essay about armenian genocide

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Armenian Genocide

By: History.com Editors

Updated: April 26, 2021 | Original: October 1, 2010

Armenian Genocide: Women and children rescued by Levon Yotneghperian, circa 1919.

The Armenian genocide was the systematic killing and deportation of Armenians by the Turks of the Ottoman Empire. In 1915, during World War I , leaders of the Turkish government set in motion a plan to expel and massacre Armenians. By the early 1920s, when the genocide finally ended, between 600,000 and 1.5 million Armenians were dead, with many more forcibly removed from the country. Today, most historians call this event a genocide: a premeditated and systematic campaign to exterminate an entire people. In 2021, U.S. President Joe Biden issued a declaration that the Ottoman Empire’s slaughter of Armenian civilians was genocide. However, the Turkish government still does not acknowledge the scope of these events.

Kingdom of Armenia

The Armenian people have made their home in the Caucasus region of Eurasia for some 3,000 years. For some of that time, the kingdom of Armenia was an independent entity: At the beginning of the 4th century A.D., for instance, it became the first nation in the world to make Christianity its official religion.

But for the most part, control of the region shifted from one empire to another. During the 15th century, Armenia was absorbed into the mighty Ottoman Empire .

Ottoman Empire

The Ottoman rulers, like most of their subjects, were Muslim. They permitted religious minorities to maintain some autonomy, but they also subjected Armenians, whom they viewed as “infidels,” to unequal and unjust treatment. Christians paid higher taxes than Muslims, for example, and had very few political or legal rights.

In spite of these obstacles, the Armenian community thrived under Ottoman rule. They tended to be better educated and wealthier than their Turkish neighbors, who in turn grew to resent their success.

This resentment was compounded by suspicions that the Christian Armenians would be more loyal to Christian governments (that of the Russians, for example, who shared an unstable border with Turkey) than they were to the Ottoman caliphate.

These suspicions grew more acute as the Ottoman Empire began to crumble: At the end of the 19th century, the despotic Turkish Sultan Abdul Hamid II—obsessed with loyalty above all, and infuriated by the nascent Armenian campaign to win basic civil rights—declared that he would solve the “Armenian question” once and for all.

“I will soon settle those Armenians,” he told a reporter in 1890. “I will give them a box on the ear which will make them…relinquish their revolutionary ambitions.”

First Armenian Massacre

Between 1894 and 1896, this “box on the ear” took the form of a state-sanctioned pogrom.

In response to large-scale protests by Armenians, Turkish military officials, soldiers and ordinary men sacked Armenian villages and cities and massacred their citizens. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians were murdered.

Young Turks

In 1908, a new government came to power in Turkey. A group of reformers who called themselves the “Young Turks” overthrew Sultan Abdul Hamid and established a more modern constitutional government.

At first, the Armenians were hopeful that they would have an equal place in this new state, but they soon learned that what the nationalistic Young Turks wanted most of all was to “Turkify” the empire. According to this way of thinking, non-Turks—and especially Christian non-Turks—were a grave threat to the new state.

World War I Begins

In 1914, the Turks entered World War I on the side of Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. (At the same time, Ottoman religious authorities declared a holy war against all Christians except their allies.)

Military leaders began to argue that the Armenians were traitors: If they thought they could win independence if the Allies were victorious, this argument went, the Armenians would be eager to fight for the enemy.

Indeed, as the war intensified, Armenians organized volunteer battalions to help the Russian army fight against the Turks in the Caucasus region. These events, and general Turkish suspicion of the Armenian people, led the Turkish government to push for the “removal” of the Armenians from the war zones along the Eastern Front.

Armenian Genocide Begins

On April 24, 1915, the Armenian genocide began: That day, the Turkish government arrested and executed several hundred Armenian intellectuals.

After that, ordinary Armenians were turned out of their homes and sent on death marches through the Mesopotamian desert without food or water.

Frequently, the marchers were stripped naked and forced to walk under the scorching sun until they dropped dead. People who stopped to rest were shot.

At the same time, the Young Turks created a “Special Organization,” which in turn organized “killing squads” or “butcher battalions” to carry out, as one officer put it, “the liquidation of the Christian elements.”

These killing squads were often made up of murderers and other ex-convicts. They drowned people in rivers, threw them off cliffs, crucified them and burned them alive. In short order, the Turkish countryside was littered with Armenian corpses.

Records show that during this “Turkification” campaign, government squads also kidnapped children, converted them to Islam and gave them to Turkish families. In some places, they raped women and forced them to join Turkish “harems” or serve as slaves. Muslim families moved into the homes of deported Armenians and seized their property.

Though reports vary, most sources agree that there were about 2 million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire at the time of the massacre. In 1922, when the genocide was over, there were just 388,000 Armenians remaining in the Ottoman Empire.

Did you know? American news outlets have also been reluctant to use the word “genocide” to describe Turkey’s crimes. The phrase “Armenian genocide” did not appear in The New York Times until 2004.

Aftermath and Legacy

After the Ottomans surrendered in 1918, the leaders of the Young Turks fled to Germany, which promised not to prosecute them for the genocide. (However, a group of Armenian nationalists devised a plan, known as Operation Nemesis , to track down and assassinate the leaders of the genocide.)

Ever since then, the Turkish government has denied that a genocide took place. The Armenians were an enemy force, they argue, and their slaughter was a necessary war measure.

Turkey is an important ally of the United States and other Western nations, and so their governments had been slow to condemn the long-ago killings. In March 2010, a U.S. Congressional panel voted to recognize the genocide. On October 29, 2019, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution that recognized the Armenian genocide. And on April 24, 2021, President Biden issued a statement, saying, "The American people honor all those Armenians who perished in the genocide that began 106 years ago today.”

The Armenian Genocide (1915-1916): Overview. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: Holocaust Encyclopedia . Armenian Genocide (1915-1923). Armenian National Institute . Armenian Genocide. Yale University: Genocide Studies Program .

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The Armenian Genocide unofficially began with the arrest of 250 Armenian intellectuals by Turkish officials on April 24, 1915. Over the next several years a series of systematic deportations and mass executions along with intentional starvation would cause the deaths of more than one million Armenians. The aftermath left the remaining Armenian population scattered, resulting in one of the greatest diasporas in the twentieth century.

Below is a condensed history of the Armenian Genocide, beginning with the life of the Armenians before the genocide and extending to the genocide's legacy today.

The Armenians before the Genocide

The Armenians and other Christian communities, including the Greeks and Assyrians, were significant minorities in the Ottoman Empire. Despite being a multi-religious and multi-ethnic state with members from all three of the great monotheistic religions (Islam, Christianity, and Judaism), the empire was dominated by ethnic Turks. The second half of the 19th century, saw the rise of Turkish nationalism that placed emphasis on the ethnic and religious identity of the majority element of the empire to the growing detriment of religious and ethno-religious minorities inhabiting the country. Beset by a series of military defeats, an ever-shrinking economy, and an overall political instability on both domestic and international fronts, the Ottoman Empire eventually turned inwards. The various Turkish nationalist movements meanwhile grew both in strength and stature, a growing sign of their influence being the nearly overnight proliferation of literature and articles that touted the uniqueness and supremacy of Turkish civilization.

The military losses that saw the further fragmentation of the empire and the ensuing reactionary nationalism would have a disastrous impact on Empire’s remaining Christian minorities, but especially the Armenian community. It left them as one of the largest Christian groups in the Ottoman Empire, geographically largely confined to Eastern Anatolia and away from other Christian populations, and thus especially vulnerable to political abuse and collective violence. Although throughout the centuries Armenians had been considered the “loyal nation,” and had risen to economic and civic prominence in the most important of imperial urban centers and in the capital, with the rise of Turkish nationalism their situation was becoming increasingly intolerable and untenable. The first Armenian political parties established around this period sought to address the increasing vulnerability of the Armenian cultural life in the empire, seeking political and economic reforms that would alleviate the growing discrimination towards the Armenian minority. This growing Armenian political awareness on one hand, and their economic overachievement in the Sultan’s domain on the other, would contribute to the atmosphere of distrust between Turks and Armenians.

The Armenian question, long a fixture of European and Ottoman diplomacy, was now becoming a fiercely debated topic of highest importance in Turkish politics. Political and economic reforms advocated by European powers and at least on paper embraced by Ottoman authorities was fast becoming a mere afterthought given how fast events on the ground were developing. Tensions would ultimately come to a head when a series of pogroms were unleashed against the Armenians and to a lesser extent against other Christian groups in the empire. The Hamidian massacres of 1894-1896 claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of Armenians, serving, in the words of one Armenian historian, as a “dress rehearsal” for the Armenian Genocide of 1915.

In the years leading up to the genocide, the Ottoman authorities would further tighten the restrictions for learning, property ownership, and religious practices for minorities, including the Armenians, in the empire. This would foreshadow future events.

The Armenian Genocide

It can be difficult to pinpoint an exact date when the Armenian Genocide begins because it was the culmination of a series of policies targeting the Ottoman Empire’s Armenian population. In February 1915, Armenians serving in the Ottoman army were removed from active duty and forced into labor battalions. However, April 24, 1915 is widely considered the date the genocide began because it was then that Turkish authorities arrested 250 Armenian intellectuals. The reason given was fear that the Armenians were in league with Russia, the Ottoman Empire’s historic rival, and could serve as a potential fifth column. The hysteria created by World War I created a perfect cover for the Ottoman government led by the nationalist ruling party of Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), a.k.a. the Young Turks, to set in motion its genocidal plan against their Armenian fellow citizens.

In May 1915, the deportation of the Armenians from Empire’s eastern provinces began apace. A series of consecutive laws passed by the Turkish government gave it the right to confiscate or otherwise impound Armenian properties and businesses left behind by the departing deportees as a wartime necessity. Other restrictions of similar or harsher nature soon followed, leaving the Armenian population defenseless, property-less, and generally destitute. Forced marches, massacres became more commonplace and widespread, especially on deportation routes. The Turkish military instituted a number of gruesome methods to exterminate the Armenian population, some of which would be adopted and refined by the Nazis a mere 25 years later. Those who were not killed outright by the military often faced starvation along the way. Rapes of women and girls were also commonplace.

The Armenians who managed to survive the marches were sent on foot to concentration camps created by the Ottoman military. These camps were located near modern Turkey’s southern border, in the Syrian desert of Deir ez-Zor. The Turkish government routinely withheld food and water from the Armenians in the camp. The lack of nourishment, coupled with unsanitary conditions and widespread disease, meant life expectancy at the camps was extraordinarily short. Armenian women and girls were often sold while in the camps by Turkish gendarmes to local Arab bedouins and chieftains. Many of the Armenian women were also routinely abducted and taken as forced brides by Turkish and Kurdish militiamen.

Much of the genocide would come to an end in 1918 with the conclusion of World War I.

Reaction to the Genocide

The international community was fully aware of the genocide as it was unfolding. Several European countries and the United States had active consular missions throughout the Ottoman Empire providing a detailed account of events during the Armenian Genocide. In addition, Christian missionary organizations and charities were also active in the area at the time. It is through these missions that newspapers of the period were able to get regular updates on the events in Turkey. In the years after the genocide, several western witnesses to the atrocities would publish their own accounts, most notably Henry Morgenthau , the former US Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire.

Aid groups, especially from the United States, sent groups to provide relief to the Armenian people. In the aftermath of the genocide, thousands of Armenian people were adopted by westerners. In all, relief groups raised more than $100 million to provide aid to more than two million Armenian refugees.

Between 1919 and 1920, a series of Turkish court cases issued guilty verdicts to the Three Pashas, three senior officials and orchestrators of the genocide. These convictions were for naught, as all three had left the country. One hundred and fifty Turkish men implicated in the genocide were arrested by Allied authorities and sent to Malta for trial. All the detainees would eventually be returned to Turkey without trial. In the end, there was no punishment for those involved with the Armenian Genocide.

The lack of justice inspired Polish law student Raphael Lemkin to begin his work defining the term genocide. The massacres against Armenians influenced Lemkin’s drafting of a law to punish and prevent genocide. Although it would take more than 20 years, Lemkin would eventually see the crime of genocide made illegal by the international community when the United Nations passed the Genocide Convention in 1948.

The Armenian Genocide, Denial, and Memory

As the first of the modern genocides, the Armenian Genocide holds a complicated place in world history. For decades, the Armenian community, dispersed throughout the globe, struggled with recognition. Today, more than twenty countries officially acknowledge the atrocities as genocide. Uruguay was the first to officially recognize the genocide back in 1965. Several countries, including Austria, Switzerland, Slovakia and, most recently, Cyprus in early April 2015, have gone as far to make genocide denial a crime.

The topic of recognition is a largely political issue in the United States. Turkey is seen as a strategic ally, especially post 9/11, making leaders in Washington, DC cautious about officially recognizing the genocide. However, 48 states have taken steps to officially call the massacre of the Armenians genocide, the latest state to do so being Indiana. In Minnesota, the genocide was first marked by a proclamation by Governor Jesse Ventura.

Two countries officially deny the Ottoman government’s role in the elimination of the Armenian community—Azerbaijan and Turkey. Turkey has taken a far more aggressive approach to genocide denial, threatening lawsuits and calling into question the authenticity of academic research into the Armenian Genocide. One famous example is Dr. Taner Akçam, a Turkish scholar. Dr. Akçam has written extensively on the Armenian Genocide, and came under harsh criticism by Turkish or pro-Turkish scholars. In 2007, while a guest lecturer at the University of Minnesota, Dr. Akçam was sued under Turkey’s laws that forbid ‘insulting Turkish-ness.’ The lawsuit was eventually thrown out. The University of Minnesota itself was sued by a pro-Turkish American organization which questioned the authenticity of materials found on the Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies website. In 2011, this suit was also dismissed.

Besides lawsuits, threats of lawsuits, and public denunciation by Turkish officials the denial of the Armenian Genocide has also academic dimensions with studies designed to cast doubt on the veracity of eyewitness reports, consular dispatches from sites of massacres, and relativization of the numbers of persons killed. Despite the persistence of denial, the overwhelming majority of historians and genocide scholars agree that the massacres of the Armenian citizens of the Ottoman Empire cannot but be classified as genocide, given the intent of the perpetrators, the scope of the massacres, and their social, demographic and cultural consequences.

Beyond the reach of international politics, the legacy of the Armenian Genocide continues to be explored by a new generation of Armenians and Armenian-Americans through film, music, and literature.

Court Dismisses Turkish Coalition Lawsuit Filed Against the University of Minnesota

On March 30, 2011, US District Court Judge Donovan Frank dismissed a lawsuit filed by the Turkish Coalition of America against the University of Minnesota. The lawsuit arose from materials posted on the university’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies (CHGS) website, including a list of websites CHGS considered “unreliable” for purposes of conducting scholarly research. The Turkish Coalition claimed the university violated its constitutional rights, and committed defamation, by including the Turkish Coalition website on the “unreliable” websites list.

