Jewish academics, media figures and authors argue that they have no
obligation to comment on “Israel’s latest attack on Gaza.”
Several prominent Turkish Jews reprimanded their government over calls
for their community to denounce Israeli military action in the Hamas-controlled
Gaza Strip.
In the open letter, published on the website
of the Hurriyet Daily News on Friday, the Jewish academics, media figures
and authors argued that they had no obligation to comment on “Israel’s latest
attack on Gaza.”
“No citizen of this country is
under any obligation to account for, interpret or comment on any event that
takes place elsewhere in the world, and in which he/she has no involvement.
There is no onus on the Jewish community of Turkey, therefore, to declare an
opinion on any matter at all,” they wrote.
Senior Turkish officials and government friendly media outlets were
highly critical of Israel during the conflict, engaging in rhetoric that Jewish
groups abroad have decried as antisemitic.
“I talked with our Jewish
citizens’ leaders… and I stated that they should adopt a firm stance and
release a statement against the Israeli government. I will contact them again,
but whether or not they release a statement, we will never let Jewish people in
Turkey get hurt,” Prime Minister Erdogan told the Daily Sabah newspaper.
Erdogan’s demand for Turkish Jews to denounce Israel, as well as his
comments comparing the Jewish state to Nazi Germany and accusing it of
perpetrating a genocide against the Palestinians, serve as a veiled threat
against their community, according to Anti-Defamation League national director
Abraham Foxman.
“Asking the Jewish community
to speak up about Israel reeks of antisemitism,” he accused in an op-ed in the
Huffington Post earlier this month.
The Turkish letter writers seemed to agree, asserting that “it is racism
to hold a whole people responsible for the actions of a state and we wish to
declare that we are opposed to this.”
“In the same way the people of
Turkey cannot be held responsible for the barbarity of what Islamic State does
because a number of Turks are among its fighters, the Jewish community of
Turkey cannot be held responsible for what the state of Israel does,” they
explained, stating that it is impossible for a community of 20,000 to offer a
unified opinion on any matter.
The writers, including columnist Soli Özel,writer Roni Margulies and
economist Cem Behar, stated that they were “opposed to the Israeli state’s
policies on Gaza, not because we are of Jewish origin, but because we are
human. We may not agree on all matters, some of us oppose all of Israel’s
policies, some of us oppose some of them. But all of us are opposed to Israel’s
aggression, militarism, expansionism and the violence it brings upon the Palestinian
people.”
Turkey’s central Jewish communal body has remained silent during the
conflict, continuing what Rafael Sadi, a Turkish expatriate who attended
university with Erdogan, has called its “policy of silence.”
In a recent interview with The Jerusalem Post, Sadi explained that he
believed the Turkish media had become a “free platform for antisemitism” and
that Turkish Jews “prefer to keep their mouths shut because of their public
safety and they are right to do this.”
Nimrod Goren, a scholar at the Israeli Institute for Regional Foreign
Policies, said that local Jews have a “very clear interest” in maintaining
communal silence.
“We are not giving interviews
for the time being and issuing press releases,” a spokesman for the community
said earlier this month when asked to comment on Erdogan’s statements. The
community did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Sunday.
