Israel’s government broke with longstanding diplomatic caution on Sunday when the cabinet unanimously approved a proposal to recognise the mass killing of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire during the First World War as a genocide. The initiative, tabled by Foreign Minister Gideon Saar, now passes to the Knesset for ratification, but the vote in the executive marks the first time an Israeli government has formally adopted the term at the cabinet level. Israeli officials framed the step as a belated moral obligation rooted in Jewish historical experience, while acknowledging it is certain to draw a sharp rebuke from Ankara.

Speaking after the vote, Saar stated that “it is never too late to do the right thing” and called the recognition a “moral and historical duty” for the Jewish state. He stressed that the move was not an act of retaliation against Turkey’s “open hostility, terrible rhetoric and hostile actions” under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The foreign minister added that Israel now joins 32 other nations – including the United States, France, Germany and Russia – that have already classified the killings as genocide. According to Israeli officials, the proposal condemns any attempt to deny or minimise the events, which historians estimate caused between 600,000 and 1.5 million deaths and erased centuries of Armenian cultural heritage in Anatolia.

Turkey’s government, the successor state to the Ottoman Empire, has consistently rejected the genocide label, insisting that the deaths resulted from civil war and unrest and that the casualty figures are inflated. Ankara was quick to signal its displeasure even before the vote, with Vice President Cevdet Yılmaz describing the Israeli measure as “an attempt to cover up their own crimes” – a reference to the war in Gaza, where more than 73,000 Palestinians have been killed according to figures from the Hamas-run health ministry. Israel faces parallel accusations of committing genocide in Gaza, levelled by several UN bodies, Turkey and other nations, charges it denounces as antisemitic libel. Diplomats in European capitals note that the reciprocal use of the genocide charge has become a fixture of the Israel-Turkey relationship, which has unravelled since the rise of Erdoğan and deteriorated sharply after the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack and Israel’s subsequent military campaign.

For years, Israeli governments refrained from formal recognition out of concern for the strategic partnership with Turkey, once a crucial regional ally. That calculus changed as Ankara moved closer to Hamas and Erdoğan repeatedly compared Israeli leaders to Nazis. In August 2025, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the first time said he personally recognised the genocide of Armenians, Assyrians and Greeks, but no cabinet-level resolution was adopted until now. The proposal must still be approved by the Knesset, where the timing of a vote remains unclear. Armenian authorities have yet to officially comment, though in the past Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has warned against turning recognition into a geopolitical bargaining chip. The dossier now moves to the parliamentary arena, where Israel’s evolving posture is expected to be scrutinised both in Ankara and in capitals that track the parallels between historical memory and present-day accusations.