During the reign of Mehmed II(1432-1481), commonly known as Mehmed the Conqueror, the Ottoman Empire began to settle Jews expelled from Europe. It was not the first ethnic cleansing the Jews suffered, but one of the largest.
An even larger group of Jews had come during the reign of Mehmed's son Bayezid II: hundreds of thousands of Sephardic Jews fleeing Spain and Portugal. Local administrators were instructed not to interfere with their entry and settlement, to treat them well, and to punish those who did otherwise. The Jews who arrived were settled in cities such as Istanbul, Thessaloniki, Edirne and Jerusalem. The Jewish immigration continued until after World War II.
You should find the amusing story of Professor Ernst Reuter, the former mayor of Magdeburg and a prisoner in the Lichtenberg concentration camp, who later escaped to Türkiye and joined Ankara University. He was told to go and join the queue to receive his salary after becoming a Turkish citizen. When he was still a guest immigrant, his salary was presented to him by the administrator of the university. Reuter, who designed the modern Ankara in the 1930s, jested, saying the now-famous and oft-repeated words: "Who said it was easy to become a Turk!" I am telling you this story to make clearer the fact that Turks have not only coexisted with Jews but amalgamated, if not assimilated, them into the society. So, you'd better not dare to flash that “anti-Semitic” card at me!
Various Jewish groups with different cultures lived for centuries under Ottoman and later republican, tolerance and protection, free from any religious oppression; therefore, we know almost the entire history of Jewish anguish from the beginning. We have the Holocaust studies in our high-school curriculum; we don’t have societies of holocaust-deniers; even our Neo-Nazi politicians are pro-Israel and anti-Arab!
Ottomans never had a problem with the returning Jews to Jerusalem's holy area around the Old City and the Dome of the Rock. That is, until the late 1800s, when the Zionist movement called for a Jewish state to be established in Palestine. Sultan Abdülhamid II took a series of precautions to reverse the plan. However, when the sultan was deposed and the Young Turks took control, the movement was able to spread throughout the region. Predominantly, Ashkenazi Jews began purchasing properties across Palestine, expanding the ownership of the Yishuv, “settlement” in Hebrew, the community of Jews residing in Palestine prior to the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.
The Ottoman-turned-Republican politicians of the one-party Türkiye yearned for and tried to emulate one-party regimes of Benito Mussolini’s Italy and Adolf Hitler’s Germany; but still feeling the collective shame of the “Armenian Deportation,” or as Winston Churchill named it, “The Armenian massacre that inspired Hitler,” looked the other way when hundreds of thousands Russian and Baltic Jews flowed to Mandate Palestine. They knew those people were seeking a homeland; the former Ottoman subjects in the Holy Land, Muslim and Christian, would open their homes, villages and towns to their ancient neighbors.
But the newcomers were not ancient neighbors of Jerusalem, or Israel, as they call the land. The “people from the land of Judea” were supposed to be God-fearing, peaceful neighbors. But the people gathered around Theodor Herzl, a Budapest native and the leader of the Zionist movement, came vengeful: They said their Holy Book promised the whole land, including the “mountains of Israel, ... all the house of Israel, all of the cities will be inhabited and ... will be rebuilt ... they will increase and be fruitful.” “What about us?” asked the locals of the newcomers. Those who call themselves “Zionist” simply killed 15,000 of them in more than 70 massacres; expelled nearly 1 million Palestinians out of 1.4 million. Under the attacks of the Zionist gangs, the Palestinians were forced to flee toward the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and neighboring Arab countries.
If the Nakba, “catastrophe” in Arabic, stopped with the events of 1947-48, perhaps it would be remembered as that: a catastrophe with 15,000 victims and destruction of 774 Palestinian villages and towns by the Zionist gangs. But it didn’t stop there. The Zionists really wanted all of what Theodor Herzl used to call “The Greater Israel”: “from the brook of Egypt to the Euphrates or the land that was divided between the original Twelve tribes of Israel after they were delivered from Egypt.”
No matter, those “holy” texts were demolished and destroyed during the long history of expulsion of the Jews from their native lands, and they had to be reconstructed from memory. No matter, those “divine commands” turned out to be interpreted as strangely compatible with what the Zionist ideology (not Judaism) required, necessitated by the settler-colonialism.
What matters today is the fact that the very experience of the European Jewry in the hands of their executioner in their own Holocaust made them “genocidaires” (a French term meaning ‘those who commit genocide’ that came to be commonly used in Rwanda after the genocide against the Tutsi in 1994 during the Rwandan Civil War).
No holy book orders its faithful to kill all the residents of any promised land! Not even the ethnocultural nationalist movement that emerged in Theodor Herzl’s 1896 pamphlet "Der Judenstaat" ("The Jewish State"), but the Zionism that turned into genocide of Palestinians in the hands of Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, Yitzhak Rabin, Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, Shimon Peres, Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu and countless other Israeli politicians, generals and soldiers who kill at will the unarmed kids Gaza and in al-Daffah (The West Bank) and Al-Quds (Jerusalem). Their Zionism is genocide; they are “genociders.”
Unless you admit the existence of the problem, you cannot start working on a solution. The good people of Tel Aviv and other towns, thousands of demonstrators are now packing the streets and protesting Netanyahu, Ben Gvir, Smotrich and other far-right politicians, calling on the Israeli government to agree to a deal to end the war in Gaza. Those Israeli politicians could have done nothing if the United States supported it without one iota of national interest in doing so.
The genocide started in 1945 when U.S. President Harry Truman provided support for Israel, not a small “Jewish State” in Mandate Palestine but Greater Israel, which would be America’s arms and hand (now, its boots) in the Muslim world. Mouin Rabbani, a Dutch-Palestinian Middle East analyst, refutes the assumption that Western leaders' key decisions on the Palestine issue were made only to curry favor with Jewish voters in his Substack piece, titled "The Truman Show." He tells the story of Truman responding to the criticism that his support for the Zionist objective of statehood in Palestine, saying, “I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism, but I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents.”
Now, in the U.S. and other European countries, there is sufficient popular pressure from constituents. Yet the Western world support the ongoing genocide while they play with words (British Prime Minister Keir Starmer saying that the U.K. plans to recognize Palestine unless Israel takes "substantive steps") or see the destruction of every building in Gaza as an opportunity for real-estate development (U.S. President Donald Trump saying that he can turn Gaza into the "Riviera of the Middle East”) or keep paying Hitler’s debt (German Chancellor Friedrich Merz saying that Germany's Staatsräson is reflected in its opposition to Iran's nuclear ambitions).
With their theatrics of dropping a bucket of aid to hundreds of starving Gazans, pretending to recognize Palestine next September and still using the Oct. 7 attacks of Hamas as an excuse for Israel’s killing more than 60,000 women, children and civilian men, the West has been supporting the genocide as an accessory that started as “ethnic cleansing” and has still been going on since 1945.
