The XIXth century, the “longest century” of Europe and the world, was, as Holly Case’s (2018) book shows, “The Age of Issues”: “The Jewish Question, the German Question, the Eastern Question (the Turkish Question), the Russian Question…” The reason why the nineteenth century was the “longest century” of Europe and the world was that, on the one hand, the crisis of legitimacy reached its peak with the modernization process based on industrial capitalism, and on the other hand, these issues accumulated over centuries had to be urgently resolved in conjunction with each other.
Of these, the Jewish Question was in fact the “mother of all issues” for Western civilization, both in terms of the relationship between Judaism and Christianity, and capitalism and Zionism. In other words, the Jewish Question is the tip of the iceberg of modernity. Therefore, understanding the course of this issue, from the Jewish Question to the Danger of Zionism, means understanding the fate of the world. The Jewish experience shaped Jewish identity, which shaped the Jewish cause, which shaped the Jewish war. The purpose of this article is to explain the Jewish war, the unprecedented Israeli massacre of the Palestinian people in Gaza in October 2023, in the light of a concise and in-depth explanation of the Jewish cause shaped by the Jewish experience and identity.
The Logic of Hebrew Identity
“He who knows his nafs knows his Lord”, and “He who does not know his nafs does not know his Lord”, and he who is not at peace with his nafs is not at peace with Allah and the world. The Jews’ constant conflict with their nafs and the world stems from the deep tension and ambivalence they experience between their opposite feelings (chosenness, damnation). This is why Jews have developed some of the most complex us-others distinctions and identity definitions in the world, which are not well known in Turkey or even in the world. However, without knowing these complex Jewish identity cognitions, the logic of the struggle between Jews and Others, which has determined the course of world history and which has reached its peak today (October 2023) with the Gaza massacre, cannot be solved.
Communal identity is determined by the distinction between self and other, and ethnic identity is determined by the distinction between us and others. Moreover, the us-others distinction is divided into intra-communal and extra-communal. Jewish identity is divided intra-communally into Abrahamic-Civilized and Israeli-Jewish, and extra-communally into primarily Jewish-Centil and Israeli-Amalek.
Abrahamic-Civilized
Like the races of Arabs and Jews, their languages belong to the same Semitic family. The words Arab and Hebrew are composed of the letters ‘-r-b (عرب) in different order. The core meaning of both is “bedouin, nomad”. Hebrew means “Hebrew, Hebrew language”. The main parameter of ethnicity is language; as the term “mother tongue” indicates, those who speak the language (Hebrew) of the same mother (umm) make up the Hebrew community. “Hebrew” (عِبْرِيٌّ) is the noun form of the word “ibr” (عِبْرٌ) meaning “river bank” from the Arabic root ‘ubûr (عُبُوْرٌ) meaning “to cross”. The Canaanites living there called the Jews “ibrî” meaning “one who crosses the river” because they came to Palestine by crossing the Euphrates River.
More generally, Hebrew means “a Bedouin who crosses the road, the field, the desert, the river, and lives a nomadic life in the wilderness and desert”. The Children of Israel were a nation of desert bedouins, constantly migrating from region to region with their camels and cattle in search of water and pasture. For this reason, settled peoples such as Canaanites, Egyptian, Philistines, etc. called the Israelites “Hebrews”. After the Israelites settled in the land of Canaan and adopted a settled (hadarî), civilized life, they began to hate the word “Hebrew”. For the moral equivalent of the social hadarî-bedouin (sedentary-nomadic) distinction was civilized-barbarian.
Accordingly, Hebrew meant barbarian and Hebrew meant barbarian language, thus reminding the Jews of their past rough life, which they wanted to forget. For this reason, they preferred the name Israelite (Israelite) instead of Hebrew (Hebrew). There is nothing in the pages of the Testament that says that the language of the Children of Israel was called Hebrew. On the contrary, their language was sometimes known as the Jewish language and sometimes as the Canaanite language. Only after the Babylonian captivity, in the book of Hikemu Ibn Sîra and in the works of the Jewish historian Yosef, in the Mishnâ and Talmud, does the term Hebrew appear (Çelebi 1978: 26-8, Hommel 1897: 249-60, Wolfensohn 1348: 77-8).
Israeli-Jewish
The name Israel, given to the Prophet Jacob, literally means Abdullah (servant of Allah) in Hebrew. As stated in the Holy Qur’an (A’râf 7/160), the Children of Israel consisted of 12 tribes (sıbt, ok, tribe, tribe) (in order of birth, Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Issachar, Zawulun, Yusuf, Benjamin), which were formed from the 12 sons of Israel, i.e. the Prophet Jacob. The word “Jew”, which became widespread in the Middle Ages and later, comes from Judah, the name of the fourth son of Jacob. The Israelite-Jewish distinction is based on three parameters (ethnicity, time, place):
1. Ethnicity: Israelite (Benî Israel, Israelites) means descendant of Prophet Jacob, Jew, adherent to the Shari’ah of Prophet Moses. Sacraments are symbolic acts and occasions that show a community’s adherence to religion and give it a collective identity, such as khitan, marriage, hajj, pilgrimage, sacrifice, Friday, Eid and funeral prayers, mosques, minarets, adhan, chador, beard and salaam. According to Jewish belief, not all Israelis are Jews; an Israeli is considered a Jew only if he or she observes two sacraments: hıtân (circumcision) and the amulet (Margoliouth 1843: 42).
