldn't care less.
Jonathan Kay: I want to talk about the situation in Israel briefly, the pandemic response, because I know that I've been to Israel many times. It's a unique society. It's a mix of high trust and low trust communities. In the pandemic, you've seen that the disease spreads fastest in low trust communities.
Or within very high trust communities where everybody trusts that they don't have the disease because, you know, they all pray together and surprise, surprise, they have the disease, they spread it to each other. At first, Israel was doing a good job of containing the pandemic, and then a few months ago, the numbers just exploded, and I think on a per capita basis, at one point maybe had more cases than almost anybody.
It's a small society with an advanced health system. How did this happen?
Benny Morris: Essentially, Netanyahu has handled the health crisis in Israel miserably, irresponsibly, incompetently, partly because of political considerations, because his main allies in the coalition government are orthodox Jewish parties.
And these Orthodox Jewish parties have essentially ignored or resisted efforts to contain the disease in their communities. They continue to have open schools, large scale wedding celebrations, enormous funeral processions. They spread among themselves and then out to Israeli society in general. It's been impossible to contain them because of Netanyahu's reliance on their political support for his continued premiership.
That's one thing. The second thing is Israel's Arab community, which also has been acting irresponsibly over the past two months, not opening schools, but holding enormous wedding celebrations and get-togethers and not wearing masks, not maintaining proper distance between people. These two communities are the reason for this massive explosion of cases in Israel a month or two ago.
But it's also true, as I say, that Netanyahu has been incompetent in running this whole show.
JK: We've got the Turks angry. We've covered Netanyahu and the religious Jewish communities and the Arabs. Is there any group we've missed?
BM: You've missed the secular Israelis. Israel, as you said, is an interesting society because it's divided more or less in two into a forward-looking half which looks to the future as high tech, as multilingual, as worldly.
Israel is prosperous. That's the forward-looking part of Israeli Jewish society. The other part of the society, made up of the ultra-Orthodox and many of the descendants of the Oriental Jews who arrived in Israel, is backward-looking. It looks towards religion. It looks towards God. It looks towards what's written in the Bible for its instruction, how to live. And these two societies live side by side together. The Israeli Arabs, who are about 20 percent of Israel's population, they are divided also into those who are very religious fundamentalist, as it's called, and who also look back towards the great days of Muhammad. And some forward-looking parts are also the high tech savvy and want to become Western and liberate the women from constrictions, Islam placed them in traditionally in Arab societies, but there too, it's divided between forward-looking groups and backward-looking groups.
So it's a very strange-looking society. Israel. It's run by and essentially carried by its forward-looking groups, the economy, the army, the Air Force, all of what works properly in Israel, and it's got these backward-looking people who are pulling Israel down. The so-called forward-looking society, if we may use that term, that segment of the society is itself divided by the same forces that divide increasingly every Western society, which is income inequality and class struggle between people who are part of the knowledge worker class and those who are part of the so-called gig economy.
Has that been an exacerbating factor? Look, there is a polarization of wealth in Israel, but as I say, it's mostly along that seam between secular Jews and ultra-Orthodox Jews, plus most of the Arabs in the country. That is, the Arabs are generally poorer than the Jews in general, the ultra-Orthodox are extremely poor, and the secular Israelis are the wealthier part of society.
So there is polarization of wealth, but it's more or less along this divide. Between the forward and backward-looking Israelis.
JK: So if I may ask, you've obviously written extensively about the Middle East conflict and now you have this massive new book which you've co-authored about Turkish history. Have you announced your newest book project yet?
BM: Well, I suppose I could tell you. I think I've mentioned it before. I've just completed a manuscript of a biography of a Jewish spy who was executed by the Soviet government in 1925. A man called, unusually, Sidney Riley. Unusually, because Sidney Riley isn't a common Jewish name. His actual name was Sigmund Rosenblum. But he spied for various countries, mainly for the British. He was even an officer in MI6 for a number of years, and spied against the Bolshevik government, and eventually managed to run a sort of a personal crusade against the Bolsheviks, and was executed by them in 1925. So I've written a biography of this strange character.
Uh, which will appear, I think, in the Jewish Lives series by Yale University Press. They've recently published books about Freud and Einstein and Karl Marx and Houdini and Spielberg. So they will have a book about Sidney Riley in that Jewish Lives series as well.
