Middle Israel: Talking Turkey
Jerusalem Post (Online Edition)
June 24, 2004
By Amotz Asa-El, amotz@jpost.com
“Our forefathers, at their strongest time in history, opened up their
hearts to the Jews who had been driven out of Spain at the time of the
Inquisition and opened up their hearts and homes to the Jews. Jews were
the victims at that time.
Today, the Palestinians are the victims, and unfortunately the people of
Israel are treating the Palestinians as they were treated 500 years ago.
Bombing people – civilians – from helicopters, killing people without
any considerations – children, women, the elderly – razing their
buildings using bulldozers.
When I explained all this to your minister of energy, his response was
‘only a friend can be this sincere and talk this openly.'”
Recep Tayyip Erdogan,
Haaretz, June 4, 2004
********************
Mr. Prime Minister
You may have expected world Jewry to regard your recent remarks
concerning the Jewish state’s conduct of its current war, and your
government’s recalling of its ambassador from Tel Aviv for
consultations, with awe; after all, yours is a major power, and its
place among the familiar choir of anti-Israeli pontiffs is not natural.
In fact, you have accomplished the opposite, raising doubts about
your own historical insights, personal integrity, and diplomatic
reliability.
Fortunately, your Islamic party has proven itself happily modernist,
a movement that once in power embraced the separation of church and
state, promoted market economics, courted Europe as feverishly as its
secularist predecessors, and inspired moderation in Cyprus.
And yet you have just launched a vicious attack at us, and it would
be useful for you to fathom its severity now rather than lament its
impression later.
FIRST, THERE is the moral aspect.
You appear to believe that you carry some moral weight with which you
can reprimand us while we fight a war that has been much more vicious
than anything your countrymen have faced in more than 80 years. Yet
the fact is that, with all due respect to your tentative release of a
handful of Kurdish dissidents recently, you remain hostile to their
general cause, arguing that they should never have a state. Not only
do you deny that nation the right of self-determination in your land,
you also deny it elsewhere. A Kurdish autonomy in Iraq, you recently
told Newsweek, would not be “healthy,” as it would “bother” Syria,
Iran, and Turkey.
Now truthfully, Mr. Prime Minister, how do you want the Jews to take
seriously your hectoring about their treatment of the Palestinians
when this is what you have to offer a nation that, unlike the
Palestinians, has existed for centuries, has its own language, and
numbers at least 30 million people? Forgive us for suspecting that
behind your high-minded talk about justice is actually a cynical
concern for power and disregard of other people’s rights, in line
with your country’s historic mistreatment of myriad nationalities,
from Greece in the west to Armenia in the east.
Forgive us also for reminding you that your criticism conveniently
ignores the fact that we Jews have offered the Palestinians a state,
half of our historic capital, and even a foothold in our religion’s
most sacred site.
Please understand that as long as you have not displayed even a
fraction of such pragmatism in your dealings with your own
adversaries, you are in no position to preach to us on these issues,
certainly not in a way that will make us reconsider our attitudes.
Yet a Jew’s qualm about your attack is not only about its morality,
but also its factuality.
Your portrayal of our military activity is almost childish. What are
you insinuating, that Israeli gunships routinely take to the air and
indiscriminately spray the humanity beneath them? Maybe you can get
away with spreading such Arabian Nights stories in the despotic
Middle East that you prefer to see conserved, and in the Europe you
are so eager to join. Here in Israel, sir, the citizenry is the army.
No one can tell us stories about what our army does and doesn’t do,
certainly not you. The army here is not some remote entity, or, as
you suggest, “the government”; the Israeli army is us, our families,
our neighbors, our friends and our colleagues. And the way we see it,
our army is surgically targeting the people who let our children’s
blood. And when innocents die for having been at the wrong place at
the wrong time, as always happens in wars – even ones fought by
Turkey – we regret it at least as much as you do. To blame us for
fighting a war we did not start is like blaming a surgeon for drawing
blood.
Yet even more perplexing is your abuse of our history.
First, one is at a loss to decide whether your statement that the
Jews are now doing what the Inquisition once did to them, is more
abusive or ignorant. Are you suggesting that we are putting hundreds
of thousands of people on boats and shipping them into the horizon,
or that we burn heretics in weekly auto-da-fes at Rabin Square? Give
us a break, Mr. Prime Minister. Europe has changed, and joining it no
longer requires blood-libeling the Jews.
There is something very touching, and sincere, about your nostalgia
for your ancestors’ hospitality toward ours, and your emulation of
that tolerance, as expressed by your visit to the Turkish chief rabbi
after the Istanbul synagogue bombings. Yet we Israelis have no
pretension of emulating the Jews of 15th-century Istanbul, whose
formula for Jewish survival boiled down to seeking non-Jewish
benevolence.
We, the sober survivors of centuries of abuse, prefer to survive
thanks to our own actions, and as such are determined to never again
be slaughtered with impunity. We prefer to be scolded abroad rather
than murdered at home, even if you protest that our murderer was “a
spiritual leader.”
And as for that minister of ours, who in response to your spitting in
his face and ours, could only bring himself to tell you that “only a
friend can be this sincere and talk this openly” – all I can say is
that only idiots like me could have voted for an idiot like him.
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