2. Time: The Hebrews before the Babylonian exile (587 BC) are called Israelites, and those after are called Jews. The name “Jew” was given to the Israelites by the natives of Babylon. Accordingly, “Israel” and “Israelites” are used in a general historical sense, while “Jew” is used in a specific sense to describe a living tribe.
3. Place: Israeli means the people living in the Land of Israel, and Jewish means the people of the Diaspora living outside the Land of Israel. As can be seen, the parameters of time and space overlap in the Israeli-Jewish distinction. The fact that the terms “Jewish fear, Jewish issue, anti-Semitism” originated in the Western world shows this. This is why “Israeli” has become a positive and “Jew” a negative characterization. Due to the pejorative meaning of the name “Jew”, Jews in Christian lands sometimes preferred to use the name “Israeli” instead.
Jewish-Kavmî (Centil)
Individuals derive their collective identity from communities, and communities are divided according to natural classification. In Aristotelian logic, essential universals are divided into three: genus, species, difference. The genus is that under which the naws are listed, such as the human naw of the animal genus. The words genus and gens, which are often confused with each other, are better understood by looking at the hierarchy of being:
-Species-nev’: human species: human species
-Genus-natural genus=race: The Circassian genus: Circassian genus, race
-Gens (pl. gentes, (έθνη) ethnē)-political genus=tribe, community: Gens de bureau: Committee of administration
Gaius, one of the architects of Roman law, divided law into Ius Civile and Ius Gentium (Civil Law and Law of the Tribes), Ulpianus first divided law into Ius Publicum and Ius Privatum (Public Law and Private Law), and then divided private law into Ius Naturale, Ius Gentium and Ius Civile. Ius Civile (Civil Law) applied only to Roman citizens, while Ius Gentium (Law of the Tribes) applied to foreigners. What was meant by gentes=akvâm in Roman law was the community of states that constituted the whole humanity. The legal meaning of Gens was the unity of lineage, “gentile” meant “member of a clan”.
In the case of the Jews, the distinction between Jews and foreigners is based on the distinction between “the (chosen) tribe-ummah-(other) tribes-ummahs” (akwâm-ümem). The Arabic distinction “ummah-ummah” is a direct equivalent of the Hebrew distinction “ummat-ummim” (ummah-ummahs). The Hebrew “goy-goyim” is the equivalent of the Latin “gens-gentes” meaning “tribe-tribes” and the Arabic “tribe-akwâm”. However, the distinction of “goy-goyim” gradually acquired the meaning of “gentile-gentiles” (those who belong to the Jewish tribe – those who do not) and accordingly Jews-Centiles, Jews-foreigners, which corresponds to the distinction of Jews-Goyim (Anonymous 1859: 172, Doederlein 1884: 206, Edwards 1699: 286, Hanan 1889: 61, Leigh 1662: 37, Ueberweg 1871: 155-6).
This is where the difference between universal and Jewish distinctions of identity emerges. The verbal similarity between the Latin genus and the Arabic genus is obvious. The words “genus attracts genus” and “Animals communicate by smelling and people communicate by speaking” and the expression “mother tongue” express that identities are differentiated according to the genus (genus) and language of those who speak the same language. According to the term “mother tongue”, those who speak the same language are considered to be children of the same ummah (mother), members of the ummah. In this respect, in ancient ethnic distinctions such as Arab-Ajem, Greek-Barbarian, etc., Arab and Greek are categories that refer to genus=race, while Persian and Barbarian are categories that refer to those who do not speak Arabic and Greek, not genus=race (non-Arabs and non-Greeks). For this reason, Persian (Iranian and Turkish) scholars who wrote in Arabic were considered culturally Arab, and even Andalusian Christians who adopted the Arabic language and Islamic culture under Islamic rule and influence were called musta’rib (Arabized).
However, the determinant of the Jewish-Centile distinction is not language, but religion. Just as Allah made a covenant with His servants in the spirit world called “bezm-i elest” (A’râf 7/172) that they would recognize His sovereignty, He also made a covenant with them in the world through the prophets. In Judaism, Allah made a covenant with all mankind through Noah, and with the Jews through Abraham and Moses on the basis of “salvation through the observance of His Shari’ah”. The Jews were thus considered Ahlullah (people of God) with the privilege of salvation. According to the covenant made with Prophet Abraham and his family, the land of Canaan was to be given to the Jews as an inheritance (Taqwīn, 13/15,17,15/18, 17/2-8). It is narrated that Prophet Abraham was circumcised (hıtân) himself at the age of eighty. Thus, since circumcision was considered the seal of the Abrahamic covenant and the sign of Judaism, the Jews were divided into Jews and Gentiles, circumcised and uncircumcised.
