Antisemitic Tropes in the Age of Post-Soviet War - by Prof. Vladimir (Ze’ev) Khanin

The Iranian regime has spent decades declaring that it aspires to “wipe Israel off the map”, as it sees Israel as the main obstacle to the expansion of the Islamic Revolution 2    and the establishment of Islamist hegemony throughout the Greater Middle East. [...] On the other hand, Tehran wants to enhance the dependence on Iran of Armenia, its own strategic partner, in view of the drastic reduction of the Russian presence in the South Caucasus. [...] In their opinion, these are latent sentiments that rarely become active, and are mainly fueled by the defense partnership of Jerusalem and Baku and the unwillingness of Israel to recognize the 1915-16 massacres of Armenians by Turks as similar to the Holocaust. [...] (According to the official position of Jerusalem and much of Israeli society, the Turkish slaughter of the Armenians may have been abhorrent and entirely unjustified, but it is unlikely that the Turks’ ultimate goal was the extermination of all Armenians on the face of the earth. [...] It is not, therefore, analogous to the Nazi goal of destroying all the Jews in the world.) Some Armenian leaders and public figures are aware of the low diplomatic and geopolitical prospects of a never-ending discussion on the non-recognition of the Armenian genocide by Israel and are ready to admit that a more productive narrative is that of “two brotherly peoples united by centuries of cooperati.