Genocide Studies Program

Armenian genocide.

The Armenian minority in Ottoman Turkey had been subject to sporadic persecutions over the centuries. In 1894-96, these were stepped up with pogrom-like massacres. With the outbreak of the First World War, the Young Turk government proceeded far more radically against the Armenians. From 1915, inspired by rabid nationalism and secret government orders, Turks drove the Armenians from their homes and massacred them in such numbers that outside observers at the time described what was happening as ‘a massacre like none other,’ or ‘a massacre that changes the meaning of massacre.’ Although we do not have reliable figures on the death toll, many historians accept that between 800,000 and one million people were killed, often in unspeakably cruel ways, or marched to their deaths in the deserts to the south. Unknown numbers of others converted to Islam or in other ways survived but were lost to the Armenian culture. At the time a number of influential people spoke out against these atrocities, most notably the distinguished historian Arnold J. Toynbee, but it has only been since the 1970s that scholars have devoted anything like sustained attention to this human catastrophe. There is more than enough evidence to suggest that the mass murder of the Armenians was a case of genocide, as that crime was subsequently defined in the United Nations Genocide Convention of 1948. Surviving perpetrators of the Armenian genocide could certainly have been held to account in an international criminal court.

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Last updated 26 may 2015, armenian genocide.

In early 1915 the Young Turk government of the Ottoman Empire decided to deport hundreds of thousands of Armenians and Assyrians from their homes into distant parts of the Empire, eventually into the deserts of Syria. Armenian soldiers in the Ottoman Army were demobilized and massacred; women and children were driven on long marches, starved, beaten, and often murdered. These events have been called the first major genocide of the 20 th century, but the government of the Turkish state and many of its supporters deny that a genocide took place; rather, they claim that the government acted to suppress an Armenian insurrection and people were killed in the process. New scholarship confirms that the Ottoman government intended the elimination of Armenians and Assyrians to render them impotent in the contest for lands in eastern Anatolia.

1 Introduction
2 The Background of Ethnic and Religious Minorities
3 Young Turk Revolution 1908
4 Turkish Nationalism and the Catastrophic Results of the War for Armenians
5 The “Evolution” of Armenian Genocide
6 Mass Deportation, Forced Marches, and Death Camps
7 The Politics behind the Genocide
8 Genocide as Response to Crisis
9 Conclusion

Selected Bibliography

Introduction ↑.

Historians generally have explained (or excused) the Turkish deportations and massacres of the Armenians during the First World War as the result of conflicting ideologies, religious or nationalist; as the understandable and justified response of the Young Turk triumvirate to Armenian subversion in time of war; or as a long-planned elimination of non-Turks in Anatolia to create a national homeland for the Turkish people. Such ideological or political explanations necessarily focus on the leadership of the two peoples in conflict - the Ottoman government and the Armenian revolutionaries - without full examination of deeper causes and the broad social and demographic dimensions of the late Ottoman environment. While a focus on the political and intellectual elites is essential to explain the instigating events of early 1915 that precipitated the Armenian tragedy, the scope of the killing and the degree of popular violence on the part of ordinary Turks, Kurds, Circassians, and others, requires investigation of both the complex evolution of interethnic relations of the Ottoman peoples as well as consideration of the international competition among the Great Powers that constrained Ottoman decision makers. Existing histories have looked upon Armenians as little more than innocent victims, without understanding their intimate connections to Ottoman society (which in part explains the passivity of the overwhelming majority), or examining the ideologies and influences that encouraged a committed minority to engage in armed resistance. Historians must ponder why the relatively benign symbiosis of several centuries, during which the ruling Ottomans referred to the Armenians as the "loyal millet" ( millet-i sadika ), broke down into the genocidal violence of 1915. What were the experiences and perceptions, the cognitive conclusions and affective understandings of Ottoman leaders and ordinary people, which led to the mass killing of hundreds of thousands of Armenian and Assyrian subjects of the Ottoman Empire ?

The Background of Ethnic and Religious Minorities ↑

Armenians , like Assyrians, Greeks, Jews, and other non-Sunni Muslim peoples of the Empire , were not only an ethnic and religious minority in a country dominated demographically and politically by Muslims, but given an ideology of inherent Muslim superiority and the segregation of minorities , were also an underclass. They were subjects who, however high they might rise in trade, commerce, or even governmental service, were never to be considered equal to the ruling Muslims. They would always remain gavur : infidels inferior to the Muslims. Active persecution of non-Muslims was relatively rare in the earlier centuries of the Ottoman Empire, but discrimination was ubiquitous and sanctioned by law and religion. The inferiority of the gavur was voluntary, Muslims believed, since unbelievers could at any time convert to Islam and thereby change their status. When Christians and Jews maintained their separate identities and communities and became visibly wealthier, effectively identified with Europeans, resentment of their enhanced status grew among Muslims. The “natural,” divinely ordained hierarchy of Muslim superiority appeared challenged by these alien elements in their midst. Unbelievers were to "stay in their place" and not appear to be equal or better than the Muslims. As imperialist Europe and nationalist movements threatened Ottoman control of the Balkans, hostilities and fears of decline ate away at the formerly cosmopolitan idea of an empire tolerant of its diverse constituent peoples.

Even in the Tanzimat period (1839-1878), when reforming rulers and bureaucrats eliminated some of the most excessive practices against their subjects and attempted to create the basis for a Rechtsstaat in the Empire, the Christians only partially benefited from the movement toward equality under the law. Armenians in eastern Anatolia repeatedly complained about armed Kurdish bands that took their livestock, land, and women. Occasionally Muslims rose in angry pogroms against Christians, and state authorities tended to excuse such behavior as an understandable response to Armenian rebellion. Beginning in the late 1870s and through the following decade, the Armenians of the provinces petitioned in greater numbers to their leaders in Istanbul and to the European consuls stationed in eastern Anatolia. Hundreds of complaints were filed; few were dealt with. Although the most brutal treatment of Armenians was at the hands of Kurdish tribesmen, the Armenians found the Ottoman state officials absent, unreliable, or simply another source of oppression. Corruption was rampant. Ordinary Muslims suffered from it as well, but the Armenians had the added burden of not belonging to the favored Muslim faithful. Massacres were reported from all parts of eastern Anatolia, particularly after the formation in the early 1890s of the officially sanctioned Kurdish military units known as the Hamidiye . Against this background of growing Kurdish aggression, Western and Russian indifference, and the collapse of the Tanzimat reform movement with the coming to power of Abdülhamid II, Sultan of the Turks (1842-1918) , a small number of Armenians, many from the Russian Empire and influenced by the radical intelligentsia of Russian Transcaucasia, turned to a revolutionary strategy. Armenian revolutionary parties - most importantly the Hunchaks and the Dashnaks - arose from a number of self-defense groups within Russia and Turkey, a tradition of resistance to state intervention characteristic of some highland Armenians, like those of Zeytun and Sasun. Armenian radicals, along with Young Turk and Macedonian revolutionaries, were seen as a serious threat to the sultan’s despotism, and in 1894-1896 massive violence led to the death of hundreds of thousands of Armenians in Anatolia.

Young Turk Revolution 1908 ↑

When Ottoman military officers joined with Young Turk intellectuals early in the 20 th century, the opposition proved able to bring down the Hamidian regime (July 1908). Ottoman Armenians and other minorities joyfully greeted the “ revolution ” that brought the Young Turks to power. They hoped that the restoration of the liberal constitution would provide a political mechanism for peaceful development within the framework of a representative parliamentary system. The leading Armenian political party, the Dashnaktsutiun , had been loosely allied with the Young Turk Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) and continued to collaborate with them up to the outbreak of the Great War. Nevertheless, the deep social hostilities between the peoples of the Empire persisted, indeed worsened, in the first two decades of the twentieth century.

Politically, most Ottoman Armenians sought a future within the Empire. Reform of the more repressive Ottoman institutions like tax farming, guarantees of equality under the law, and perhaps autonomy under a Christian governor for the Anatolian provinces, made up the program of the Armenian liberals. After 1908, the revolutionaries turned to parliamentary politics, and even the most radical agreed to work for reforms within the Ottoman constitutional regime. Both the Tanzimat reform movement and the Young Turk government that came to power in 1908 promoted a notion of legal protection of non-Muslims in a program that came to be known as Ottomanism ( osmanlılık ). The ideological umbrella of Ottomanism, however, was broad enough to include under it those who believed that the unity of the Empire could be best guaranteed by having the Ottoman Turks rule over the other nationalities. While some Ottoman reformers were prepared to go as far as the liberal Prince Mehmed Sabaheddin (1879-1948) and call for a federation of equal nations, others used the guise of Ottomanism to mask their Turkish nationalist or Pan-Turkic preferences. In the decade from 1908 to 1918 Turkish nationalism, which included virulent hostility to non-Muslims, increasingly dominated leading intellectual and political circles close to the Young Turks.

Some 2 million Christian Armenians lived in the Ottoman lands in 1915, most of them peasants and townspeople in the six provinces of eastern Anatolia. In an Anatolian population estimated to be between 15 and 17.5 million inhabitants, Armenians were outnumbered by their Muslim neighbors in most locations, though they often lived in homogeneous villages and sections of towns, and occasionally dominated larger rural and urban areas. [1] The most influential and prosperous Armenians lived in the imperial capital, Istanbul (Constantinople), where their visibility made them the target of both official and popular resentment from many Muslims. The mountainous plateau of eastern Anatolia - that Armenians considered to be historic Armenia - was an area in which the central government had only intermittent authority. An intense four-sided struggle for power, position, and survival pitted the agents of the Ottoman government, the Kurdish nomadic leaders, the semi-autonomous Turkish notables of the towns, and the Armenians against one another. Local Turkish officials ran the towns with little regard to central authority, and Kurdish beys held much of the countryside under their sway. Often the only way Istanbul could make its will felt was by sending in the army. Though Kurds had repeatedly revolted against the Ottoman state and collaborated with the invading Russians in the 19 th century, the Sublime Porte saw Armenians as a more seriously subversive element, since European powers, most importantly Russia, promoted their protection and used the “Armenian Question” as a wedge into Ottoman internal affairs. Encouraging Muslim resentment and fear of the Armenians, the state created an Armenian scapegoat that could be blamed for the defeats and failures of the Ottoman government. The social system in eastern Anatolia was sanctioned by violence, often state violence, and the claims of the Armenians for a more just relationship were neglected or rejected. Ottoman governments recognized no right of popular resistance, and acts of rebellion were seen as the result of the artificial intervention of outside agitators and disloyal Armenian subjects.

Social grievances in towns, along with the population pressure and competition for resources in agriculture, were part of a toxic mix of social and political elements that provided the environment for growing hostility toward the Armenians. Whatever resentments the poor peasant population of eastern Anatolia may have felt toward the people in towns - the places where they received low prices for their produce, where they felt their social inferiority most acutely, and where they were alien to and unwanted by the better-dressed people - were easily transferred to the Armenians. The catalyst for killing, however, was not spontaneously generated out of the tinder of social and cultural tensions. It came from the state itself: from officials and conservative clergy who had for decades perceived Armenians as alien to the Ottoman Empire, and from dangerous revolutionaries and separatists who threatened the integrity of the state. Armenians were imagined to be responsible for the troubles of the Empire, allies of the anti-Ottoman European powers, and the introduction of politically radical ideas, including trade unionism and socialism, to the Empire.

Turkish Nationalism and the Catastrophic Results of the War for Armenians ↑

As Europe drifted through the last decade before World War I, the Ottoman government experienced a series of political and military defeats: the annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina by Austro-Hungary in 1908, the subsequent declaration of independence by Bulgaria , the merger of Crete with Greece , revolts in Albania in 1910-1912, losses to Italy in Libya (1911), and in the course of two Balkan Wars (1912-1913) the diminution of Ottoman territory in Europe and the forced migration of hundreds of thousands of Muslims from Europe into Anatolia. As their liberal strategies failed to unify and strengthen the Empire, the Young Turk leaders gradually shifted away from their original Ottomanist views of a multinational empire based on guarantees of civil and minority rights to a more Turkish nationalist ideology that emphasized the dominant role of Turks. In desperation a group of Young Turk officers, led by Ismail Enver Pasha (1881-1922) , seized the government in a coup d'état in 1913, and for the next five years, years fateful for all Armenians, a triumvirate of Enver, Ahmet Cemal Pasha (1872-1922) , and Mehmed Talat Pasha (1874-1921) ruled the Empire. Their regime marked the triumph of Turkish nationalism within the government itself.

This shift toward Turkish nationalism left the Armenian political leadership in an impossible position. Torn between continuing to cooperate with the Young Turks in the hope that some gains might be won for the Armenians and breaking with their undependable political allies and going over to the opposition, the Dashnaks decided to maintain their alliance with the ruling party. Other Armenian cultural and political leaders, however, most notably the Hunchak party, opposed further collaboration with the government. As the Ottomans entered the First World War, even as Armenian soldiers joined the Ottoman Army to fight against the enemies of their government, the situation grew extremely ominous for the dangerously exposed Armenians.

What was then known as “the Great War” was a catastrophe for all the peoples of the Ottoman Empire and most completely for the Armenians and Assyrians. Of the more than 20 million subjects of the sultan, perhaps as many as 5 million would perish because of the decision by the CUP to join what was for them a war not of necessity but of choice. Most of the victims were civilians. 18 percent of Anatolian Muslims would die: the casualties of battle, famine, disease, and governmental disorganization. About 90 percent of the Armenians would be gone by the end of the war - deported, massacred, forcibly converted to Islam, or exiled beyond the borders of the new Turkey. In the twelve years from 1912 to 1924, the non-Muslim population in Ottoman Asia Minor fell from roughly 20 percent to 2 percent. [2]

The Young Turks entered the war to save, even enhance, their empire, only to preside over its demise. The war laid the foundations for the Empire’s successor, the national state created by a Turkish nationalist movement, by ethnically cleansing what would now become the “heartland” of Turks and mobilizing millions of ordinary Muslims to fight for their “fatherland.” “In Turkey’s collective memory today,” a historian of the Ottoman war writes, “the Ottomans lost the First World War; the Turks won it.” [3]

The Ottoman Empire fought from 1914 to 1918 on nine different fronts, from the Dardanelles and the Balkans to Palestine and Arabia to the Caucasus and Persia. Over 3 million Ottomans, mostly Turks, were conscripted to fight the war against the Entente. An estimated 771,844 were killed: over half by disease. The mortality rate reached 25 percent. [4] Only Serbia would suffer the loss of a higher percentage of its population than the Ottomans. The war blurred the distinctions between civilians and the military. Violence would be visited upon all citizens in this total war . Civil society would suffer enormously, while the state’s power would be extended into society in unprecedented ways. The gross domestic product in Turkey in the 1920s was half the pre-war level. [5] The urban populations of the region would not recover until the 1950s. Millions of people would be moved, either conscripted or forcibly deported by their government. Every tenth person in the Ottoman Empire would become a displaced person in the years of war. [6] Hundreds of thousands would be slaughtered because of state policy, and further hundreds of thousands would be forcibly converted to Islam, losing their original identity as Christians.

