NAASR to Host talk on Israeli-Turkish Relations and Denial of the Armenian Genocide

BELMONT, MA — The National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR) will host a lecture by Dr. Eldad Ben Aharon titled “Israeli-Turkish Relations at the End of the Cold War: The Geopolitics of Denying the Armenian Genocide,” on Thursday, April 23, 2026, at 7:30 pm Eastern at the NAASR Vartan Gregorian Building, 395 Concord Ave., Belmont, MA. This program is sponsored by the NAASR / Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Lecture Series on Contemporary Armenian Issues.

The event is free and open to the public and can also be attended online via Zoom (registration link: https://bit.ly/4rUsT0U) or YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/c/ArmenianStudies).  Following the program there will be a reception and a book signing to which all attendees are cordially invited.

In the shadows of Cold War politics, Israel quietly aligned itself with Turkey’s denial of the Armenian Genocide. Why, and at what cost?

Eldad Ben Aharon’s Israeli–Turkish Relations at the End of the Cold War: The Geopolitics of Denying the Armenian Genocide (Edinburgh Univ. Press, 2025) traces Israel’s diplomatic maneuvering through key geopolitical events, including Iran’s Islamic Revolution, the July 1980 Jerusalem Law, Turkey’s September 1980 military coup, and the 1982 First Lebanon War, alongside its secret dealings with Ankara. He situates these developments within broader regional and global shifts, such as Turkey’s 1987 bid to join the European Economic Community, U.S. foreign policy under Ronald Reagan and the early stages of the American “war on terror.”

Ben Aharon uncovers how divisions within Israel’s diplomatic corps reflected broader dilemmas over supporting Turkey’s denial of the Armenian Genocide while protecting Jerusalem’s strategic interests in Washington and Brussels. Ultimately, he shows how individual diplomats, operating in the shadows, forged an alliance that reshaped Israeli–Turkish relations for decades.

Dr. Eldad Ben Aharon is a Senior Researcher at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt and was previously an Irish Research Council (IRC) Postdoctoral Fellow in International Security at Dublin City University. His work explores the nexus of security, identity, and memory, drawing on insights from securitization theory, foreign policy analysis, and oral history. Ben Aharon has published widely on Israeli foreign policy and its intersections with broader regional conflict dynamics, with his research appearing in leading academic journals.