It is hard to find words facing the ongoing genocide in Gaza since October 2023. Tens of writers, scholars, journalists, historians and other enlightened people have written and talked extensively on the current massacre, its antecedents and background going back many years to 1948, the Nakba. Their testimony also mentions the complicity of the British Empire in the last half century of the Ottoman rule and after the Great War. As far as I can follow, the most informed commentary comes from American intellectuals and investigative reporters, and from Palestinians in exile or still in the occupied territories, and from few Israelis still living in their own country. These people are mostly drawing from the leftist point of view and they are in many instances Jewish. Their writings and interviews are mainly published through websites like Counterpunch, Scheerpost, ZNetwork and others, whose circulation (in the old parlance of publishing) may possibly be in the thousands only. In addition to these, DemocracyNow is especially commendable in bringing out the real faces of the tragedy by interviewing Palestinians of Gaza: Doctors, poets, writers and journalists. Some of them lost their lives since, and almost all lost relatives and loved ones. Not being able to follow other material from the continental European languages, I should expect to be lacking in some crucial commentary. But then, the worthwhile contribution to the critique (and condemnation) of an ongoing massacre one can expect to be translated into English and circulated on the web. In my opinion, mainstream media and newspapers in the western world can be excluded from this list for various reasons. Even the ‘left-liberal’ ones, like The Guardian that I follow for news everyday fail to deliver an ethical and just account of the carnage: balanced journalism is not about pitting one’s grief to the other’s in consequent photographs on the main page, or distant-reporting on a ‘war’ as though there are two compatible sides, or relying mainly on the Israeli propaganda machine. Even a simple glitch in language is telling: This is not a war in Gaza, but a war on Gaza. Meanwhile, except for Al Jazeera, true journalism with witnesses on the ground has failed in this instance, following incredible number of casualties and deaths among the brave Palestinian reporters under Israeli fire. As a lot of people agree, among wars of the past century this has been the deadliest assault on a small territory in which no one is spared, including (and deliberately) the journalists.
My modest contribution to these can be told through my experience and reminiscences as an academic and an artist living in Turkey. It is by no means a kind investigative research, but what I have observed over the years in instances that relate to the struggle for Palestine as seen from the Turkish side. This also should recount the official view as the political power in Turkey in the past fifty years has changed hands from center-left democrats, to semi-secular right wing opportunists, and finally to a kind of authoritarian political Islam. As a footnote: The policies that bind these political actors together are the denial of Armenian genocide and refusal to make peace with the Kurdish population of Turkey and its neighbors. In certain instances, this narration also includes episodes of utmost agony that the Jewish community in Turkey had faced in a number of deadly attacks in the past. I try to understand what a lot of scholars worldwide observe as extreme confusion in the employment of the concept of antisemitism, and in labeling multiple facets of racism, including Islamic fundamentalism and Zionism. It should be clear for a socialist (or for that matter for any person of conscience) that worldwide any fascistic, or an authoritarian, or an apartheid government should be labeled as such and fought against regardless of the foundation myths and extenuating circumstances, period. At the same time to hold the populations responsible for voting and electing these governments and to discriminate along these lines is the worst mistake an intelligent person can make, as we have observed time and again in Turkey. Peoples of the third world had frequently been punished by their oppressors for democratically electing the wrong guys, as the people in Gaza know very well. This is the stuff of military coups and following atrocities in 1953 in Iran, in Chile and in other instances in south America, Africa and Asia
Most of Edward Said’s books have been translated into Turkish with considerable delay. In the 1990’s the first and the most influential one among scholars and social scientists was Orientalism. Unfortunately the first date of publication for most of his translated books are somewhat lost among the multiple publishing houses in Turkey that circulate data. As the original English version was first published in 1978, we can assume that part of the Turkish academia had picked it up early. The book is still influential in scope, not because Said mentions the Turks as an object of study for the field of Orientalism, but because the historical subjects of the Ottoman Empire were in the focus of the debate, and the literature of post-colonialism had some relevance in the developing Republic of Turkey. In 1990’s the Turkish academics in the cultural field, including myself, thought that the book answered some of the questions that we faced. For me they surfaced looking at photographs from 19th century Ottoman Istanbul. Somehow, representations of Islam was not among these questions. Meanwhile, Edward Said’s specific identity as a Palestinian public