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Al-Ahram Weekly, Egypt
June 11 2010
We are all Palestinians
So say the Turks, writes Belen Fernandez* in Istanbul
This afternoon at Istanbul's Beyazyt Mosque, the funeral ceremony was
held for Turkish humanitarian aid activist Cevdet Kylyçlar, one of
nine victims of the Israeli attack on Monday on the Mavi Marmara en
route to Gaza. The full fatality list, which was inexplicably withheld
until yesterday, includes seven other Turkish citizens and a
19-year-old high school student named Furkan Dogan with a United
States passport, although the US State Department's noncommittal
pledge to "look into the circumstances of the death of an American
citizen" suggests that the administration might prefer to relinquish
territorial responsibility for him.
In fact, it appears that international territorial boundaries are
becoming increasingly tailored to the whims of Israel, which is now
under the impression that it is entitled not only to the land of
Palestine but also Lebanese airspace and the Mediterranean Sea, with
additional claims suggested by the attendance last year at the
Organisation of American States by Deputy Foreign Minister of Israel
Danny Ayalon.
Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has however identified
greater territorial ambitions in the region, and recently warned the
world of Iran's intentions to "establish a Mediterranean port a few
kilometres from Tel Aviv and from Jerusalem". The inauguration of the
Iranian port of Gaza would apparently thus have occurred had the
Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) permitted the Mavi Marmara to proceed
undeterred, and Netanyahu announced that it was Israel's right "
[u]nder international law and under common sense and common decency"
to inspect vessels potentially containing Iranian weaponry. More
enlightened commentators have meanwhile invoked the issue of Iran this
week merely to suggest that most nations don't benefit from the
Israeli model of legality, sensibility, and decency, especially when
it comes to the murder of traditional US allies and passport holders.
Signs of allied realignment at the funeral ceremony for Kylyçlar this
afternoon, attended by thousands despite the heat, included ubiquitous
green and black headbands reading "We are all Palestinians". A man
selling bananas in a wooden cart outside the Beyazyt Mosque endeavored
to persuade me that the martyr Kylyçlar had in fact hailed from
Palestine and that his own bananas were not affiliated with the US
despite their Dole labels, while a customer admitted to having
sympathised with Israel when its fast food restaurants were on the
receiving end of suicide bombs but had eventually amended his
sympathies after calculating the ratio of Israeli civilian deaths to
Palestinian.
As for yesterday's Turkish news headlines such as "What the world
couldn't do, this country did," it turned out that this was not a
reference to the only country that could get away with boarding
humanitarian aid ships and slaughtering people but rather to the fact
that Nicaragua had broken off diplomatic relations with Israel in the
aftermath of the attack. The article did not specify whether
Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega had yet donned a headband reading
"We are all Turks" or how his show of solidarity had been received by
Central American citizens who group Arab and Jewish immigrants into
the pejorative Ottoman-era category turcos. Israel might meanwhile
enhance its post-massacre propaganda campaign by appealing to outdated
views of Turks among certain European sectors and nicknaming the Mavi
Marmara "Attila the Hun".
The fact that contemporary Turkish protest headbands read "We are all
Palestinians" rather than "You are all Turks" and that the ubiquitous
Turkish flag has been joined by the Palestinian one -- sometimes
superimposed on the same piece of cloth -- additionally suggests a
tempering of sorts of the intense nationalism for which Turkey is
known and often resented. How long Turks will continue to claim
Palestinian nationality remains to be seen, although current slogans
are presumably more sustainable than past ones such as "We are all
Armenians," coined on the occasion of the 2007 assassination of
Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink.
According to a funeral observer standing against a railing at the
perimeter of the Beyazyt Mosque today, Turkish Prime Minister Recep
Tayyip Erdogan must proceed in accordance with new national
affiliations and break off all relations and agreements with the state
of Israel "in order to deny it the water necessary for life". A
somewhat contradictory foreign policy approach was however advocated
by a nearby group of girls holding a banner that read: "If every
Muslim dumps a bucket of water, Israel will be flooded" -- a result
that has not yet been achieved by Israeli usurpation of Muslim water
supplies.
* The writer is the author of Coffee with Hezbollah .
