to detract from the uniqueness of the holocaust. But there is nothing unique about the German holocaust of Jews per se, as events in the same century in the Congo, Turkey, Cambodia, Rwanda, and Sudan have shown. The notion of the holocaust has spurred the growth of an industry designed to extract long-ago costs of this event, which flow not to the camp survivors but to their distant cousins, usually nowhere near the camps, while serving to justify Israel’s frequent attacks on its Arab neighbors.
Yet the Turkish genocide must in principle have had large indirect benefits for the remaining population—and this I believe is the key. The immediate loss of these skilled people puts you at a disadvantage in competing with neighboring groups, but their destruction allows you to occupy niches formerly denied to you because Armenians already occupied these places. The first is temporary, while the second is for keeps. That is, for a while you may do worse against other groups, but you will soon develop to fulfill the functions of those you have destroyed. Failing counter-genocide, your new position is all but secure. A whole series of non-Armenian Turks are benefiting every day from the absence of their former compadres, and this must make admitting to the genocide especially threatening—to the legitimacy of their own positions in society. Almost everyone must have moved up after the removal of the local Armenians, while a large Armenian country now sits next door.
A LAND WITHOUT PEOPLE FOR A PEOPLE WITHOUT LAND
A key original Zionist falsehood was the slogan popularized in the 1880s that the Jewish people needed to settle in Palestine because it was “a land without people for a people without land.” Alas, there were plenty of people in Palestine. Even by 1920, after a wave of Jewish immigration, there were about 80,000 Jews in Palestine and more than 700,000 Arabs. Most of these Jewish people seemed content to live with their Arab neighbors the way they had for generations, but the Zionists had other ideas—a simple colonial project to occupy (“reclaim”) places important in their religion. The Zionist project seems to have been set from the beginning, to entice enough Jewish people to Palestine with support from the colonial power of England and from Jewish people worldwide until they had enough power to seize Israel, which, when they did, involved expelling large numbers of Arabs, destroying or confiscating their property, and refusing them any right to return or compensation of any sort so as to produce a (now) 80 percent homogeneous Jewish state in lands some of their forebears had occupied a few thousand years ago. The Zionists were nothing if not consistent. Maps they drew up in the 1920s of their future state reveal later Israeli behavior remarkably well—they show Israel as including the West Bank and Gaza, as well as southern Lebanon, which Israel did indeed occupy from 1982 until 2000, before Hezbollah finally drove it back out of Lebanon.
The notion of a people without a land occupying a land without people has been reinforced repeatedly since then. Of particular note was a book published in 1984 and widely applauded in the United States, where it was reprinted seven times in its first year alone because, among other things, “it could also affect the history of the future,” which of course is precisely the purpose of such narratives. The brand-new and far-reaching claim of this book (From Time Immemorial) was that there had been a massive—but hitherto undetected—illegal immigration of about 300,000 Arabs into Palestine during the British mandate (1920–1947), attracted by the flowering economy produced by the industrious and intelligent Jewish immigrants. This explained away roughly half the Arab population.
The book argued that the inherent superiority of the Jewish immigrants attracted Arabs in search of economic opportunities, who then illegally occupied space that with any justice should have gone to new Jewish immigrants. In addition—absent a history of Palestinians occupying their own land—there is no current refugee problem or problem of compensation. The Arabs should simply return to where they came from in the first place. Is it any wonder that Zionists in the United States fell over themselves in praise of this pathbreaking and remarkable book, and still do? But in Israel the praise has been somewhat muted, since many know that the author cooked her demographic facts thoroughly to generate her novel results. The book is, in fact, a hoax. All the available evidence shows that a natural increase of about 2.5 percent