This paper takes the April 24 round up of Armenian intellectuals which inaugurated the 1915 Genocide as its focal point, and examines the period preceding and following their murders through the lens of L’Aurore, a Zionist newspaper published in Istanbul. By reading the 1915 Genocide through the lens of L’Aurore, which was published in Istanbul from 1909 until 1918, this paper makes two important contributions to existing scholarship on the Ottoman Genocide. First, L’Aurore was a Zionist publication that ascribed neither to Armenian or Turkish nationalist identities, nor to Christian or Muslim religious identities, which expands the scope of this study beyond the categories of perpetrator and victim that dominate studies of genocide. As a Jewish publication, L’Aurore’s rhetoric had to accommodate the mythology of Ottoman tolerance towards Jews that Julia Philips Cohen and Marc Baer have explored in detail. This paper juxtaposes L’Aurore’s patriotic affect with its silence in the face of violence to uncover a new part of the process through which state violence was occluded, excused, and justified in the Ottoman public sphere. Second, this paper’s temporal framing confronts the continuity of liberal discourse from 1908 to 1918, throughout the process of the genocide. With the Young Turk revolution and accompanying liberal citizenship reforms of 1908, the state tied the fate of all subjects, including Jews and Armenians, to the fate of the state by promising protections under the liberal rhetoric of brotherhood and inclusion studied by Michelle Campos. I show that although L’Aurore’s triangulation of kinship morphed over time, its rhetoric of brotherhood, inclusion, and protection continued throughout the alleged shift away from liberalism in the Balkan Wars and World War I. I argue that while demographic changes, nationalist movements, and wartime exigencies thoroughly studied in this period exacerbated state violence, liberalism should be considered as a condition of possibility that produced the totalizing scope of genocide, which itself laid the groundwork for the establishment of homogenizing nation-states in the region. This paper is part of a larger project to grapple with the fact that the Ottoman administration that was most committed to liberal citizenship was also the one that orchestrated and implemented the 1915 Genocide. Far from a failed momentary aspiration, Ottoman liberalism was an ongoing movement that, in promoting brotherhood and universal inclusion, ultimately demanded loyalty from all and ultimately punished the allegedly disloyal with genocidal violence.