The “Evolution” of Armenian Genocide ↑

What would evolve into genocide began haphazardly in policies designed both to rearrange the demographic topography of Anatolia and to prepare for the war with Russia and its European allies. For the Young Turks the war was conceived as a transformative, revolutionary opportunity, a moment to gamble in order to save their empire and make it more secure. How that might be accomplished was influenced and shaped by their own understanding of what they desired, who their friends were, and who had to be eliminated in order to realize their emerging vision. As they worked out their jerry-built design of the future empire and improvised the means to achieve it, the party leaders consolidated their hold over the state. When Enver became minister of war in January 1914, he immediately purged the army of hundreds of officers, solidifying the military’s loyalty to himself and the CUP. The Ministry of Interior under Talat took command of the Ottoman gendarmerie. To realize their ambitions in the east the Young Turks organized a new Special Organization ( Teşkilat-ı Mahsusa ) similar in aims to an already existing paramilitary and working eventually in tandem with the original organization. [7] Headed by Doctors Behaeddin Şakir (1874-1922) and Selânikli Mehmet Nazım Bey (1870-1926) , the organization was financed and supplied by the Ministry of War but in cooperation with other parts of the government and under the direct supervision of the party. Formed initially for covert action in Russian Caucasia and Persia, the new Teşkilat-ı Mahsusa recruited tribesmen - Circassians, Kurds, and others - as well as prisoners, criminals, and bandits for its ranks. Prisons were emptied on orders of the government. More than 10,000 imprisoned criminals, many of them convicted of murder, were given a new role as fighters in the squadrons of the Special Organization. By fighting for the fatherland these former “people without honor” ( namussuz ) became respectable ( namuslu ). [8] Referred to as çetes (gangs, guerrillas), these specially recruited fighters were available to the Young Turks independently from the regular army and could be used for actions against designated civilians. [9] They played a decisive and disastrous role in the destruction of the Armenians.

Having suffered territorial losses in the Balkan Wars and been forced to accept a European-imposed reform in the “Armenian provinces” in 1914, the Young Turks joined the Central Powers ( Germany and Austro-Hungary ) as they waged war against the Entente ( Great Britain , France , and Russia) in a desperate effort to restore and strengthen their empire. Armenians precariously straddled the Russian–Ottoman front, and both the Russians and the Ottomans attempted to recruit Armenians in their campaigns against their enemies. Most Ottoman Armenians supported and even fought alongside the Ottomans against the Russians, while Armenians in Russia, organized into volunteer units, joined the tsarist campaign. In late 1914 and early 1915 massacres of Christians - Armenians and Assyrians - and Muslims occurred in the Caucasus and Persia, where Russians and Ottoman forces faced each other. Anxious to fight the Russians in 1914, the Ottoman government instigated the war by attacking Russian ships in the Black Sea. Enver led a huge army against tsarist forces on the eastern front late in the year, and at first, he was dramatically victorious. Kars was cut off and Sarıkamış surrounded. But the Ottoman troops were not prepared for the harsh winter in the Armenian highlands, and early in 1915 the Russians, accompanied by Armenian volunteer units from the Caucasus, pushed the Ottoman Army back. A disastrous defeat followed in which Enver lost three-quarters of his army - more than 45,000 men. Some Armenian soldiers deserted, and a few Ottoman Armenians fled to the areas occupied by the Russians, confirming in Turkish minds the treachery that marked the Christian minorities. Enver's defeat on the Caucasian front was the prelude to the "final solution" of the Armenian Question.

Mass Deportation, Forced Marches, and Death Camps ↑

The Russians posed a real danger to the Ottomans, just as the Allied forces were attacking Gallipoli in the west. In this moment of defeat and desperation, the triumvirate in Istanbul decided to demobilize the Armenian soldiers in the Ottoman Army and to deport Armenians from eastern Anatolia. The first victims of the state were these disarmed Armenian soldiers, who were easily segregated and systematically killed. Thus, the muscle of the Armenian communities was removed. Almost immediately, the government ordered the deportation of Armenians from cities, towns, and villages in the east, ostensibly as a necessary military measure to ensure the security of the rear. Soon Armenians throughout the country were forced to gather what belongings they could carry or transport and leave their homes at short notice. The exodus of Armenians was haphazard and brutal; irregular forces, local Kurds, and Circassians, cut down hundreds of thousands of Christians, as civil and military officials oversaw and facilitated the removal of the Empire’s Armenian and Assyrian subjects. When some Armenians resisted the encroaching massacres in the city of Van in eastern Anatolia, the CUP had the leading intellectuals and politicians in Istanbul, several of them deputies to the Ottoman Parliament, arrested and sent from the city (24 April 1915). Most of them perished in the next few months. Thus was the brain of the Ottoman Armenian people removed: the intellectual and political leadership and the connective tissue that linked separate communities together. Women, children , and old men in town after town were marched through the valleys and mountains of eastern Anatolia. Missionaries, diplomats, and foreign military officers witnessed the convoys, recorded what they saw, and sent reports home about death marches and killing fields. Survivors reached the deserts of Syria where they languished in concentration camps; many starved to death, and new massacres occurred.

The canvas on which the mass deportation and massacre of Armenians and Assyrians took place was a landscape that stretched from Istanbul almost 1,000 miles to the east, beyond the eastern ends of the Ottoman Empire into Persia and the Caucasus. Mountains, valleys, rivers, and deserts were the topographies through which hundreds of thousands of uprooted people moved in convoys. Guarded by Ottoman soldiers and gendarmes, they were attacked and slaughtered by the çetes (gangs of irregular fighters) of the Teşkilat-ı Mahsusa (Special Organization), and by Kurds, Turks, and Circassians. Driven to exhaustion, starvation, and suicide, hundreds of thousands would perish; others would be forced to emigrate or convert to Islam to save their lives. Men died in greater numbers; many woman and children were taken into the families of the local Muslims. Tens of thousands of orphans found some refuge in the protection of foreign missionaries. It is conservatively estimated that between 600,000 and 1 million were slaughtered, or died on the marches. Other tens of thousands fled north, to the relative safety of the Russian Caucasus. Hundreds of thousands of women and children, we now know, were compelled to convert to Islam and survived in the families of Kurds, Turks, and Arabs. Those who observed the killings, as well as the Allied powers engaged in a war against the Ottomans, repeatedly claimed that they had never witnessed anything like it. The word for what happened had not yet been invented. There was no concept to mark the state-targeted killing of a designated ethnoreligious people. At the time, those who needed a word borrowed from the bible and called it “holocaust.”

What might have been rationalized as a military necessity, given the imperial ambitions and distorted perceptions of the Ottoman leaders, quickly became a massive attack on their Armenian subjects, a systematic program of murder and pillage. An act of panic and vengeance metamorphosed monstrously into an opportunity to rid Anatolia once and for all of the one people that stood in the way of the Young Turks' plans for a more purely Muslim Empire, dominated by ethnic Turks. A whole category based on religion and ethnicity, the people of a particular millet (religious community), were singled out as potentially dangerous to the state. The deportations of Armenians and Assyrians were rationalized at the time and later as a military necessity, framed by the imperial ambitions and distorted perceptions of the Ottoman leaders, though the government refused to take responsibility for the massacres, claiming that they were caused by local officials and excessive hatred of Armenians by common people.

The Politics behind the Genocide ↑

The causes of what has come to be known as the first genocide of the 20 th century were both immediate and long-term. [10] The environment in which genocide occurred - the imperial appetites of the Great Powers, the fierce competition for land and goods in eastern Anatolia, the aspirations and aims of Armenians, and the ambitions and ideas of the Young Turks - shaped the cognitive and emotional state of the perpetrators and their “affective disposition,” that allowed them, indeed, in their minds required them, to eliminate whole peoples. In the context of war and invasion, a mental and emotional universe developed that included perceived threats, the Manichaean construction of internal enemies, and a pervasive fear that triggered a deadly, pathological response to real and imagined immediate and future dangers. A government had come to believe that among its subject peoples whole “nations” presented an immediate threat to the security of the state. Defense of the Empire and of the “Turkish nation” became the rationale for mass murder. Armenians were neither passive nor submissive victims, but the power to decide their fate was largely out of their hands. A “great inequality in agency” existed between Young Turks and their armed agents and the segmented and dispersed Armenians. [11]

The purpose of the genocide was to eliminate the perceived threat of the Armenians within the Ottoman Empire by reducing their numbers and scattering them in isolated, distant places, and to replace them with Muslim refugees who had fled from the Balkans. The destruction of the Ermeni milleti was carried out in three different but related ways: dispersion, massacre, and assimilation by conversion to Islam. A perfectly rational (and rationalist) explanation, then, for the genocide appears to be adequate: a strategic goal to secure the Empire by elimination of an existential threat to the state and the Turkish (or Islamic) people. But, before the strategic goal and the “rational” choices of instruments to be used can be considered, it is necessary to explain how the existential threat was imagined; how the Armenian and Assyrian enemy was historically and culturally constructed; and what cognitive and emotional processes shaped the affective disposition of the perpetrators that compelled them to carry out massive uprooting and murder of specifically targeted peoples, and to believe that such actions were justified.

Rather than being a struggle between primordial nations (as imagined by nationalists) inevitably confronting one another and contesting sovereignty over a disputed land, the genocide was the result of an accelerating construction of different ethnoreligious communities within the complex context of an empire with its possibilities of multiple and hybrid identities and coexistence. The hierarchies, inequities, institutionalized differences, and repressions that characterized imperial life and rule, had for centuries allowed people of different religions, cultures, and languages to live together. Armenians and others acquiesced to their position in the imperial hierarchy and even developed some affection for the polity in which they lived. Shared experiences as Ottomans in some cases led to material prosperity and cultural hybridity, but always under conditions of insecurity and, often capricious, governance. The imperial paradigm met its greatest challenges from what might be lumped together under the concept of “progress”: the technological and industrial advancement of the capitalist West, which rendered the Ottoman Empire relatively “backward” in the internationally competitive marketplace, as well as the idea of equality that challenged the differentiated and unequal treatment of the various peoples of the Ottoman realm. Religion, language, and culture distinguished the millets - the Muslim, Armenian, Greek, Catholic, Protestant, Assyrian, and Jewish - one from another, yet members of all of them could aspire to be Ottoman and participate in the cultural, social, and even political life of the Empire without ever achieving full equality with the ruling institution.

From abroad, two powerful influences shaped the evolution of the various Ottoman peoples: the increasingly hegemonic discourse of the nation, which redefined the nature of political communities and legitimized culture as the basis of sovereignty and possession of a “homeland”; and the imperial ambitions of European powers, which repeatedly intervened in Ottoman politics, hiving off parts of the Empire’s territory, hollowing out the sultan’s sovereignty, and insisting on protection of his Christian subjects. Migration of some peoples out of the Empire and others into it, competition over land, particularly in eastern Anatolia, Armenian resistance to old forms of “feudal” subjugation to the Kurds - all contributed to structural and dynamic influences that generated a mental world of opposition and hostility among the millets .

Determined to save their empire, the Young Turks came to power at a moment of radical disintegration of their state that was threatened, in their minds, both by the great European powers and the non-Turkic peoples (not only by Balkan Christians, Armenians, and Greeks, but Muslim Kurds, Albanians, and Arabs as well). Clear to those Young Turks who eventually won the political contest by 1914 was that “Turks” would dominate in one way or another, and that this imperial community would not be one of civic equality. It would, in other words, be neither an ethnically homogeneous nation state like the paradigmatic states of Western Europe, nor a multinational state of diverse peoples equal under the law. It would remain an empire with some peoples dominant over others. [12] One of the most radical of the Turkish nationalists, Ziya Gökalp (1876-1924) , stated, “The people is like a garden. We are supposed to be its gardeners! First, the bad shoots are to be cut. And then the scion is to be grafted.” [13]

Genocide as Response to Crisis ↑

The Armenian genocide was not planned long in advance, but was a contingent reaction to a moment of crisis that grew more radical over time. Yet genocide became possible as a technique of state security only after a long gestation of a militant, deeply hostile anti-Armenian disposition. The genocide should be distinguished from the earlier episodes of conservative restoration of order by repression (the Hamidian massacres of 1894-1896) or urban ethnic violence (Adana, 1909). Although there were similarities with the brutal policies of massacre and deportation that earlier regimes used to keep order, the very scale of the Armenian genocide and its intended effects - to rid Anatolia and other parts of the Empire of a entire people - make it a far more radical, indeed revolutionary, transformation of the imperial setup. Neither religiously motivated nor a struggle between two contending nationalisms, one of which destroyed the other, the genocide was the product of a pathological response of desperate leaders who sought security against a people they had both construed as enemies and driven into radical opposition to the regime under which they had lived for centuries. While an anti-Armenian disposition existed and grew more virulent within the Ottoman elite long before the war, and some extremists contemplated radical solutions to the Armenian Question, particularly after the Balkan Wars, the World War not only presented an opportunity for carrying out the most revolutionary program against the Armenians, but provided the particular conjuncture that convinced the Young Turk triumvirate to deploy ethnic cleansing and genocide against the Armenians. Had there been no World War there would have been no genocide, not only because there would have been no “fog of war” to cover up the events but because the radical sense of endangerment among Turks would not have been as acute. As spring approached in 1915, and the Armenians could be linked to the Russian advance as collaborators, the governing few believed that the circumstances were propitious to remove the Armenians. Ziya Gökalp, who like so many others saw the genocide as necessary or even forced on the Ottomans, could with confidence write, “there was no Armenian massacre, there was a Turkish-Armenian arrangement. They stabbed us in the back, we stabbed them back.” [14] What was done had to be done in the name of national security, and so a kind of lawful lawlessness was permitted.

The choice of genocide was not inevitable. Predicated on long-standing and ever more extreme affective dispositions and attitudes that had demonized the Armenians as a threat that needed to be dealt with, the ultimate choice was made by specific leaders at a particular historical conjuncture when the threat seemed to them most palpable. The Young Turks’ sense of their own vulnerability - combined with resentment at what they took to be Armenians’ privileged status, Armenian dominance over Muslims in some spheres of life, and the preference of many Armenians for Christian Russia - fed a fantasy that the Armenians presented an existential threat to Turks, not only an immediate menace but a future peril as well.