intellectual in exile and as the enlightened scholar of Palestinian struggle was a little lost. His later books came late into Turkish, like The Question of Palestine and Covering Islam and I suppose they had a lesser circulation. By this time, the left in Turkey was in disarray after the 1980 military coup, like in most other countries after the Berlin wall came down. And so was the solidarity of the global left with the Palestinian cause which by this time was picked up by the rising militant Islam. I think it was in late 1960’s and 1970’s that a worldwide internationalism of socialists connected the struggles in the Middle East, South America, East Asia and Turkey. As an adolescent, I remember that there was a lot of debate on Palestine, and for the left militants PLO set an example for an armed national struggle. Meanwhile, the majority of the Turkish governments of the time, from social democrats to the right, and the combination of both in coalition, but always the enemy of socialists and communists in Turkey, had welcomed Arafat in many occasions. As far as I remember, PLO was the legitimate representative of the Palestinian cause, and Arafat its spokesperson both in Turkey and occasionally at the UN. And again as I recall, he never started his excited public speeches with (in) the name of Allah. For the official Turkish stand, the solidarity with Palestine was supposedly less about a brotherhood in Islam, but then it looked good during the elections among the pious voters. Later on in 1993 it was again Edward Said that harshly criticized PLO and Arafat’s concessions, their embrace by western media and centers of power, and their offsetting of the gains of the Intifada.
In late April in 1998 I was in the West Bank for around ten days as a photographer. I was commissioned by the Aga Khan Award for architecture to photograph in El Khalil (Hebron) and Nablus, both nominees for the award for the rehabilitation of the old town centers. Together with an architect-historian colleague who prepared the report for the jury, we stayed in East Jerusalem and were well received by a team of Palestinian architects and restoration experts. They were very proud of their achievement and hopeful for the recognition by a very prestigious institution. That year, Hebron had received the award in restoration. This very brief visit had left its impressions. It was a relatively quiet time in between two Intifadas and on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the state of Israel, for which thousands of flags were visible everywhere. From my experiences in Turkey, I sense that the extreme visibility of the national flag in the public realm refers to both the degree of fervent nationalism and to a kind of emergency situation that requires vigilance, rather than being a symbol of simple patriotism. For Israel, this was possibly understandable. In my country one should beware. Unlike Jerusalem old city, on the street level in Hebron and Nablus there was not the presence of Israeli soldiers on patrol, and the tensions this aroused. But once I was on the rooftops to photograph, I could see that a network of other rooftops were occupied by Israeli military, in clear view of each other, heavily armed and fortified. I remember being closely watched from a distance, together with my guide, a sensation that Palestinians faced in everyday life together with a number of settlements and checkpoints on the daily trips. The Ibrahim Mosque in Hebron was a forbidden zone, guarded by Israeli soldiers. This is where in 1994 Baruch Goldstein, an American-Jewish settler had murdered 29 Muslim worshipers and wounded 125 others. In the early 2000s, on the TV screen I have recognized exactly the same few buildings that I photographed in Nablus. They were turned into rubble and dust by the Israeli tanks and bulldozers in an occasional assault.
On the morning of November 15, 2003, a Saturday, I was at home in Istanbul, where I lived for ten years. My apartment was in Galata district, in the heart of the city about twenty meters distance from the Galata Tower, a Genovese landmark and tourist attraction that stood there since 1348. It was also about a hundred meters away from Neve Shalom synagogue, which is around the corner from the tower down on the busy main street. When I felt the huge explosion, the first thing that came to my mind was that an lpg tank had accidentally went off in one of the restaurants. I was too shaken to go out. In a few minutes, I understood that it was far more serious when the bodies were being carried in the arms of men down the street to the two nearby hospitals as I watched from my window. A couple of minutes later another bang was faintly heard coming from the other side of the city. The car bombs that exploded in front of two synagogues (the other one in Şişli district) almost simultaneously have killed 29 people and wounded 600 others. All casualties were Turkish citizens, and most were people of Muslim faith going about their daily business as the stores and businesses were open. Less than a week later, two more car bombs went off one after the other, one in front of the British consulate and the other one near the HSBC Bank in Levent, again killing tens of people passing by and wounding hundreds. All attacks were carried out by al Qaida. The mass in Neve Shalom was mainly spared possibly by the help of hidden fortified walls and a fake facade. What prompted these precautions was a prior atrocity that happened on another Saturday, September 6, 1986, when members of the Abu Nidal organization attacked the temple and killed 22 Jewish citizens of Turkey.