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2010/1002/op22.htm
From: A. Papazian
June 11 2010
We are all Palestinians
So say the Turks, writes Belen Fernandez* in Istanbul
This afternoon at Istanbul's Beyazyt Mosque, the funeral ceremony was
held for Turkish humanitarian aid activist Cevdet Kylyçlar, one of
nine victims of the Israeli attack on Monday on the Mavi Marmara en
route to Gaza. The full fatality list, which was inexplicably withheld
until yesterday, includes seven other Turkish citizens and a
19-year-old high school student named Furkan Dogan with a United
States passport, although the US State Department's noncommittal
pledge to "look into the circumstances of the death of an American
citizen" suggests that the administration might prefer to relinquish
territorial responsibility for him.
In fact, it appears that international territorial boundaries are
becoming increasingly tailored to the whims of Israel, which is now
under the impression that it is entitled not only to the land of
Palestine but also Lebanese airspace and the Mediterranean Sea, with
additional claims suggested by the attendance last year at the
Organisation of American States by Deputy Foreign Minister of Israel
Danny Ayalon.
Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has however identified
greater territorial ambitions in the region, and recently warned the
world of Iran's intentions to "establish a Mediterranean port a few
kilometres from Tel Aviv and from Jerusalem". The inauguration of the
Iranian port of Gaza would apparently thus have occurred had the
Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) permitted the Mavi Marmara to proceed
undeterred, and Netanyahu announced that it was Israel's right "
[u]nder international law and under common sense and common decency"
to inspect vessels potentially containing Iranian weaponry. More
enlightened commentators have meanwhile invoked the issue of Iran this
week merely to suggest that most nations don't benefit from the
Israeli model of legality, sensibility, and decency, especially when
it comes to the murder of traditional US allies and passport holders.
Signs of allied realignment at the funeral ceremony for Kylyçlar this
afternoon, attended by thousands despite the heat, included ubiquitous
green and black headbands reading "We are all Palestinians". A man
selling bananas in a wooden cart outside the Beyazyt Mosque endeavored
to persuade me that the martyr Kylyçlar had in fact hailed from
Palestine and that his own bananas were not affiliated with the US
despite their Dole labels, while a customer admitted to having
sympathised with Israel when its fast food restaurants were on the
receiving end of suicide bombs but had eventually amended his
sympathies after calculating the ratio of Israeli civilian deaths to
Palestinian.
As for yesterday's Turkish news headlines such as "What the world
couldn't do, this country did," it turned out that this was not a
reference to the only country that could get away with boarding
humanitarian aid ships and slaughtering people but rather to the fact
that Nicaragua had broken off diplomatic relations with Israel in the
aftermath of the attack. The article did not specify whether
Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega had yet donned a headband reading
"We are all Turks" or how his show of solidarity had been received by
Central American citizens who group Arab and Jewish immigrants into
the pejorative Ottoman-era category turcos. Israel might meanwhile
enhance its post-massacre propaganda campaign by appealing to outdated
views of Turks among certain European sectors and nicknaming the Mavi
Marmara "Attila the Hun".
The fact that contemporary Turkish protest headbands read "We are all
Palestinians" rather than "You are all Turks" and that the ubiquitous
Turkish flag has been joined by the Palestinian one -- sometimes
superimposed on the same piece of cloth -- additionally suggests a
tempering of sorts of the intense nationalism for which Turkey is
known and often resented. How long Turks will continue to claim
Palestinian nationality remains to be seen, although current slogans
are presumably more sustainable than past ones such as "We are all
Armenians," coined on the occasion of the 2007 assassination of
Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink.
According to a funeral observer standing against a railing at the
perimeter of the Beyazyt Mosque today, Turkish Prime Minister Recep
Tayyip Erdogan must proceed in accordance with new national
affiliations and break off all relations and agreements with the state
of Israel "in order to deny it the water necessary for life". A
somewhat contradictory foreign policy approach was however advocated
by a nearby group of girls holding a banner that read: "If every
Muslim dumps a bucket of water, Israel will be flooded" -- a result
that has not yet been achieved by Israeli usurpation of Muslim water
supplies.
* The writer is the author of Coffee with Hezbollah .
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2010/1002/op22.htm
From: A. Papazian