The catalytic moment that triggered the most brutal response to anxiety about the future came with the World War. There was no blueprint for genocide elaborated before or even in the early months of war, but the disposition to dispose of the Armenians had already been forming in the decade before Sarajevo . The Armenian genocide was both the result of increasingly radical attitudes of Turkish national imperialists and triggered by the events of 1914-1915: the imposition of the European reform plan; the breakdown of CUP–Armenian relations when the Dashnaks refused to instigate rebellion among Caucasian Armenians; the colossal losses at Sarıkamış; and the rapid reconstruction of Armenians as an imminent internal danger. Those who perpetrated genocide operated within their own delusional rationality. [15] The Young Turks acted on fears and resentments that had been generated over time and directed their efforts to resolve their anxieties by dealing with those they perceived to threaten their survival - not with their external enemies but an internal enemy they saw allied to the Entente - the Armenians. What to denialists and their sympathizers appears to be a rational and justified strategic choice to eliminate a rebellious and seditious population, in this account is seen as the outcome of the Young Turk leaders’ pathological construction of the Armenian enemy. [16] The actions that the Young Turks decided upon were based in an emotional disposition that led to distorted interpretations of social reality and exaggerated estimations of threats. [17] The conviction that Armenians desired to form an independent state was a fantasy of the Young Turks and a few Armenian extremists. The great majority of Armenians had been willing to live within the Ottoman Empire if their lives and property could be secured. They clung to the belief that a future was possible within the Empire long after it seemed to some to be reasonable. Still, they had been socialized as Ottomans: this was their home, and what they knew. Only when their own government once again turned them into pariahs did some of them defect or resist.

The Armenian genocide, along with the killing of Assyrians and the expulsion of the Anatolian Greeks, laid the ground for the more homogeneous nation state that arose from the ashes of the Empire. Like many other states, including Australia, Israel, and the United States, the emergence of the Republic of Turkey involved the removal and subordination of native peoples who had lived on its territory prior to its founding. The connection between ethnic cleansing or genocide and the legitimacy of the national state underlies the desperate efforts to deny or distort the history of the nation and the state’s genesis.

Conclusion ↑

Estimates of the Armenians killed in the deportations and massacres of 1915-1916 range from a few hundred thousand to 1,500,000. The more conservative estimates of between 600,000 and 800,000 killed, with hundreds of thousands of others converted to Islam or surviving as refugees, appear most accurate. Whatever the actual number of those killed, the result was the physical annihilation of Armenians in the greater part of historic Armenia, the final breaking of a continuous inhabitation of that region by people who called themselves Armenian. By the act of genocide, the Young Turks prepared the ground for the Turkish national state, the republic founded by Mustafa Kemal (1881-1938) , that now occupies the Anatolian peninsula. Once the Greeks were driven into the sea at Smyrna in 1922 and Cilicia cleared of Armenians, the Turkish nationalists gained a homeland for the Turkish people. Though they would have to share eastern Anatolia with Kurds who in time acquired their own political ambitions, the successive Turkish regimes were successful in gaining international recognition of their rights to the territory that once made up the heartland of Armenian kingdoms and the eastern marchlands of the Byzantine Empire.

Ronald Grigor Suny, University of Michigan and University of Chicago

Section Editors: Michael Neiberg ; Sophie De Schaepdrijver

↑ Karpat, Kemal: Ottoman Population, 1830-1914: Demographic and Social Characteristics, Madison 1985, p. 190; McCarthy, Justin: Muslims and Minorities: The Population of Ottoman Anatolia and the End of the Empire, New York 1983, p. 110.
↑ Zürcher, Erik-Jan: Griechisch-orthodoxe und muslimische Flüchtlinge und Deportierte in Griechenland und der Türkei seit 1912, in: Bade, Klaus J. et al. (eds.): Enzykopädie Migration in Europa vom 17. Jahhundert bis zur Gegenwart, Paderborn et al. 2007, pp. 623-627.
↑ Aksakal, Mustafa: The Ottoman Empire, in: Winter, Jay (ed.): The Cambridge History of the First World War, Cambridge 2014, p. 464.
↑ Ibid., p. 468; Erik J. Zürcher estimates 325,000 directly killed in action and between 400,000 and 700,000 wounded, see The Ottoman Soldier in World War I, in his: The Young Turk Legacy and Nation Building: From the Ottoman Empire to Atatürk’s Turkey, London et al. 2010, p. 186.
↑ Ibid., p. 478.
↑ Akın, Yiğit: The Ottoman Home Front during World War I: Everyday Politics, Society, and Culture, Phd. dissertation in history, Ohio State University 2011, p. 245.
↑ Kévorkian, Raymond: The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History, London 2011, pp. 180-187; Kévorkian’s account of the formation of the Special Organization is based on the testimonies at the trials of the Unionists held in 1919-1920 and published originally in Takvim-ı Vekayi.
↑ Kévorkian, Armenian Genocide 2011, pp. 184; testimony from the First Session of the Trial of the Unionists, April 27, 1919, at 1:50: Takvim-i Vakayi, no. 3540, May 5, 1919, p. 5, col. 2, lines 8-14; Krieger: Engghati Haiaspanutyan Vaveragrakan Patmutyune, New York 1980, p. 215; Sixth Session of the Trial of the Unionists, May 14, 1919, questioning of Midhat Şükrü (pp. 91-99): Takvim-i Vakayi no. 3557, May 25, 1919, p. 92.
↑ A useful review of the historiographical literature on Teşkilat-ı Masusa can be found in Safı, Polat: History in the Trench: The Ottoman Special Organization – Teşkilat-ı Masusa Literature, Middle Eastern Studies, XLVIII/1 (2012), pp. 89-106. Regrettably, the article deals primarily with what cannot be said about the Special Organization rather than what it actually was. An early account still worth reading is Stoddard, Philip H.: The Ottoman Government and the Arabs, 1911-1918: A Preliminary Study on the Teşkilat-ı Mahsusa, PhD dissertation, Princeton University 1963.
↑ In the last few decades, scholars have designated other early 20 th -century mass killings as genocide, most notably the German attempt to exterminate the Herero and Nama peoples in Southwest Africa in 1904-1905. See, Hull, Isabel V.: Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany, Ithaca et al. 2005.
↑ In his reply to an article on 1915, by Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu, historian Gerard J. Libaridian writes, “It is difficult to imagine a ‘shared history’ that does not take into consideration the great inequality of agency that existed. A shared history does indeed exist, but it is not a history of equals between the Ottoman imperial state and its Armenian subjects.” (Commentary on Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu’s article on the Armenian Issue: “Turkish Armenian Relations: Is a ‘Just Memory’ Possible?” , Turkish Policy Quarterly, Spring 2014, p. 7, http://www.turkishpolicy.com/article/989/commentary-on-fm-davutoglus-article-on-the-armenian-issue/ ).
↑ On the conceptual difference between empire and nation state, see Suny, Ronald Grigor: The Empire Strikes Out: Imperial Russia, ‘National’ Identity, and Theories of Empire, in: Suny, Ronald Grigor/ Martin, Terry (eds.): A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin, Oxford et al. 2001, pp. 23-66.
↑ Gökalp, Ziya: Kızıl elma, translation from: Kinloch, Graham Charles / Mohan, Raj P.: Genocide Approaches, Case Studies, and Responses, New York 2005, p. 50; also, cited in: Jonderden, Joost: Elite Encounters of a Violent Kind: Milli İbrahim Paşa, Ziya Gökalp and Political Struggle in Diyarbekir at the Turn of the 20th Century, in: Jonderden, Joost / Verheij Jelle (eds.), Social Relations in Ottoman Diyarbekir, Leiden 2012, p. 80.
↑ Jonderden, Elite Encounters of a Violent Kind 2012, p. 72.
↑ The words “delusional rationality” come from Turkyilmaz, Yektan: Rethinking Genocide: Violence and Victimhood in Eastern Anatolia, 1913-1915, PhD dissertation in Cultural Anthropology, Duke University 2011, who writes, “These ‘rationalities’ have no basis in reason, and yet become a powerful motor for killing on a mass scale” (p. 43).
↑ The argument from state security was made repeatedly by the Young Turk leaders and was reproduced in the first major collection of materials issued by the Ottoman government on the Armenian deportations: Dahiliye, Nezareti: Ermeni Komitelerinin Amal Ve Harekat-ı Ihtilaliyesi, Istanbul 1916.
↑ For interpretations of the genocide that are compatible, though not identical, with my own analysis, see, for example, the thoughtful essay by Astourian, Stepan: The Armenian Genocide: An Interpretation, The History Teacher, XXIII, 2 (February 1990), pp. 111-160; Mann, Michael: The Dark Side of Democracy, Cambridge 2004; Levene, Mark: Genocide in the Age of the Nation State, 2 vols., London 2005; Valentino, Benjamin A.: Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the Twentieth Century, Ithaca, New York 2005; and Bloxham, Donald: The Great Game of Genocide, Oxford 2005.
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Suny, Ronald Grigor: Armenian Genocide , in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed. by Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones, Jennifer Keene, Alan Kramer, and Bill Nasson, issued by Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin 2015-05-26. DOI : 10.15463/ie1418.10646 .

This text is licensed under: CC by-NC-ND 3.0 Germany - Attribution, Non-commercial, No Derivative Works.

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Title II, Part A Resources and Guidance

California Department of Education letterhead with the official seal of the Department. Tony Thurmond, State Superintendent of Public Instruction. 1430 N Street, Sacramento, CA 95814-5901, 916-319-0800, www.cde.ca.gov

Dear County and District Superintendents, Charter School Administrators, and High School Principals:

Essay and Visual Arts Scholarships to Raise Awareness of the Armenian Genocide

The California Armenian Legislative Caucus Foundation (Foundation) is holding two scholarship contests for the 2024 commemoration of the Armenian Genocide. High school students in ninth through twelfth grades are invited to participate in an essay contest and/or a visual arts contest to increase awareness of the Armenian Genocide. The submission deadline for both contests is 11:59 p.m. on Friday, March 29, 2024.

All winners will be awarded scholarships and acknowledged at the Foundation’s Annual Armenian Advocacy Day. Winners will also receive special recognition from the Foundation’s members. Original artwork may be requested from visual arts finalists for display in the California State Capitol. Scholarship awards are $1,000 for first place, $750 for second place, and $500 for third place in each contest.

Instructions and criteria for the contests are available on the Armenian Mirror-Spectator Newspaper web page at https://mirrorspectator.com/2024/02/26/california-armenian-legislative-caucus-foundation-announces-scholarships-in-remembrance-of-the-armenian-genocide/ . Students may enter both contests, but submissions must be entered separately.

To apply, please view the Foundation 2024 Scholarship Contest web form at https://bit.ly/2024CALCF .

If you have any questions, please contact Natalie Bruton-Yenovkian at [email protected] .

Tony Thurmond State Superintendent of Public Instruction

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world affairs

Kim Kardashian West: Armenian Genocide Victims ‘Should Never Be Forgotten’

Kim Kardashian attends Variety's Power of Women Luncheon at Cipriani Midtown in New York on Apr. 24, 2015, .

When we grew up, all my father did was talk about our heritage.

It was such a big part of our life: We’d eat Armenian food, we would listen to stories—my dad was really outspoken about our history. We were told that when a lot of Armenians moved, they took the – ian off their last names in fear that they would be killed. “Whatever you girls do, never change your last name—it’s Kardashian,” he would say. He was very vocal and wanted us to never forget where we came from.

My great-great-grandparents came from Armenia to Los Angeles in 1914, right before the genocide happened. We have no existing family left in Armenia. Had they not escaped, we wouldn’t be here. There are so many people who lost their families, and the stories of how they were killed are so heartbreaking—they should never be forgotten. The whole point of remembering the genocide is to make sure it doesn’t happen again. A million-and-a-half people were brutally massacred, and a country can just pretend like it never happened? I don’t think that’s right.

My family wanted to go back to Armenia for the longest time. My dad would have loved to go. My grandparents would have loved to go. My great-grandparents would have loved to go. None of them were able to go.

My sister Khloé, my daughter North and my husband Kanye West finally went to Armenia this month. So many people have come to me and said, “I had no idea there was a genocide.” There aren’t that many Armenians in this business. We have this spotlight to bring attention to it, so why would we just sit back?

Now is the time to speak out, and every little bit helps. I will continue to ask the questions and fight for the genocide to be recognized for what it was.

I would like President Obama to use the word genocide. It’s very disappointing he hasn’t used it as President. We thought it was going to happen this year. I feel like we’re close—but we’re definitely moving in the right direction.

It’s time for Turkey to recognize it. It’s not the fault of the people who live there now; it was 100 years ago on Friday. I think if they recognize it and acknowledge it, everyone can move on. I believe in moving on and looking toward a brighter future, but you can’t move on unless you acknowledge the past. To not do so is an act of disrespect.

There’s a purple centennial pin that everyone wears to commemorate the genocide. Prime Minister Hovik Abrahamyan gave me his when I met him. Purple is my daughter’s favorite color, so she wants to wear it every single day. When she gets older, I will explain to her the real meaning behind it. I’m half Armenian, but I grew up with a such a strong sense of my Armenian identity, and I want my daughter to have the same.

My great-great-grandparents were so brave to move their whole family. I’ll honor them by passing their memory down to my daughter.

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The Armenian Genocide

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The Armenian genocide refers to the physical annihilation of ethnic Armenian Christian people living in the Ottoman Empire from spring 1915 through autumn 1916.

Ottoman military forces march Armenians to an execution site

Ottoman military forces march Armenian men from Kharput to an execution site outside the city. Kharput, Ottoman Empire, March 1915-June 1915. [Courtesy of the Armenian National Institute.]

Deportation of Armenians

Ottoman troops guard Armenians being deported. Ottoman Empire, 1915-16.

Armenian children lie in the street of an unidentified town

Armenian children lie in the street of an unidentified town. Photograph taken by Armin T. Wegner. Wegner served as a nurse with the German Sanitary Corps. In 1915 and 1916, Wegner traveled throughout the Ottoman Empire and documented atrocities carried out against the Armenians. [Courtesy of Sybil Stevens (daughter of Armin T. Wegner). Wegner Collection, Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach & United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.]

Armenian deportees

A small group of Armenian deportees walking through the Taurus Mountain region, carrying bundles. A woman in the foreground carries a child. Ottoman Empire, ca. November 1915. Photograph taken by Armin T. Wegner. Wegner served as a nurse with the German Sanitary Corps. In 1915 and 1916, Wegner traveled throughout the Ottoman Empire and documented atrocities carried out against the Armenians . [Courtesy of Sybil Stevens (daughter of Armin T. Wegner). Wegner Collection, Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach & United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.]

Armenian families in a refugee camp

Armenian families next to makeshift tents in a refugee camp. Ottoman Empire, 1915-16.Photograph taken by Armin T. Wegner. Wegner served as a nurse with the German Sanitary Corps. In 1915 and 1916, Wegner traveled throughout the Ottoman Empire and documented atrocities carried out against the Armenians. [Courtesy of Sybil Stevens (daughter of Armin T. Wegner). Wegner Collection, Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach & United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.]

Armenian refugees

A group of Armenian refugees. 1915-20.

