31-07-2025
New Coalitions for a Dying World
A week after Azerbaijan's 2023 attack on Artsakh that led to its fall, Israel's assault on Gaza began. Politically engaged Armenians had little time to catch our breath between our tragedy before the next. The urgency to hold Azerbaijan accountable and advocate for Artsakh Armenians' rights still remains. But with Israel's indiscriminate and brutal force against Gaza's starving, unarmed civilian population, and the shocking visibility of it, our appeals to international law and human dignity for our own people seemed to dissolve in the face of this violence against another group making the same pleas.
A friend, whose family is from Karin Tak, Artsakh, said: 'It's when I realized how f*cked we are.'
Those who speak out against Israel's violence in the countries most complicit—the U.S., Germany, and the UK—are being silenced: students targeted for deportation , professors fired , advocacy groups criminalized , protesters beaten and arrested . Western media maintain what a friend called 'a collective agreement to sudden stupidity.' Is it genocide? Can we even be sure? This Orwellian pretense of uncertainty continues, and with it, the human misery, dehumanization, and destruction of an entire society.
Human rights and international law, when it comes to Israel, bend like reeds, revealing a system functioning as designed: to extract, destroy, obscure its violence, and shield its executioners from accountability. These frameworks, built to serve empire and capital, were never designed to prevent violence—they were meant to manage and legitimize it, as seen in this era of mass atrocities against civilians.
Artsakh taught Armenians this lesson. But instead of cynical paralysis or viewing these struggles as disconnected, we must recognize shared patterns of state violence. Even Colombian President Gustavo Petro points to these broader connections, calling Gaza 'an experiment of the mega rich trying to show all the peoples of the world how to respond to a rebellion of humanity.'
One of the more unfortunate ways the 'Armenian cause' has been framed and understood is in isolation—Armenian suffering treated as unique and detached from the broader context of global injustice. Yet, we are not alone in facing military violence, occupation, and settler colonialism. Precisely because we know what it is to be besieged, starved, bombed, expelled, and dehumanized we have a responsibility to stand with others facing the same horrors. Internationalist solidarity—rooted in mutual respect, shared goals, and a commitment to dismantling the root causes of violence like imperialism and capitalism—offers a way forward.
Some Armenians are already building these bridges. In the U.S., groups like Armor and Yerazad Coalitions are building transnational networks built in shared struggle. The Lernazang Dance Ensemble brings this into the cultural sphere, hosting Assyrian dance instructors and participating in Southwest Asia and North Africa focused workshops. History offers examples too: Missak Manouchian's resistance group fought Nazis alongside Jews; Monte Melkonian was an internationalist committed to struggles beyond his own. Today, Armenians are part of the multiethnic, multiconfessional fabric of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, also known as Rojava.
In contrast, projects like the Aurora Prize may signal solidarity, but their top-down structure and elite curation feel detached from the struggles they claim to champion. True solidarity starts with horizontal connection—organizers, artists, musicians, historian—not branding or philanthropy. Start small, but start now.
Like many Armenians, I once complained about the lack of support when Artsakh was under attack. But since then, I've seen different people, including Afghans and Kurds , advocacy groups like City Kurds , as well as media initiatives like The Funambulist , consistently work with and include Armenians and Armenian issues in their work. At From the Periphery , the media collective I'm part of alongside individuals from various backgrounds, we platform Armenian perspectives alongside others as a matter of principle. Of course, these are individuals without the power to stop the existential threats that Armenia faces. But have states—those with that power—done any better? To dismiss this popular solidarity is to erase real work. Could it be more? Absolutely. But just as urgently: What have we done for them?
Building coalitions among peoples who've survived historic and ongoing state violence should be an obvious impulse. Yet many Armenians still fail to act on these shared struggles—most glaringly with Palestine. Historian Taner Akçam draws a direct link between denial of the Armenian Genocide and the silencing of criticism around the genocide in Gaza. Western charges of antisemitism now serve a similar function to Turkey's Article 301, which criminalizes 'insulting Turkishness': both are tools to suppress dissent and shield state violence from scrutiny. Similarly, narratives that deflect critique by invoking national security—from Ottoman claims of 'Armenian terrorists' in 1915 to Israel's justification of atrocities as self-defense—both function to erase memory and deflect accountability. These are not new tactics; they are tools of empire, rehearsed and redeployed to mask systematic violence.
