Turkey can no longer count on the backing of the powerful Jewish lobby in the United States in its efforts to block a congressional resolution recognizing the Armenian Genocide, according to a Washington-based journalist.

Eli Lake, a national security correspondent for “The Washington Times,” believes that Ankara’s furious reaction to the deadly Israeli raid on a Gaza-bound international aid flotilla will help Armenian-American advocacy groups trying to push such a resolution through the U.S. Congress.

The Washington Times published a revealing article by Lake on the issue titled, “American Jewish community ends support of Turkish interests on Hill.” “In 2008, the major Jewish organizations decided they would no longer quietly push Congress to block a resolution commemorating the Armenian Genocide,” Lake told RFE/RL’s Armenian service on Monday. “This was a reflection in some way of deteriorating ties between Israel and Turkey.”

“One of the prizes of the Turks in their relationship with Israel was support from the American Jewish community in Washington. After the flotilla incident, I would say that that support for now has dried up,” he said.

“I would say that they will certainly not be an obstacle to the bill,” Lake said, referring to the more influential Jewish-American groups. “It’s possible that some groups may end up supporting it because there is a kinship, of course, between what happened to the Armenian people in 1915 and what happened to the Jewish people in the Holocaust in 1939-1945,” asbarez.com quoted him as saying.