Sometimes called the first genocide of the twentieth century, the Armenian genocide refers to the physical annihilation of Armenian Christian people living in the Ottoman Empire from spring 1915 through autumn 1916. There were approximately 1.5 million Armenians living in the multiethnic Ottoman Empire in 1915. At least 664,000 and possibly as many as 1.2 million died during the genocide, either in massacres and individual killings, or from systematic ill treatment, exposure, and starvation.

Armenian refugees in the desert

Armenian refugees in the desert. A man in the foreground lies on the ground on a layer of bedding. 1915-20.

An Armenian refugee

An Armenian refugee, wearing a scarf and a pack on her back. Ottoman Empire, 1918-20.

Armenian refugees. Ottoman Empire, 1918-20.

An Armenian woman and her child

An Armenian woman and her child sit on a sidewalk next to a bundle of their possessions. Ottoman Empire, 1918–20.

Armenian refugee children

A group of 1,500 Armenian children at a refugee camp of the Near East Relief organization in Alexandroupolis. Greece, 1921–22.

Refugees foraging at Alexandropol, Russian Armenia. Photograph taken by John Elder. In 1917, Elder, a divinity student from Pennsylvania, joined the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief team that was aiding refugees. For two years, Elder did volunteer work with Armenian orphans. During that time, he photographed refugees and conditions at camps.

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System of a Down singer Serj Tankian’s new book details band’s up and downs, and what fuels his activism

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Serj Tankian is a man of many talents. Aside from being the lead singer of rock band System of a Down, he’s also a solo artist, composer, filmmaker and painter. This month he can add author to that list, as his memoir “Down With the System” comes out May 14.

Born in Beirut to Armenian parents, Tankian and his family moved to Los Angeles when he was 7. His multiplatinum-selling band System of a Down is composed of four men of Armenian ancestry who grew up in L.A. Though it’s been almost 20 years since the band’s last album “Hypnotize” came out in 2005, their influence in rock remains undeniable. Recently the band was tapped to headline a show at Golden Gate Park accompanied by the Deftones, the Mars Volta, Viagra Boys and Vows on August 17.

“Down With the System” starts with Tankian, a longtime champion of Armenian causes, being grilled by Howard Stern in 2001 for an essay he wrote called “Understanding Oil,” which he posted on the band’s website in the days after 9/11. He called 9/11 “a reaction to existing injustices around the world, generally unseen to most Americans.” With America reeling from the attacks, the essay sparked considerable controversy. Stern told listeners how Tankian “said the right things” on the show, and Tankian calls it a missed opportunity to speak his mind on American foreign policy.

He vowed to never let that happen again.

Ever outspoken, Tankian spoke with The Times about his book, why he’s optimistic about Armenia, and whether we might see another album from System of a Down.

What compelled you to take on a memoir?

I had a call from a literary agent in London, who asked if I’d be interested in a memoir. My first answer was, not really. I want to write a book about the intersection of justice and spirituality [laughs], a philosophy book, and ultimately we realized that both can be done in the same form. So it became a memoir of sorts.

Are you able to be optimistic about what’s going on in Armenia?

I’m an eternal optimist because I have to be, based on my culture. We’ve had such a tragic history that without optimism, you wouldn’t get out of bed. The reason that I’m optimistic is, Armenia has a very strong, growing economy right now — in fact, one of the strongest in all of Europe, in terms of GDP growth. The 2018 Velvet Revolution, the peaceful revolution, really pivoted the country into a more transparent, responsible governance. It changed a lot of things and slowly got rid of all the post-Soviet corrupt policies. The problem was in 2020, when Azerbaijan, along with the help of Turkey, attacked Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia. It led to basically a brain drain, and the death of 5,000 men — like a whole generation of young men.

Singer/producer Steve Albini performs onstage

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For those that don’t know much about what’s going on in Armenia, can you point them toward a fact-based website, a book, a film?

There’s a wonderful English news website from Armenia called Civil Net [ civilnet.am ] that they can check out. The U.S.’s own Radio Free Armenia is also a resource.

I know it’s a question you get every day, but will there be another System of a Down record?

Time will tell! I go into a lot of nitty-gritty details with the process of understanding each other and laying out what everyone’s vision is, at least what my vision is for the band, and to move forward. I’m proud to say that, in 2020, we were able to galvanize and do two songs [“Protect the Land” and “Genocidal Humanoidz”] that we dedicated to our people in Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia and to raise awareness and funds for those people suffering.

Any concern about how your bandmates might interpret some of what you’ve shared in the book?

Sure, sure. I was very honest because that’s who I am. I’m an activist, and without being honest, there’s no activism. But at the same time, I have compassion and love for the guys. I have respect for the guys. One of them is my brother-in-law! We’re a family. We’ve been together for 30 years. The reason I even wanted to write it was, some of it’s already public, but not really perceived correctly. I wanted to put it to bed so we can move beyond this.

Is there a live performance of yours that sticks out in your mind a little bit more than the rest?

I would say [System’s] show in 2015 in Yerevan, Armenia. It was the 100th commemoration of the Armenian genocide in Republic Square and it was streamed worldwide, so we had millions of people watching. It felt like the top of the mountain for the band, like we had achieved something greater than music. It was being with our people, our heritage, where we come from, and playing for them and for our ancestors and our grandparents who were survivors of the genocide. It was a feeling unparalleled.

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Armenian genocide commemoration event held at Pasadena Memorial Park

A solemn ceremony in Pasadena on Sunday marked the anniversary of the Armenian genocide.

The theme of this year's commemorative event, hosted by the Pasadena Armenian Coalition, was "Resilience in the Face of Genocide -- Then and Now."

Attendees gathered at Memorial Park's Armenian Genocide Memorial Monument for the remembrance, which organizers said was "intended to draw the public's attention to the Armenian community's continued demands that its perpetrator, the Republic of Turkey, properly acknowledge its crimes against their civilian, Armenian population."

The event also highlighted "how the failure to acknowledge and punish genocide may result in its perpetuation, as demonstrated by the Republic of Azerbaijan's recent ethnic cleansing and genocidal campaign against the majority Armenian enclave of the Republic of Artsakh," according to organizers.

Southern California is home to some 200,000 Armenian Americans, the largest such population in the U.S.

Many have expressed concern about the ongoing conflict affecting thousands in their homeland, where more than 100,000 ethnic Armenians have been displaced from the Artsakh region.

"It breaks my heart to see that all those Armenians had to flee," Rep. Judy Chu said in an interview at Sunday's event. "I want to make sure that those refugees are taken care of, but also that Azerbaijan is made not to do such horrific acts of aggression."

Tamar Poladian-Perron, of the Pasadena Armenian Coalition, said the commemoration was "a time for reflection, it's a time of -- we don't want to say 'mourning' anymore, because mourning gets you nowhere. It's a time of looking at your inner strength and try to find the courage to move forward in the face of adversity."

The Revolutionary Impact of Henry Ford’s Invention Cars

This essay about the revolutionary impact of Henry Ford’s invention of the assembly line, focusing on its transformational effects on the automotive industry, society, and the economy. It highlights Ford’s vision to make automobiles affordable for the masses and his pioneering approach to manufacturing that led to increased efficiency and reduced costs. The essay explores how the assembly line not only revolutionized transportation but also reshaped urban planning, labor practices, and cultural norms. Ford’s legacy as a visionary thinker and innovator continues to influence modern industry and society, underscoring the enduring impact of his groundbreaking invention.

How it works

Henry Ford stands as a towering figure in the annals of industrial history, his name synonymous with innovation and progress. Among his many contributions, perhaps none have left a more profound mark on the world than his pioneering work in automobile manufacturing. Ford’s invention of the assembly line revolutionized not only the automotive industry but also the very fabric of modern society, ushering in an era of unprecedented mass production and economic growth.

At the turn of the 20th century, the automobile was still a luxury reserved for the wealthy elite.

Cars were handcrafted, expensive, and inaccessible to the average person. Ford recognized the potential for change and set out to make the automobile affordable for the masses. In 1908, he introduced the Model T, a simple, sturdy vehicle that would become the first car to be mass-produced on a large scale.

Central to Ford’s vision was his innovative approach to manufacturing. He sought to streamline the production process and reduce costs to make cars more affordable. In 1913, Ford introduced the world to the assembly line, a groundbreaking method that revolutionized manufacturing. By breaking down the production of automobiles into a series of simple, repetitive tasks, Ford was able to dramatically increase efficiency and reduce the time and cost of production.

The impact of Ford’s invention was immediate and far-reaching. With the assembly line, Ford was able to produce cars at a fraction of the previous cost, making automobile ownership attainable for millions of Americans. The Model T quickly became the best-selling car in the world, transforming the automotive industry and reshaping society in the process.

Beyond its economic implications, Ford’s invention also had profound social and cultural effects. The widespread availability of automobiles revolutionized transportation, enabling people to travel greater distances with ease and freedom. This newfound mobility reshaped urban planning, spurred the growth of suburbs, and changed the way people lived and worked.

Ford’s assembly line also had a significant impact on the labor force. While it increased productivity and reduced the cost of goods, it also led to concerns about worker exploitation and the dehumanization of labor. Ford famously implemented the $5-a-day wage, more than double the industry average at the time, as a means of attracting and retaining skilled workers. This move not only improved the lives of Ford’s employees but also set a new standard for fair wages in the industry.

In conclusion, Henry Ford’s invention of the assembly line represents a pivotal moment in history, with far-reaching implications that continue to shape the world today. By revolutionizing manufacturing and making automobiles accessible to the masses, Ford not only transformed the automotive industry but also had a profound impact on society, culture, and the economy. His legacy serves as a testament to the power of innovation and the enduring influence of visionary thinkers.

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Campus Protests At Commencements, Protesters Deliver Messages in Many Ways

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Several people dressed caps and gowns at a graduation walk on a stretch of grass in a field. Some of them are carrying a white banner that says, “Free Palestine.” In the distance is a large screen that says, “Duke.”

Here’s the latest on campus protests.

Graduates across the country showed their opposition to the war in Gaza this weekend, walking out of commencement speeches, draping themselves in Palestinian flags and chanting their demands to divest from Israel.

By and large, the ceremonies carried on. At Duke University Jerry Seinfeld, the famed comedian who has lately taken a public stance in support of Jews in the United States and Israel, received an honorary degree and advised hundreds of graduates to maintain a sense of humor, while a few dozen protesters walked out in their caps and gowns to have their own ceremony.

At Emerson College in Boston, where more than 100 protesters were arrested less than three weeks ago, some students used their walks across the stage as moments of individual protest, removing their gowns or displaying signs, sometimes to cheers and often to loud boos from the families watching from the stands.

At the University of Minnesota, several students receiving diplomas unfurled banners with pro-Palestinian messages like “Students for Palestine” and “Let Gaza Live.”

The graduations capped a tumultuous few weeks on college campuses as students mounted pro-Palestinian protests and encampments and, in many places, the police removed them. College administrators prepared for potential disruptions with increased security, strict ticketing systems, designated free speech zones and even requests that students open their gowns for inspection.

Pomona College, where pro-Palestinian students have announced a protest targeting the ceremony, moved the location of its commencement after demonstrators set up an encampment on the stage where the event was supposed to be held.

A few universities came to agreements with protesters or bowed to student demands and canceled commencement speeches .

Here are other developments:

Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore said on Sunday that it reached an agreement with student protesters to end their encampment and not restart it, promising to end some of the proceedings on student conduct involving the encampment and to review calls for divestment from Israel.

Arizona State University has banned a postdoctoral research scholar from campus as it investigates a video that showed him confronting a woman wearing a hijab at a pro-Israel rally near the school’s Tempe campus . The university, where the campus police recently broke up a pro-Palestinian encampment and arrested dozens of people, has also put the chief of its campus police department on leave.

Xavier University of Louisiana in New Orleans last week became the second school to rescind a commencement speaking invitation to Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. The University of Vermont said earlier this month that she would not be speaking there, a concession to a demand from student demonstrators.

More than 2,800 people have been arrested at pro-Palestinian protests on U.S. campuses since April 18, according to New York Times tracking data .

— Shaila Dewan , Eduardo Medina and Maya Shwayder

A skirmish breaks out near Pomona College’s graduation.

Scuffle breaks out during pomona college commencement, pro-palestinian demonstrators tried to block access to pomona college’s graduation ceremony on sunday..

[chanting in call and response] Not another nickel, not another dime. No more money for Israel’s crime. Resistance is justified when people are occupied.

At least one person was arrested after scuffles broke out among pro-Palestinian protesters, private security officers and police officers outside Pomona College’s commencement in Los Angeles on Sunday evening, the latest confrontation between the school and a protest movement that has received strong support from students and faculty on campus.

The skirmish occurred outside the Shrine Auditorium, in downtown Los Angeles, where school administrators had made a last-minute decision to relocate the event. Since last week, protesters had been camping out on the school’s graduation stage at its campus in Claremont about 40 miles away.

As graduates and their families lined up outside the auditorium, more than a hundred protesters converged on the group, unfurling banners that read “Pomona College divest from genocide now,” and chanting “Shame!”

Minor fights broke out after demonstrators attempted to block some family members of the graduates from entering the venue. Los Angeles Police Department officers in riot gear moved in to disperse the crowd. No injuries were reported, and the commencement went on as scheduled.

Hours before the event on Sunday, as the university was preparing to bus students to the new graduation site, protesters took down their encampment on campus and declared victory in a statement, saying they had accomplished their goal of disrupting commencement.

The protesters at Pomona College, a private liberal arts college, began camping on campus in late March near a pro-Palestinian art project that was erected near a student services building. The project was dismantled by the college in early April, and protesters responded by storming and occupying the president’s office, leading to 20 arrests .

At the time, protesters voluntarily removed their encampment, but students returned last week, erecting tents on the stage that had been set up for graduation. Many students and faculty members believe the school has been hesitant to clear the new encampment because of criticism by some over the arrests last month. The school did not respond to a request for an interview.

Protesters at Pomona College have called on the school to disclose its investments in weapons manufacturers that work with Israel and negotiate on divestment. In February, the student government voted in favor of an academic boycott of Israel — the severing of relations with the country’s academic and cultural institutions — and approved a resolution calling on the college to disclose its ties to companies connected to the Israeli military campaign in Gaza.

Pomona College is one of five undergraduate colleges and two graduate institutions that make up the Claremont Colleges . At Pitzer College, another Claremont College, an encampment was disbanded by protesters after the president agreed on May 3 to disclose “its holdings in military and weapons manufacturers.”

The success at Pitzer has galvanized protesters at Pomona, who say that the college has so far not engaged with their demands.

For Lucía Driessen, 23, a student graduating with degrees in public policy analysis and biology, relocating the commencement to Los Angeles meant that her friends from other Claremont Colleges could not attend. And because a livestream of the ceremony was canceled, her parents could not watch from the East Coast.

“We’re used to graduation being a really big community thing on our campuses” she said. “And now it’s like we were ripped away from our community.”

— Jonathan Wolfe Reporting from Los Angeles

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and protesters reach a deal to end an encampment.

