System Of A Down’s Serj Tankian has hit out at the Israeli government, accusing them of “using” Armenian history and their “genocide and pain” to their “political advantage”.
The frontman is of Armenian descent and all four of his grandparents were survivors of the 1915 genocide that took place during World War I, and led to the deaths of between 664,000 and 1.2 million Armenians, according to United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Tankian and the band have regularly shed light on the mass killings of Armenians under the Ottoman Empire between 1915 and 1916, and even thanked former President Joe Biden for officially recognising the genocide in 2021 – a move that other American leaders often shied away from over concerns about potentially of straining the nation’s ties with Turkey.
According to EuroNews, Israel has long resisted calls to recognise it as a genocide due to its relations to Turkey. Now, amid weakening relations with Turkey over the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has now officially recognised the killings WWI as a genocide, and said his country had “fulfilled a moral duty by recognising the historical truth, and rejecting attempts to deny it”.