This pattern demands action, yet Armenian institutions like the Genocide Museum-Institute, Germany-based Institute for Diaspora and Genocide Research, the ANCA, and the Society for Armenian Studies, and others have remained silent on the genocide in Gaza. That silence isn't just disappointing—it betrays the core principle behind Armenian Genocide Studies and Armenian advocacy: 'never again'. Institutions built to prevent future atrocities through knowledge have abandoned their own moral foundation.
Where is Armenian civil society? Not a single organization in Armenia has spoken out. Whether this silence is due to ignorance, moral cowardice, or the belief that anything beyond Armenia is irrelevant, this detachment is no longer defensible. Perhaps it's a posture of feigned neutrality—but if so, isn't that then complicity in the very logic of disposability we claim to oppose? If we refuse to name and resist state violence elsewhere, especially when it echoes our own history, then what exactly have we learned from that history?
I understand why many Armenians hesitate to engage in broader struggles. We are exhausted—betrayed by shortsighted, undeserving leaders across government, opposition, and the diaspora. I feel it, too. With limited resources and the urgency of our own survival, solidarity can seem like a luxury. Yet, this cannot become an excuse for silence. Our history of erasure gives us not just a moral imperative but a strategic one: to build alliances with others who know this pain. Silence in the face of occupation is how the framework for genocide is laid. In my own more discouraged moments, I try to remind myself: did I think this was going to be easy?
Just last night, I saw that the Veradardz Folk Ensemble was banned from performing at an international folk festival in Dersim—for flying the Armenian flag. The incident wasn't just about a performance—it was about erasing a shared history of resistance and survival. This is Dersim (known in Turkish as Tunceli), where Alevi Kurds sheltered 40,000 Armenians in 1915, only to face their own massacre in 1937–38, with Islamized Armenians fighting alongside them. The festival organizers had made a very conscious effort to celebrate the diverse peoples of Anatolia, but the backlash reveals the enduring fear of 'separatism' and its rejection of pluralism.
This suppression of shared histories demonstrates the need for solidarity among marginalized peoples. Armenia cannot rely on a broken global order or the geopolitics of capital—arms deals, extractive interests, and power games that crush small nations. This must be our wake-up call, because it is going to get worse. We also need to think seriously about horizontal forms of self-defense in this new era of mass atrocities against civilians.
Of course, the Armenian state—flawed as its institutions and as misguided as its current leadership may be—is part of why we still exist as a people. The goal isn't to abandon the state; it's to refuse the trap of thinking it's all that matters. That illusion drives some towards alliances with colonizing, ethnonationalist powers—be it pro-Israel groups or other segments of the American and French far right—under the guise of shared civilizational or religious values. In practice, these have been appeals to Christian supremacist frameworks or Zionist lobbying networks by reductively presenting Armenians as a 'Christian people' under siege. I recognize that states may form tactical partnerships to counter existential threats like Turkish supremacy—especially when the stakes are about survival in a hostile world. These are pragmatic, state-driven calculations diplomats may need to make. But when the private sector or civil society pursues these as allyships, it's a different story. With them, it doesn't feel like survival, it feels like they're imitating state pragmatism without the same stakes. These alignments are—like the state ones—transactional, not protective. They reinforce the very systems that endanger us. What looks like pragmatism is, in truth, a deep compromise that undermines both our credibility and our cause.
We have to act not by relying on their power, but in spite of it. That means building reciprocal, principled connections with people who know what it means to be marginalized, erased, and made to survive. People who act on principle, not shifting geopolitical interests. Internationalist solidarity with other oppressed communities isn't idealism; it's strategic. This isn't about replacing the state, it's about complementing it—building an added layer of protection that doesn't depend on the goodwill of imperial powers. It positions the Armenian cause within a broader network of mutual support, amplifying our voice and resilience in a global system that routinely sidelines us and other small nations. This isn't just a moral stance—it's about survival. To isolate ourselves is to misread the world. To look away is to lose our place in it. We can't afford either.