Protesters at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee will take down a pro-Palestinian encampment that had stood for two weeks under an agreement reached with the school, university officials said in a statement on Sunday. The encampment, believed to be the last one standing at a Wisconsin college, will be gone by Tuesday, they said.

School officials had allowed the encampment to stand and occupy a broad patch of lawn between Mitchell Hall and a busy thoroughfare on the campus’s southern boundary, choosing not to call in the police. That approach differed from one at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where administrators in early May called in the police to break down the tents after negotiations failed. After the initial crackdown failed to end the encampment, Wisconsin-Madison later came to an agreement with protesters to break down the camp voluntarily before commencement ceremonies over the weekend.

Mark Mone, the chancellor of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, said in a statement last Wednesday that the university had exercised “the widest possible amount of patience and restraint.” But he also indicated that patience had nearly run out, and warned that the school might take action.

Under the agreement with the group of protesters, known as the UWM Popular University for Palestine Coalition, the university pledged to join calls for a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas; denounce the destruction by Israeli forces of schools and universities in Gaza; and meet with protest leaders over their concerns about university investments.

The university also agreed to encourage the Water Council, a Milwaukee consortium of water technology companies, to cut ties with two Israeli government-owned entities, Mekorot and the Israel Innovation Authority. Mr. Mone is the treasurer of the Water Council’s board of directors.

In exchange, protesters agreed to take down the encampment, starting on Sunday and finishing by Tuesday, and to refrain from disrupting the university’s commencement ceremonies on Sunday.

In a statement, the protesters acknowledged the agreement.

“After hard fought edits and careful consideration by the coalition, we determined we had obtained all possible benefits from the encampment,” they said.

— Dan Simmons Reporting from Milwaukee

As Jerry Seinfeld receives an honorary degree at Duke, students walk out in protest.

Dozens of students walk out of duke commencement ceremony, as the comedian jerry seinfeld received an honorary degree at duke university’s commencement, dozens of students walked out and chanted, “free palestine.” some also chanted mr. seinfeld’s name during the walkout..

From stage: “Big deal about our commencement speaker?” [crowd boos and cheers] Some in crowd: “Free Palestine!” Some in crowd: “Free Palestine!” Some in crowd: “Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!” From stage: “Thank you.”

Jerry Seinfeld knows his way around handling awkward moments onstage. Even so, the initial reception he faced at Duke University’s commencement on Sunday reflected a more complicated audience than usual.

As Mr. Seinfeld, who has recently been vocal about his support for Israel, received an honorary degree, dozens of students walked out and chanted, “Free, free Palestine,” while the comedian looked on and smiled tensely.

Many in the crowd jeered the protesters. Minutes later, as the last of the protesters were filing out, he approached the mic. His first words were: “Thank you. Oh my God, what a beautiful day.”

In his commencement speech, Mr. Seinfeld was mostly cautious, opting for a tight comedic script interspersed with life advice instead of a full-on response to the protests against his presence.

Still, in one part of his speech, he defended various types of privilege and appeared to hint at the elephant in the room.

“I grew up a Jewish boy from New York,” he said to applause from the crowd. “That is a privilege if you want to be a comedian.”

Outside Duke’s stadium, graduates walked around campus, chanting: “Disclose, divest, we will not stop, we will not rest.” When they arrived at a green space, they were joined by hundreds of other people — including faculty, relatives and other protesters — who organized a makeshift graduation for them.

As they prepared to throw their caps in the air, Mr. Seinfeld continued his speech inside Wallace Wade Stadium, telling students that while he admired their generation’s commitment to inclusivity and not hurting other people’s feelings, “it is worth the sacrifice of occasional discomfort to have some laughs.”

Mr. Seinfeld, who has two children who have attended Duke, has been uncharacteristically vocal about his support for Jews in Israel while doing press in recent weeks for his latest film, “Unfrosted,” which chronicles the invention of Pop-Tarts .

Typically an apolitical comedian who prefers punchy takes on ordinary observations, Mr. Seinfeld is now engaging in the type of celebrity activism that few associate with him, and that has drawn criticism and praise. Since the attacks of Oct. 7 in Israel, he has signed a letter in support of the country and posted an earnest message on social media about his devotion to it.

His wife, Jessica Seinfeld, a cookbook author, recently promoted on Instagram a counterprotest at the University of California, Los Angeles, that she said she had helped bankroll. (She condemned the violence that occurred at a later counterprotest.)

In December, Mr. Seinfeld traveled to Tel Aviv to meet with the families of hostages, soberly recounting afterward the missile attack that occurred during the trip.

Still, his comments on the issues have been somewhat modest.

“I don’t preach about it,” he told GQ last month. “I have my personal feelings about it that I discuss privately. It’s not part of what I can do comedically, but my feelings are very strong.”

On Sunday, Mr. Seinfeld played to the crowd, telling students: “You’re never going to believe this: Harvard used to be a great place to go to school. Now it’s Duke.”

Not everyone at Duke, however, was laughing at Mr. Seinfeld’s jokes.

The Rev. Dr. Stefan Weathers Sr., an ordained minister in the American Baptist Church who was awarded a Ph.D. in divinity, had written a letter before the ceremony to the university asking that the comedian be replaced, citing Mr. Seinfeld’s ongoing and strong support for Israel.

Shreya Joshi, a graduate and one of the organizers of the protest, said that after Duke selected Mr. Seinfeld as the speaker, she and other seniors, faculty members and pro-Palestinian supporters began organizing the walkout and an alternate graduation.

Ms. Joshi, 21, who studied history at Duke and will be attending law school at the University of Chicago, said that it was painful to have lost out on a high school graduation ceremony in 2020 because of the pandemic, and the seniors still wanted one this year, even if it meant creating one outside of the university’s official channels.

And that pain, she added, paled in comparison to what people in Gaza are experiencing.

“The fact that we were going to sit here and celebrate our own?” Ms. Joshi said. “It felt trivial in the face of all that. Have you seen the tiny violin? That’s how it felt.”

Ms. Joshi said that they had tried to leave the main commencement ceremony in the least disruptive way possible. They chose to leave as the honorary degree was being given to Mr. Seinfeld because “none of us particularly wanted to listen to Seinfeld.”

— Eduardo Medina and Emily Cataneo Reporting from Duke University’s campus in Durham N.C.

At Emerson College’s commencement, there were expressions of protest from beginning to end.

At Emerson College’s commencement, pro-Palestinian supporters made sure they were seen and heard throughout the ceremony.

The graduation for the Boston school, held at Agganis Arena, took place less than three weeks after police officers stormed an encampment and arrested more than 100 protesters.

As the more than 1,000 students entered in a procession, about one in every five students had a fist raised or some kind of pro-Palestinian paraphernalia accompanying their cap and gown: a keffiyeh, a decorated mortarboard with a Palestinian flag, and, in one case, a Palestinian flag worn as a cape.

Almost immediately after the journalism professor Michael Brown began to speak to start the ceremony, several students began shouting pro-Palestinian slogans, which were met with loud boos from the crowd of families in the stands.

Brown pressed on forcefully. “I’m here for the graduates of 2024,” he proclaimed loudly over the din, drawing cheers from the crowd. “You are the class that didn’t have a high school graduation, so you’re going to have a graduation today!”

That set the tone for the rest of the ceremony. Several speeches that followed were interrupted. And the processions across the stage were filled with individual protests from students. Some removed their robes onstage in protest. Some held up signs.

One woman arrived onstage with no robe on, wearing all white covered in red writing about the war in Gaza . She threw her diploma across the stage and held up her hands, covered in red paint, before exiting. Another draped a flag over the main podium at the center of the stage, which was promptly removed.

The biggest cheers were for the student class president, Joe Nalieth. “Our message cannot be washed away with the chalk,” he said in his speech. “Our voices echo on campuses across the world, especially those campuses which have been reduced to rubble. Let us not forget, we are creatives, innovators and revolutionaries.”

After the ceremony wrapped up just after 1 p.m., around 50 students defected from the recessional to stay on the floor on the arena, trying to shout “Free Palestine!” over the drum corps playing the graduates out.

— Maya Shwayder Reporting from Boston

Student protesters at Johns Hopkins agree to end encampment.

Johns Hopkins University said on Sunday that it reached an agreement with student protesters to end their encampment and not restart it, the university said in a statement . The school said it promised students a “timely review” of their calls for divestment from Israel.

The university also said it was ending proceedings on some student conduct from the encampment as long as protesters do not disrupt more university functions, including the commencement ceremony on May 23. But those proceedings will continue for allegations of misconduct including violence, assault or property damage.

“We are grateful to the many members of our community — faculty, staff, and students — who helped us navigate this moment,” Ron Daniels, the university president, said. “This is a truly difficult time in our world and at our university, with the anguish of the ongoing conflict and human tragedy in Israel and Gaza.”

Students began an encampment on April 29, which the university said violated policies that were designed to safeguard freedom of expression and safety on campus.

The group behind the encampment, the Hopkins Justice Collective, confirmed the agreement.

“In no way are we satisfied with this end to our demonstration,” the group said in a statement, saying that it was only a first step. “Palestinian liberation remains in our sights.”

— Colbi Edmonds

A closer look at the violent attack at U.C.L.A. raises questions about the police response.

Nearly two weeks after a pro-Palestinian encampment at the University of California, Los Angeles, was attacked by counterprotesters, university officials still have not explained why security officers stood by for hours while the attack was underway, nor have the authorities arrested any of those who swarmed in wielding metal rods, water bottles and firecrackers in one of the worst outbreaks of violence in the college protests that have rocked the country.

The extent of the policing failure has become clearer in recent days, as witnesses have come forward to describe a chaotic night of violence on April 30, in which students and bystanders repeatedly called 911 and nonemergency lines, finding little help and calls that were disconnected. A dispatcher told one caller pleading for help that they were ending the call because “I have actual emergencies to handle.”

One man was filmed by a local television station on the phone with emergency dispatchers, alerting them that people were getting hurt. “Security has abandoned this encampment,” he could be heard saying before lowering his phone and looking at it. “They just hung up on me again,” he said incredulously.

Miles away in Sacramento, staff members in Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office contacted the U.C.L.A. chancellor’s office shortly after 11 p.m. to make sure that law enforcement officers were responding to the scene, and were assured that more officers were coming, according to a person familiar with the situation, who described the discussions on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to make them public.

But as the night wore on and there was still no intervention, the person said, the governor’s office moved to circumvent local authority and ordered California Highway Patrol officers to the campus. The state officers began assembling on campus at 1:45 a.m., a few moments before L.A.P.D. riot police arrived, but it took another hour to quell the clashes.

The chancellor’s office, the L.A.P.D. and an outside consultant hired to investigate the tardy response have all declined to discuss it, pending the outcome of an inquiry that could take weeks or months. The campus police chief, John Thomas, also did not comment. He told The Los Angeles Times that he had relied on private security officers who were not authorized to make arrests, but that he had done “everything I could” to keep students safe.

To understand what happened, New York Times journalists conducted interviews with several people who were at the protests that night, including two people who were involved in the counterprotest; reviewed and analyzed video footage ; and spoke with organizations involved in both the pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli movements on campus.

The review found no public callouts for such a violent attack and no clear signs that one group coordinated the attack, though some people had arrived wearing black clothes and masks and seemingly prepared for violence. There was also no indication that the police had prepared for the kind of severe assault on the encampment that took place.

Instead, it appeared that contract security officers who did not have sufficient authority or numbers to halt the escalating melee had been caught by surprise and left to wait for reinforcements that did not arrive for hours.

“Either the university was hesitant to do anything to get law enforcement involved, or law enforcement was dealing with authorization issues and political considerations from elected officials,” said Ed Davis, a former Boston police commissioner who is familiar with crowd control policing issues. “And then things got out of hand.”

Despite growing concern on campus about the pro-Palestinian encampment, complaints about antisemitic incidents and the potential for violence, in the early days of the protests, university officials made it clear that they would consider calling in outside police only as a last resort.

“We are following University of California systemwide policy guidance, which directs us not to request law enforcement involvement preemptively, and only if absolutely necessary to protect the physical safety of our campus community,” Mary Osako, the vice chancellor for strategic communications, said in a statement on April 26 , shortly after the encampment had been set up.

On the night of April 30, a range of counterprotesters had gathered, a group that grew in size as expectations mounted that the police would begin dismantling the encampment. In interviews, witnesses said there had been little warning before counterprotesters went on the offensive.

One of the counterprotesters, Liel Asherian, was seen on video footage kicking at the encampment’s plywood barrier, pulling boards to the ground and slamming a tennis racket against the wood that remained. He said he had gone that night to see the encampment on his own, though he later acknowledged that a friend of his was also pictured at the scene. In an interview, he said he was not part of any group and had not intended to participate in a conflict.

Mr. Asherian said he had approached the pro-Palestinian encampment to ask some people why they were protesting. He said he believed Jewish people such as himself and Palestinians were like cousins, and he expressed alarm at the innocent Palestinians being killed in Israel’s military campaign. But he said he disliked the disruptive tactics the pro-Palestinian protesters were using at U.C.L.A.

He said things devolved when someone called him a “dirty Jew” and he was doused in pepper spray.

“That made me start breaking down their barricades,” he said.

Also among the counterprotesters that night was Narek Palyan, an activist known for making frequent antisemitic statements, as well as comments critical of gay and transgender people. He said he went alone and was motivated to show up in part because he had seen a video of a Jewish woman on the pro-Palestinian side criticizing white people.

“I wanted to go find her, specifically,” he said, adding that he was not able to.

Mr. Palyan said he did not necessarily support either side in the protest or the war.

He said he spent much of the night asking people questions about their positions and trying to keep people from fighting by throwing makeshift weapons into nearby bushes. Mr. Palyan, who is Armenian American, also said he had warned two younger Armenian boys to stay out of the melee.

“I told them, ‘This isn’t ours,’” he said.

Anthony Cabassa, a self-described conservative independent journalist who posted videos of the chaos, said many people may have flocked to the scene on Tuesday night in the hours after U.C.L.A. declared the encampment illegal, believing that the police would move in to clear it and make arrests.

But then the counterprotesters descended on the protest, pulling metal gates away from the group and attacking protesters.

“We were all waiting for the L.A.P.D. to show up, and they never did,” Mr. Cabassa said in an interview. “As the night went on, more and more pro-Israel folks started showing up, to the point where it was starting to get worrisome.”

He said some people seemed to have arrived after seeing broadcasts of the tense scene that he and other livestreamers made, wanting to witness what would happen next.

“People were responding to my livestream and saying ‘I just showed up because of you. I live nearby,’” he said. But others, he said, appeared to have planned for potential clashes, wearing all-black outfits and ski masks. Mr. Cabassa recalled being concerned about their presence.

In the end, more than 30 protesters were injured, according to the Council on American-Islamic Relations Los Angeles, before police dispersed the crowd.

Brian H. Levin, the founding director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, said that, with religion and ethnicity at the heart of the recent protests, the attack had amounted to a hate crime.