In 1986 I was studying in New York and all through those years Benjamin Netenyahu’s face was on prime time broadcast news every other day, interviewed by the anchors of the three networks as the representative of Israel at the UN. It was the time of the first Intifada. By then this fast talking man was being primed for what he would become today.
A condemnation should go for any indiscriminate terror attack on a civilian population anywhere in the world, be it in Europe, in Turkey or in Palestine. This is almost tautological. A humanist take on the proposition should attribute a decent moral position to every obedient Muslim of conscience, to every other faith and all decent folk who do not follow a faith. But when it is uttered by the highest political authority, it rings hollow. This is not a problem of political speech writing. It is about the long term policies being followed and other public utterances (demagogy) to satisfy a certain publicum (and the mob) that lead to moral corruption and cracks through which these vile acts can flow. Through these cracks, hundreds of Turkish people had been bombed and gunned to death and hundreds maimed for life in Ankara, in Suruç and in Istanbul in the last ten years, by the members of Isis and its Turkish affiliates. Meanwhile, the Jewish community in Turkey is not leading as precarious a life as the Armenian citizens of the country, even though they did not enjoy the best of times in the last one hundred years. But today when the highest authority in the country engages in something close to a hate speech against ‘Israel’ (a nondescript entity on the receiving end) some of his followers are ready to engage in racism of the vicious kind. In return, when an Israeli cabinet member labels all Palestinians as ‘human animals’ there are consequences all the worst for the people of Gaza and the West Bank.
On June 28, 2016 Isis militants carried out an attack in Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport that killed 48 people and wounded 236. On October 28, 2023, the ruling party in Turkey (AKP) held the ‘Great Palestine Meeting’ in the currently dismantled airport’s runways. Thousands of people had to be bused to the relatively remote location: a party organization. As far as I have seen from photographs, among the thousands of national symbols waved in excitement, there was approximately one Palestinian flag for every one hundred Turkish flags. This was an AKP rally, an occasion for the president to publicly voice his rhetoric before the oncoming local elections. Meanwhile, it was all in the family, all acted for the national crowds.
The fate of the people of Gaza and the West Bank has been sealed by the most toxic circumstances that the global world had seen for a very long time. On one hand, the claim on the Palestinian struggle by varied militants of Islam since 1990s left them facing the more murderous Zionist regime and the settlers as its paramilitary wing. The violence spirals out of control and finally the apartheid government sets the conditions for revenge in each instance. But equally tragic is the fact that another toxic-macho combination of men rule the corrupt regimes that occupy and surround the Holy Land in concentric circles on the map, South Africa being an exception. They might have had some sincere empathy for Gazans (or might have had the power of sanctions) to alleviate the plight of Palestinian people, but they stayed put. These men range in a spectrum from members of the Palestinian Authority to the sheiks, owners of the oil wells (and countries) in the Gulf; and to the king (and his son) guilty of the most gruesome murder of a journalist, a citizen, inside a foreign mission (the body snatchers); to the new Persians, the clerics that accelerated the public hanging of the most joyful and innocent sons and daughters of Iran; the butchers of Damascus and Tahrir Square; and gradually to other men of (some) power. Enter the European countries and the United States in this act of the tragedy. Few people in a sane mind expect that through the ‘corridors of power’ and ‘the delicate balance of trade and supply chains’ or through the fog of history or simply through the long term allegiences and support for Israel, that neat distinctions could be made by men in power along the following lines: What is Antisemitism? What is racism? Holocaust denial? White supremacy? Apartheid regime? Annihilation? Genocide? These distinctions are being made with a clear conscience and mind by the majority of peoples of the world, and acted upon by gathering on the streets in Europe, United States and to a lesser degree elsewhere, demanding first a ceasefire, then dignity and a decent existence for the Palestinian people. Facing the innocents of Gaza covered in blood, our only hope lies in the decency and the power of this multitude.
February 2024