NEW BOOK EXAMINES ROOTS OF JEWISH ANTI-GENOCIDE LOBBY

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NEW BOOK EXAMINES ROOTS OF JEWISH ANTI-GENOCIDE LOBBY

 

ASBAREZ

Thursday, May 31st, 2012

 

Model Citizens of the State

 

Book traces forced Turkification of Jews, their fight against

Anti-Semitism, and Turkish-Jewish Leadership Lobbying against

Recognition of Armenian Genocide

 

TORONTO-The Zoryan Institute is proud to announce the translation and

publication of a new book by noted author Rifat Bali, Model Citizens of

the State: The Jews of Turkey during the Multi-Party Period (Fairleigh

Dickinson University Press, Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group,

2012).

 

This book provides an expose of the treatment of the Jewish community

in Turkey from 1950 to the present, their fight against anti-Semitism,

the struggle for their constitutional rights, and the attitude of

the Turkish state and society towards these problems.

 

In a review of the Turkish edition that appeared in the Armenian

Weekly, Turkish journalist Ayse Gunaysu and a member of the Committee

Against Racism and Discrimination of the Human Rights Association

of Turkey (Istanbul branch) since 1995, described the book as

"groundbreaking ... unearthing facts and first-hand accounts that

unmistakably illustrate how the Turkish establishment blackmailed the

leaders of the Jewish community-and through them Jewish organizations

in the United States-to secure their support of the Turkish position

against the Armenians' campaign for genocide recognition . . . The book

also offers rich material about how Turkish diplomats and semi-official

spokesmen of Turkish policies, while carrying out their lobbying

activities, threatened both Israel and the U.S. by indicating that if

the Jewish lobby failed to prevent Armenian initiatives abroad-Turkey

might not be able to guarantee the security of Turkish Jews . . . It

has been a routine practice for Turkish authorities to invariably

deny such threats. However, Bali's industrious work in the archives

reveals first-hand accounts that confirm these allegations."

 

In explaining his motivation for writing this book, Bali states,

 

There are a number of facts which triggered my starting to research the

history of the Jews in the Turkish Republic. They can all be summed

up in the fact that I was tired of listening to and reading the rosy

narrative that was repeated over and over by the leaders of the Turkish

Jewish community, as well as by Turkish intellectuals, politicians and

historians. The same narrative was also predominant outside Turkey. I

wanted to discover what was really behind this rhetoric.

 

Bali details how, despite the attempt of Jewish community leaders

in Istanbul to fit into the mold of the "model" Turkish citizen as

defined by Kemal Ataturk, and regardless of the official government

policy toward the Jewish community, the anti-Semitic attitudes of

the majority Muslim population in Turkish society were ever present.

 

The book describes how, initially, the Jewish community received

similar treatment by the government of Turkey and had similar problems,

fears and reactions as the Armenian and Greek minorities during the

Single Party period, 1923-1949, to such things as the Capital Tax

Law and policy of Labor Battalions. During the first two decades

of the Multi-Party period, it endured the September 6, 1955 pogrom,

the May 27, 1960 revolution, and the 1971 military coup. All three

minorities suffered equally from these critical events, with loss

of life and property and consequent emigrations to Greece, Israel,

Europe and North America.

 

Bali explains how a shift in the Turkish state's treatment of its

Jewish citizens started in the late 1960s and early 1970s due to three

pivotal events outside of Turkey: the 1967 Israeli Six-Day War, the

1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus, and the movement for international

recognition of the Armenian Genocide. He shows that the Turkish

government in the 1970s reversed its policy of prohibiting minorities'

links to outside organizations by encouraging the Jews of Turkey

to connect with American Jewish organizations, once it realized the

importance of American Jewish political lobby groups.

 

Since then, Turkey has adopted a policy of utilizing the American

Jewish lobby against the Greek lobby to lift the Cyprus related

arms embargo, and against the Armenian lobby to further its genocide

denial policies. Bali details efforts to distance the American Jewish

community from the Armenian community by propagandizing that the

Armenian Genocide is a non-truth, or that whatever may have happened

in 1915 it can not be compared to the Jewish Holocaust and therefore

can not be called genocide, and that Turks have been very tolerant

and friendly to Jews since their expulsion from Spain in 1492.

 

Bali illustrates that with this new policy, successive Turkish

governments obtained the cooperation of Turkish Jews to convince the

American Jewish lobbies to actively support pro-Turkish measures,

including fighting against Armenian Genocide resolutions in the US

Congress, excluding the Armenian Genocide from the Holocaust Museums

in Washington and Los Angeles, prohibiting papers on the Armenian

Genocide from being presented at Israeli Holocaust conferences,

prohibiting the showing of Armenian Genocide related movies in US

and Israel, etc. The tactics used by Turkish governments included

financial assistance, economic concessions and other privileges,

but also veiled threats that lack of cooperation by the Jewish lobby,

the State of Israel, or Turkish-Jewish leaders would jeopardize the

safety and economic well-being of the Jews in Turkey.

 

When asked about the possible effect his research could have,

Bali answers,

 

I do not believe that the book will have any sort of negative impact

on Israeli-Turkish and/or Turkish-Jewish relations. Real politics

and strategic concerns always dominate and even embellish past history.

 

However I hope that at last the English-speaking public will have

the opportunity to read the "real" story of Turkish-Jewish relations

instead of an embellished one.

 

In documenting the Turkish state's manipulation of its vulnerable

Jewish minority and their acquiescence, this book serves as a

valuable case study of how Realpolitik in domestic politics and

foreign relations distorts the truth and how coercion by the powerful

contributes to the violation of collective human rights. It will be of

interest to academics and students of non-Muslim minorities in Turkey,

political lobbyists in America, Israeli policy-makers, as well as to

the Jewish, Greek and Armenian communities around the world.

 

Rifat N. Bali, born in 1948 in Istanbul, is an independent scholar

specializing in the history of Turkish Jews and an associate

member of the Alberto-Benveniste Center for Sephardic Studies and

the Sociocultural History of the Jews (Ecole Pratique des Hautes

Etudes/CNRS/Universite Paris-Sorbonne). He is the winner of the

Alberto Benveniste Research Award for 2009 for his publications on

Turkish Jewry.

 

The Zoryan Institute is the parent organization of the International

Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies, which runs an annual,

accredited university program on the subject and is co-publisher

of Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal in

partnership with the International Association of Genocide Scholars

and the University of Toronto Press. It is the first non-profit,

international center devoted to the research and documentation

of contemporary issues with a focus on Genocide, Diaspora and

Armenia. For more information please contact the Zoryan Institute by

email zoryan@zoryaninstitute.org or telephone 416-250-9807