“This comes at a time when major U.S. cities, including Los Angeles, have had a surge in anti-Arab and Muslim hate crimes and have hit a record for anti-Jewish crimes,” he said.

Mr. Levin watched the incident via livestream and said the weapons, the presence of some of the same people from previous protests and the waving of a yellow flag associated with Chabad-Lubavitch, a Hasidic Jewish movement, suggested some organizational coordination among the counterprotesters.

The director of the nearby Chabad House said the group had no role in the protest that night.

But he also noted that some of the implements wielded by the counterprotesters “were spontaneous weapons of opportunity,” and that some people “may have just showed up randomly with their own separate xenophobic and religious bigotries.”

The next day, after the counterprotesters had left, police officers moved in to remove the pro-Palestinian encampment, making more than 200 arrests.

Marie Salem, a U.C.L.A. graduate student and one of the protesters, questioned why the police had arrested dozens of student protesters but had not yet arrested any of those who had attacked them.

“The majority of the encampment is students that attend this university, and who were not violent,” Ms. Salem said. “We were met with violence, and the other side looked like majority not-students, which the university chose to protect over their own students.”

Jonathan Wolfe and Shawn Hubler contributed reporting. Susan C. Beachy and Kitty Bennett contributed research.

— Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs , Mike Baker and Serge F. Kovaleski Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs reported from Los Angeles, Mike Baker from Seattle and Serge F. Kovaleski from New York.

Frustrated by Gaza Coverage, Student Protesters Turn to Al Jazeera

Nick Wilson has closely followed news on the war in Gaza since October. But Mr. Wilson, a Cornell student, is picky when it comes to his media diet: As a pro-Palestinian activist, he doesn’t trust major American outlets’ reporting on Israel’s campaign in Gaza.

Instead, he turns to publications less familiar to some American audiences, like the Arab news network Al Jazeera.

“Al Jazeera is the site that I go to to get an account of events that I think will be reliable,” he said.

Many student protesters said in recent interviews that they were seeking on-the-ground coverage of the war in Gaza, and often, a staunchly pro-Palestinian perspective — and they are turning to alternative media for it. There’s a range of options: Jewish Currents , The Intercept, Mondoweiss and even independent Palestinian journalists on social media, as they seek information about what is happening in Gaza.

Their preferences embody a broader shift for members of Generation Z, who are increasingly seeking out news from a wider array of sources and questioning legacy outlets in a fragmented media ecosystem.

Israel’s recent ban on the local operations of Al Jazeera has only elevated the network’s status among many student protesters. They prize coverage from reporters on the ground, and Al Jazeera has a more extensive operation in Gaza than any other publication. Students also noted the sacrifices it has made to tell the story there. Two Al Jazeera journalists have died since the start of the war.

“Al Jazeera is sort of playing that role for a lot of younger Americans, in terms of getting a different perspective than they feel like they’re getting from U.S. media,” said Ben Toff, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Minnesota.

While many Western media outlets, with few if any journalists in Gaza before the war, have struggled to gain access to the territory, Al Jazeera has been recognized for its raw, searing portrayals of the death and destruction there. A typical report may show video of Israeli tanks rolling into cities, alongside drone shots of leveled buildings in Gaza City and Palestinians fleeing their homes.

“It’s news about the Middle East, and it doesn’t really convey it in a Western perspective , ” said Alina Atiq, a student at the University of South Florida who has pushed her university to divest from Israel.

The network, owned by Qatar, has its headquarters in Doha and operates two separate newsrooms that provide English- and Arabic-language content. Its mobile apps have been downloaded in the United States 295,000 times since October, an increase of more than 200 percent from the previous seven months, according to Appfigures, a market research firm.

Among the outlets frequently cited by protesters, Al Jazeera English is by far the most popular on social media. It has 1.9 million followers on TikTok — up from around 750,000 at the outset of the war — and 4.6 million on Instagram.

Hussein Ibish, a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, described the network’s Arabic-language channel as more outwardly pro-Palestinian than the English one, which he said has a more subtle slant.

Critics say its coverage veers into support of the armed resistance to Israel. The Israeli government, which has accused Al Jazeera of acting as a “mouthpiece” for Hamas, last Sunday seized its broadcast equipment and shut down its operations in the country for at least 45 days.

Al Jazeera called the government’s accusation “baseless” in a statement, adding that it has broadcast every news conference held by the Israeli cabinet and representatives for the Israel Defense Forces, in addition to videos from Hamas.

It also said that its reporting “provides diverse viewpoints and narrative and counter narrative,” and that charges of pro-Palestinian bias should be “scrutinized through careful analysis of our journalistic standards and reporting practices.”

The Israeli government’s rejection of Al Jazeera appears to have bolstered the network’s reputation among some of the students.

“It goes to show the extent to which Israel is afraid of the coverage and reportage of Al Jazeera,” said Matthew Vickers, a junior at Occidental College in Los Angeles who has been active in efforts to persuade his school to divest from companies tied to Israel.

The protesters rattle off a list of mainstream American publications as having coverage they find objectionable, including CNN, The Atlantic, the BBC and The New York Times, among many others. Though major news outlets have reported extensively on Israel’s campaign in Gaza, the death toll and the damage, the coverage in the view of student protesters doesn’t assign enough blame to Israel for Palestinian deaths, or thoroughly fact-check Israeli officials. And they said protest coverage has focused too much on antisemitism on college campuses instead of Islamophobia.

“There’s a fair amount of misinformation that is being fed to us by mainstream media, and just a clear bias when it comes to the Palestine issue,” said Cameron Jones, a student at Columbia University and an organizer with Jewish Voice for Peace, a pro-Palestinian organization.

The activists’ interest in Al Jazeera stands in contrast with the outlet’s previous struggles to find an audience in the United States. The network started an American channel in 2013, but that folded in 2016 with nightly ratings that hovered around 30,000, far shy of viewership for cable networks like Fox News and CNN.

Part of what doomed the network back then was “a distinctly anti-American bent” to its coverage, Mr. Ibish wrote in a 2016 guest essay for The Times. But now, broadcast from a different country, the network’s tone is finding its audience on university campuses, he said.

“There’s a third-worldist, anti-imperial point of view, and that’s also the view that many college kids have adopted,” he said.

Jeremy W. Peters contributed reporting.

— Santul Nerkar

On a day with many calm ceremonies, Berkeley’s protests stand out.

At the University of California, Berkeley, hundreds of soon-to-be graduates rose from their seats in protest, chanting and disrupting their commencement. At Virginia Commonwealth University, about 60 graduates in caps and gowns walked out during Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s speech. At the University of Wisconsin, a handful of graduates stood with their backs to their chancellor as she spoke.

After weeks of tumult on college campuses over pro-Palestinian protests, many administrators prepared themselves for disruptions at graduations on Saturday. And while there were demonstrations — most noisily, perhaps, at U.C. Berkeley — ceremonies at several universities unfolded without major incident. Many students who protested did so silently.

Anticipating possible disruptions, university administrators had increased their security or taken various measures, including dismantling encampments, setting aside free speech zones, canceling student speeches and issuing admission tickets.

Some administrators also tried to reach agreements with encampment organizers. The University of Wisconsin said it had reached a deal with protesters to clear the encampment in return for a meeting to discuss the university’s investments.

Some students, too, were on edge about their big day — many missed their high school graduations four years ago because of the pandemic and did not want to repeat the experience.

In 2020, David Emuze and his mother had watched his high school graduation “ceremony,” a parade of senior photos set to music on Zoom, from their living room in Springfield, Ill. This time, he and his classmates at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign heard that other schools, like the University of Southern California and Columbia University, had canceled their main-stage commencements altogether because of campus unrest.

But on Saturday morning, Mr. Emuze donned his electric-blue mortarboard and orange sash, and his mother watched live from the audience as he received his bachelor’s degree in public health. “It was a touching, peaceful, inspiring and motivational ceremony,” he said, with a note of relief in his voice.

He said the keynote speaker, Jeanne Gang, an architect and University of Illinois alumna, had hit just the right note. She acknowledged that “we all know about what’s going on in the world right now,” but said it was a time to come together and celebrate achievements.

At Berkeley, the home of the free-speech movement, the protesters made themselves heard. Greta Brown, 23, an environmental science graduate, wore cap, gown and a stole with the word “Palestine” emblazoned on it. She was among those who stood and chanted during the graduation speeches. “I felt like it was necessary,” she said, because the university had not done enough. “I just heard a lot of, like, ‘Oh, we hear you,’ and a centrist point of view.”

At the beginning of the ceremony, Chancellor Carol Christ was met with boos when she began to speak, but there were louder cheers when she mentioned the pro-Palestinian encampment nearby. “Students have been camping around Sproul Hall for almost three weeks,” Dr. Christ said. “They feel passionately about the brutality of the violence in Gaza.” She added, “I, too, am deeply troubled by the terrible tragedy.”

As the speeches continued, the disruptions escalated. Dozens of students in the crowd in the stands rose with signs reading “Divest,” and at least 10 Palestinian flags. They began to chant, and then interrupted the speech by the student body president, Sydney Roberts, who said, “This wouldn’t be Berkeley without a protest.”

Despite warnings from a school official, a group of students staked out a section of empty stadium seats behind the main stage, chanting, “Hey hey, ho ho, the occupation has got to go” and “UC divest” and attracting other students until the crowd swelled to about 500. Most of them slowly made their way to the exit as the graduation drew to a close.

Not all of the protests were centered on the Middle East. At Virginia Commonwealth in Richmond, Micah White, 26, was one of roughly 60 students who walked out while the governor was speaking.

“The first thing that motivated me is the hypocrisy of V.C.U. declaring themselves to be a minority-serving institution, declaring themselves to be for diversity, equity and inclusion, and bringing Youngkin in as commencement speaker,” he said.

The university’s board voted on Friday against requiring students to take racial literacy classes . Mr. Youngkin, a Republican, requested to review course materials for proposed racial literacy classes.

Mr. Youngkin also supported the dismantling of an encampment on campus late last month during which 13 people, including six students, were arrested. Sereen Haddad, 19, who studies psychology at V.C.U., said she was knocked to the ground during the clash between protesters and the police that day and that Mr. Youngkin had failed to acknowledge that the encampment was peaceful.

The ceremonies came after a week in which some colleges made arrests and cleared encampments of pro-Palestinian demonstrators. In recent days, authorities dismantled encampments at the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . Officers were also called in to empty an encampment at the University of Arizona, in Tucson, deploying “chemical munitions” in the process, hours before its graduation ceremony on Friday evening.

Anger over the clearing of an encampment lingered for some at the University of North Carolina commencement on Saturday night. Many students jeered their interim chancellor, Lee Roberts, who last month ordered that an encampment of pro-Palestinian protesters be removed. Still, when two students waved Palestinian flags and walked on the field in the middle of Mr. Roberts’s speech before security escorted them out, the majority of the stadium booed them and chanted, “USA! USA!”

Cynthia Howle and Eduardo Medina contributed reporting.

An earlier version of this article misstated the given name of a female student at Virginia Commonwealth University and misidentified her gender. She is Sereen Haddad, not Sareen.

An earlier version of this article misstated the title of the person who warned a group of students against disrupting the ceremony. It was a school official but not a vice provost.

How we handle corrections

— Shaila Dewan , Holly Secon , Leah Small and Robert Chiarito

Arizona State bans a scholar from campus after a confrontation at a protest.

Arizona State University has banned a postdoctoral research scholar and faculty member from campus as it investigates a video that went viral depicting him confronting a woman in a hijab, the school said this week.

In the video from May 5, the scholar, Jonathan Yudelman, along with another unidentified man, can be seen cursing and getting in a woman’s face at a pro-Israel rally near the school’s Tempe campus .

It was unclear what occurred before the video, but at one point in the video Mr. Yudelman can be seen repeatedly advancing toward the woman who is wearing a hijab, and telling her — “I’m literally in your face, that’s right” — as she backs away from him.

The woman responds and tells him that he is disrespecting her religious boundaries to which Mr. Yudelman responds, “You disrespect my sense of humanity,” followed by a profanity.

Mr. Yudelman, who was a postdoctoral fellow at the university’s School of Civics, Ethics and Leadership , had earlier resigned from the position, effective June 30, according to a statement the school released on Wednesday. But the school said he was placed on leave on May 6, adding that he was no longer permitted to come to campus, teach classes or interact with students or employees.

“Arizona State University protects freedom of speech and expression but does not tolerate threatening or violent behavior. While peaceful protest is welcome, all incidents of violent or threatening behavior will be addressed,” the statement added.

Mr. Yudelman was interviewed on May 5 at the pro-Israel rally by Phoenix television station KPNX . In the clip , he stated that campuses across the country were being “taken over by supporters of terrorism,” and stated that Jewish students were being intimidated. “It was important to come out, show the broader community that there are people who stand against this,” he said.

Mr. Yudelman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

— Anna Betts

Pennsylvania’s governor leans into the campus fight over antisemitism.

A few hours after Columbia University canceled its main commencement ceremony following weeks of pro-Palestinian student protests, Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania was in his office in Harrisburg, taking stock of the ways he sees universities letting students down.

“Our colleges, in many cases, are failing young people,” he said in an interview this week. “Failing to teach information that is necessary to form thoughtful perspectives. They are willing to let certain forms of hate pass by and condemn others more strongly.”

Mr. Shapiro — the leader of a pre-eminent battleground state, a rising Democrat and a proudly observant Jew — has also emerged as one of his party’s most visible figures denouncing the rise in documented antisemitism after the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack on Israel.

And at a moment of growing Democratic anger and unease over how Israel is conducting its devastating military response, Mr. Shapiro, 50 — who has no obligation to talk about foreign policy — has not shied away from expressing support for the country while criticizing its right-wing government.

Plunging into a subject that has inflamed and divided many Americans carries risk for an ambitious Democrat from a politically important state. The politics around both the Gaza war and the protest movement are exceptionally fraught within the Democratic Party , and many of its voters and elected officials have become increasingly critical of Israel.

But Mr. Shapiro has been direct.

Asked if he considered himself a Zionist, he said that he did. When Iran attacked Israel last month, he wrote on social media that Pennsylvania “stands with Israel.”

When the University of Pennsylvania’s president struggled before Congress to directly answer whether calling for the genocide of Jews violated the school’s rules, Mr. Shapiro said she had failed to show “moral clarity.” ( She later resigned .) When opponents of the Gaza war picketed an Israeli-style restaurant in Philadelphia known for its falafel and tahini shakes, Mr. Shapiro called the demonstration antisemitic and showed up for lunch.

And as university officials have struggled to define where free speech ends and hate speech begins, a tension upending the final weeks of the school year, Mr. Shapiro has issued stern warnings about their responsibility to protect students from discrimination. The issue hits close to home: On Friday, police cleared an encampment of pro-Palestinian demonstrators off the campus of the University of Pennsylvania. Mr. Shapiro had said it was “ past time ” for Penn to do so.

‘It should not be hard’

In the interview, Mr. Shapiro stressed that he did not believe all encampments or demonstrators were antisemitic — not “by any stretch.” But he suggested that on some campuses, antisemitic speech was treated differently than other kinds of hate speech.

“If you had a group of white supremacists camped out and yelling racial slurs every day, that would be met with a different response than antisemites camped out, yelling antisemitic tropes,” he said.

Law enforcement officials and advocacy groups have tracked a rise in antisemitic, anti-Muslim and anti-Arab acts in recent months.

Speaking after an appearance at a Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony on Monday, Mr. Shapiro emphasized that “we should be universal in our condemnation of antisemitism, Islamophobia and all forms of hate.”

While there is room for “nuance” in foreign policy discussions, he said, “it should not be hard for anyone on the political left or right to call out antisemitism.”

In a new survey , Mr. Shapiro, a former state attorney general, had a job approval rating of 64 percent, with just 19 percent of Pennsylvanians saying they disapproved.

He has long emphasized bipartisanship and prioritized nonideological issues like rapidly reopening a stretch of Interstate 95 after a collapse. And his own religious observance has helped him connect with people of other faiths in a state where Jews are estimated to make up about 3 percent of the electorate.

“I make it home Friday night for Sabbath dinner because family and faith ground me,” he said in a campaign ad.

Many Jews in Pennsylvania hope that he will become the first Jewish president. On that subject, he deflects as skillfully as any potential White House aspirant: He laughs or insists that he loves and is focused on his current job.

“I am very humbled that people have taken note of our work,” he said. “I sort of dismiss those comments because they’re not helpful to the work I’m trying to do every day as governor, the voice I’m trying to have both here in the commonwealth and across the country to root out hate and to speak with moral clarity.”

He added, “It’s certainly not helpful when it comes to our top political priority, which is to re-elect President Biden.”

‘Josh is front and center’

The Mideast war, which has killed more than 34,000 people in Gaza, according to local health authorities, has fueled a broad and significant protest movement.

But on college campuses, there are sharp debates over when demonstrations against Israel and its treatment of Palestinians veer into antisemitic targeting of Jewish students and institutions.

To Mr. Shapiro, the distinction is clear: Criticism of Israeli policies is fair game. “Affixing to every Jew the policies of Israel,” he said, is not.

Mr. Shapiro said he felt a “unique responsibility” to speak out both because he leads a state founded on a vision of religious tolerance , and because he is a “proud American Jew.”

Indeed, his Jewish identity is intertwined with his public persona to a degree rarely seen in American politicians.

He is a Jewish day school alumnus who has featured challah in his campaign advertising and alludes to a collection of Jewish ethics in his speeches. In recent weeks, he offered an under-the-weather 76ers player matzo ball soup and celebrated the end of Passover with Martin’s Potato Rolls, a Pennsylvania delicacy.

“It’s not an easy time to be Jewish, and to be a Jewish politician,” said Sharon Levin, a former teacher of Mr. Shapiro’s. “Josh is front and center.”

Mr. Shapiro has also spent significant time in Israel, proposing to his wife in Jerusalem . Asked if, like Mr. Biden , he considers himself a Zionist, he confirmed that he did.

“I am pro-Israel,” he said. “I am pro-the idea of a Jewish homeland, a Jewish state, and I will certainly do everything in my power to ensure that Israel is strong and Israel is fortified and will exist for generations.”

He also supports a two-state solution , is a longtime critic of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and said he mourned “the loss of life in Gaza.”

That approach is common among elected Democrats. But it is clearly at odds with the campus protests, which are often explicitly anti-Zionist.

The issue is virtually certain to divide Democrats on future presidential debate stages.

For now, Mr. Shapiro has not drawn the kind of backlash from the left that some other Israel supporters have, in part because he is not voting on foreign policy. And while another Pennsylvania Democrat, Senator John Fetterman, has sometimes engaged provocatively with pro-Palestinian demonstrators, Mr. Shapiro has a more measured, lawyerly style.

“It’s critically important that we remove hate from the conversation and allow people to freely express their ideas, whether I agree with their ideas or not,” he said.

Tensions over Israel

Some Muslim leaders say Mr. Shapiro has not found the right balance in his post-Oct. 7 comments.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations in Philadelphia said in a statement that two of its board members had skipped an iftar dinner he hosted, arguing that he had “created much harm and hurt among Muslim, Arab and pro-Palestinian Pennsylvanians.”

“The governor, like the White House, is not fully able to see the deep level of resentment that exists about his stances,” Ahmet Tekelioglu, the executive director of that chapter, said in an interview. (In a statement on Friday, he also criticized Mr. Shapiro’s call to disband the Penn encampment.) “The governor has lost the trust of many in the Muslim-American community in Pennsylvania that had long considered him a friend.”

Mr. Shapiro, whose team has clashed with CAIR before, replied, “I’m not going to let one press release from one group that has its own agenda take away from the close, strong relationship I have with the Muslim community.”

“We have tried to create, at the residence and across Pennsylvania, a place where all faiths feel welcomed,” he said.

State Representative Tarik Khan, a Philadelphia-area Democrat who is Muslim, did attend the iftar. It included time for prayer and a “legit dinner,” he said, rather than “hors d’oeuvres and get the hell out.”

“At a time when there’s a lot of trauma, sometimes the easy thing is to do nothing,” Mr. Khan said. “If he didn’t care about our community, he wouldn’t have spent that time.”

Growing expectations

Mr. Shapiro faces different pressures from the Jewish community.

In the Philadelphia area, many know him or his family personally — or feel as if they do — and in some cases expect him to speak out frequently in support of Israel. But, said Jonathan Scott Goldman, the chair of the Pennsylvania Jewish Coalition, his job is to lead the whole state.

“Jewish people want to and do claim Josh as their own,” Mr. Goldman said. “He knows he’s not just a Jewish governor. He’s a governor, and he’s the governor of all Pennsylvanians.”

In the interview, Mr. Shapiro reiterated that he was focused on that job.

But asked if — broadly speaking — he believed the country could elect a Jewish president in his lifetime, he replied, “Speaking broadly, absolutely.”

“It doesn’t mean that our nation is free of bias,” he said. “If you’re asking me, can the country rise above that, and elect someone that might look different than them or worship different than them? The answer is yes.”

— Katie Glueck Reporting from Pennsylvania’s State Capitol building in Harrisburg, Pa.

Here’s why antiwar protests haven’t flared up at Black colleges like Morehouse.

As President Biden prepares to give graduation remarks this month at Morehouse College in Atlanta, a prestigious historically Black institution, the White House is signaling anxiety about the potential for protests over the war in Gaza.

During a recent visit to Atlanta, Vice President Kamala Harris stopped to ask the Morehouse student government president about the sentiment on campus about the conflict, how students felt about Mr. Biden’s visit and what the graduating class would like to hear from him on May 19.

Then, on Friday, the White House dispatched the leader of its public engagement office and one of its most senior Black officials, Stephen K. Benjamin, to the Morehouse campus for meetings to take the temperature of students, faculty members and administrators.

The reasons for concern are clear: Nationwide demonstrations over the war and Mr. Biden’s approach to it have inflamed more than 60 colleges and universities , stoked tensions within the Democratic Party and created new headaches for his re-election bid.

Yet Mr. Biden appears to be entering a different type of scene at Morehouse.

While anger over the war remains palpable at Morehouse and other historically Black colleges and universities, these campuses have been largely free of turmoil, and tensions are far less evident: no encampments, few loud protests and little sign of Palestinian flags flying from dorm windows.

The reasons stem from political, cultural and socioeconomic differences with other institutions of higher learning. While H.B.C.U.s host a range of political views, domestic concerns tend to outweigh foreign policy in the minds of most students. Many started lower on the economic ladder and are more intently focused on their education and their job prospects after graduation.

At Morehouse — which has a legacy of civil rights protests and is the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s alma mater — discontent over the Gaza war has played out in classrooms and auditoriums rather than on campus lawns.

“This should not be a place that cancels people regardless of if we agree with them,” David Thomas, the Morehouse president, said in an interview on Thursday. Of Mr. Biden’s visit, he said, “Whether people support the decision or not, they are committed to having it happen on our campus in a way that doesn’t undermine the integrity or dignity of the school.”

Some students have held contentious meetings with university leaders and urged them to rescind Mr. Biden’s invitation, and a small group of faculty members has vowed not to attend commencement. Some alumni wrote a letter expressing worries that student protesters could be punished, noting Morehouse’s history of “celebrating student activists long after they have graduated.”

But the college might appear politically safer for the president to visit than many others. Morehouse is a custom-bound place where undergraduates traditionally do not step on the grass in the heart of campus until they receive their degrees. Alumni view commencement as a distinguished event not only for students but also for scores of family and community members — making it a less likely venue for a major disruption.

Mr. Biden chose to speak at Morehouse after the White House had received invitations from an array of colleges. It will be the third time in four years he has addressed graduates of a historically Black institution; he has also spoken at commencement for one military academy each year.

Among those lobbying Mr. Biden to come to Morehouse was Cedric Richmond, a member of the college’s class of 1995, who ran Mr. Biden’s public engagement office and is now a senior adviser at the Democratic National Committee .

Mr. Richmond, who has a nephew at Morehouse, predicted Mr. Biden would speak about the high expectations of the college’s alumni, promote his record of reducing Black unemployment and narrowing the racial wealth gap, and deliver familiar exhortations about perseverance.

Mr. Richmond does not think Mr. Biden will face protests.

“The Morehouse College graduation, at least as I remember it, is a very solemn event,” he said. “You have almost 500 African American males walking across that stage, whose parents and grandparents sacrificed and those students worked their butts off to, one, get into Morehouse, and two, to graduate. That’s a very significant day. And I’m just not sure whether students or protesters are going to interfere with that solemn moment.”

Vice President Harris, who graduated from Howard University, another historically Black institution, is engaged in her own virtual tour of such colleges. A congratulatory video she recorded will be played for graduates at 44 H.B.C.U.s; she is often introduced as a surprise guest and greeted with cheers.

In Atlanta last month, Ms. Harris asked the Morehouse student government president, Mekhi Perrin, what approach Mr. Biden should take in his address.

“I think really she was just trying to gain an idea of what exactly students’ issues were with his coming, if any at all,” Mr. Perrin said. “And what would kind of shift that narrative.”

Mr. Biden has been trailed by Gaza protesters for months. The last time he spoke at a four-year college campus was in January, when demonstrators interrupted him at least 10 times during a rally at George Mason University in Virginia.

Morehouse’s traditions are strong. Dr. King said it was a place where he had advanced his understanding of nonviolent protest and moral leadership — which current Morehouse students say they take seriously.

“I feel like the protests do need to come out, because if you don’t see students advocating for what they believe in, then the change that they’re advocating for will never come about,” said Benjamin Bayliss, a Morehouse junior. Looking toward the statue of Dr. King in front of the chapel named for the civil rights leader, he added, “You really feel the weight of what King did and the fire of the torch that he lit that we have to carry on.”

Yet even as some students feel compelled to protest, outside factors can shape their decisions. Roughly 75 percent of students at H.B.C.U.s, including 50 percent of Morehouse students, are eligible for the Pell Grant , a federal aid program for low-income students. More than 80 percent of Morehouse students receive some form of financial aid. In the Class of 2024, nearly a third of graduates will be the first in their family to receive a bachelor’s degree.

Some students at Black colleges also may decide against protesting because of family pressure , which amplifies the importance of securing their degrees.

“Your student body at Columbia is very different than the student body at, say, Dillard,” said Walter Kimbrough, who spent a decade as president of Dillard University, a historically Black institution in New Orleans. “It doesn’t mean that people aren’t concerned. But they understand that they have some different kinds of stakes.”

The stakes are also high for Mr. Biden, whose standing with Black voters has softened ahead of November’s presidential election. Young people are less enthusiastic about voting at all — partly because of Mr. Biden’s handling of the Gaza war, but also because they are unhappy with the choice between him and former President Donald J. Trump.

“I think it’s really just picking the lesser of two evils,” said Freddrell Rhea Green II, a Morehouse freshman. “Anything better than Donald Trump, a madman, a quote unquote tyrant, is better for me.”

“Joe Biden is probably a very nice person,” said Samuel Livingston, an associate professor of Africana studies at Morehouse. “But niceness is not the level of leadership that we need. We need ethical leadership. And continuing to support the aiding, abetting and the stripping of Palestinian land, from Palestinian people in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, is not ethical.”

Some students, like Auzzy Byrdsell, a senior studying kinesiology and journalism, support their classmates’ protests but fear a possible response from the police to a crowd of largely Black young men.

“Do we get tear-gassed?” said Mr. Byrdsell, the editor in chief of The Maroon Tiger, the school’s student newspaper. “Do we get arrested? That would not be the greatest look for a Morehouse College graduation.”

Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia, a 1991 Morehouse alumnus, said that he hoped Mr. Biden would highlight his record and his agenda — but that there was little the president could say about the Gaza conflict to assuage his critics on campus.

“While what he says is important,” Mr. Warnock said, trying to put himself in the shoes of student protesters, “I think much more important is what he does in the future.”

Kitty Bennett contributed research.

— Maya King and Reid J. Epstein Maya King reported from Atlanta, and Reid J. Epstein from Washington.

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Armenian Genocide
Armenian Genocide, campaign of deportation and mass killing conducted against the Armenian subjects of the Ottoman Empire by the Young Turk government during World War I (1914-18). Armenians charge that the campaign was a deliberate attempt to destroy the Armenian people and, thus, an act of genocide.
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More information about this image. The Armenian genocide refers to the physical annihilation of ethnic Armenian Christian people living in the Ottoman Empire from spring 1915 through autumn 1916. There were approximately 1.5 million Armenians living in the Empire. At least 664,000 and possibly as many as 1.2 million died during the genocide.
Armenian genocide
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Young Turk Revolution 1908 ↑

Turkish Nationalism and the Catastrophic Results of the War for Armenians ↑

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Mass Deportation, Forced Marches, and Death Camps ↑

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Genocide as Response to Crisis ↑

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Campus Protests At Commencements, Protesters Deliver Messages in Many Ways

Here’s the latest on campus protests.

A skirmish breaks out near Pomona College’s graduation.

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and protesters reach a deal to end an encampment.

As Jerry Seinfeld receives an honorary degree at Duke, students walk out in protest.

At Emerson College’s commencement, there were expressions of protest from beginning to end.

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A closer look at the violent attack at U.C.L.A. raises questions about the police response.

Frustrated by Gaza Coverage, Student Protesters Turn to Al Jazeera

On a day with many calm ceremonies, Berkeley’s protests stand out.

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Pennsylvania’s governor leans into the campus fight over antisemitism.

‘It should not be hard’

‘Josh is front and center’

Tensions over Israel

Growing expectations

Here’s why antiwar protests haven’t flared up at Black colleges like Morehouse.

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