In the Holy Qur’an, it is stated that Allah made a treaty with the Children of Israel (al-Baqarah 2:47,122) in return for the virtue and blessing He bestowed upon them: “O Children of Israel! Remember My favor which I have bestowed upon you, and keep the covenant which you have covenanted with Me, and I will keep the covenant which I have covenanted with you” (Al-Baqarah 2/40). However, each time the Jews broke their covenant, they suffered divine punishment, and after the Babylonian exile (587 BCE), they began to expect “salvation through a Munjî (savior) in accordance with divine grace” instead of “salvation through deeds in accordance with the Shari’ah in accordance with the divine test”. The deep pain of the Babylonian exile led the Jews to despair of prophethood.
Under the influence of their nomadic pagan past, the Jews had developed an anthropomorphistic, nationalistic conception of a god named Yahweh who wrestled with human beings, as in pagan Greece. Because of this pagan, anthropomorphistic conception of God, they called the Prophet Uzeir, one of the prophets from the lineage of Aaron, “the son of Allah” (Tawbah 9/30), as reported in the Qur’an. Therefore, according to them, the Messiah (Munjî) who will come to save the Children of Israel is not David, a prophet from the Jewish lineage, but Yahweh, the God of the Jews. Therefore, while Christians believed that the Jewish Jesus was the Messiah foretold in the Jewish scriptures, Jews did not.
Thus, as he himself says in the Gospel, “I was sent to none other than the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matthew, 15/24), and as the distinction between the Old Testament and the New Testament shows, Jesus was initially considered a Jewish prophet and Christianity a continuation of Judaism. Therefore, the first Christians were both circumcised and baptized. However, Paul, who was a fierce enemy of Christians at the time of Jesus, converted to Christianity after the assassination of Jesus and became the flag-bearer of the new religion. Paul was called “the Apostle of the Gentiles” because he spread Christianity as a universal religion mainly among the Gentiles. The goal is no longer the salvation of the Jews through the practice of the Sharia according to the divine test, but the salvation of all mankind, Jew and Greek, free and slave, male and female, through a Messiah (Jesus Christ) according to divine grace.
Thus, in Christianity, circumcision was abolished along with the Jewish Sharia, the distinction between Jew and Gentile (circumcised and uncircumcised) was abolished, and circumcision was replaced by baptism. In fact, earlier in the Torah (9/23-26) Jeremiah declares that God will punish the Jews who are circumcised in body and uncircumcised in heart: “The days are coming,” says the Lord, “when I will punish only those who are circumcised in the flesh. I will punish Egypt, Judah, Edom, Ammon, Moab, and all who dwell in the wilderness and cut off their beards; for all these tribes are uncircumcised in truth, and all Israel is uncircumcised in heart.”
Israeli-Amalekite
The emergence of Christianity, which came with the message of universal salvation, forced Judaism, which claimed the monopoly of salvation, to develop a universal salvation formula. This tahaddî faced by Judaism made the distinction between Jews and Others more complex with a classification of ten according to the degree of belonging to Israel. The fact that the word “outsider” is met with four concepts in Hebrew is a sign of this (Dujardin 1912: 100). The key concept here, the Hebrew “ger” (גֵּר), which is probably etymologically-semantically related to the Arabic word “strange”, literally means “resident foreigner (minority)”, and literally means “convert, proselyte”. has taken on a new meaning.
1- Israelite (native-born citizen)-Jewish: Original Jew by birth
2- Faithful convert (full citizen)-Judaized (ger faithful, proselyte of the covenant): A convert who has fully embraced Judaism (Jewish Sharia (Ten Commandments) and Sunnah).
3- Semi-immigrant (half-citizen)-Nuhî: (Resident foreigner (minority), (ger toshab), proselyte of the gate): According to Jewish rabbis, God made a covenant with Noah (1056-2006 BC) for the salvation of all mankind, and with Abraham and Moses for the salvation of the Jews. Therefore, Noahides, who are considered resident aliens (minorities), are saved if they adopt and follow the seven decrees of Noah in the presence of three witnesses instead of the Jewish Sharia (Ten Commandments) and Sunnah. The Noahide system of Jewish law, called Halakha (הלכה=sect), formed after the return of the Babylonian Exile and was called by Moses b. Maimonides “Ḥasidei ummot ha-‘olam” (חֲסִידֵי אֻמּוֹת הָעוֹלָם=”the pious of the nations of the world”) (Novak 2011).
4- Idolaters (Akum): Idolaters other than non-Nuhî, Ahl al-Kitab (Christians and Muslims)
5- Tribal (Centil): (goyim=gentes=akwâm): The collective foreigner hostile to the people of Israel. Goyim refers primarily to the Greeks and Romans as the main other of Jews and Christians.
6- Munkar (Nokri) (נָכְרִי): A non-Jew in the sense of a non-identified Jew, also a non-geneal Jew
7- Israelite-Kuti (Kutali, Cuthean): In 721 BC, the Kingdom of Israel, whose capital was Sâmiriye (Sâmarra) in the north, was destroyed by the invasion of the Assyrian king Sargon II, and the people of Israel, who were exiled after the invasion, were replaced by people brought from Babylon, Kuta, Avva, Hamat and Sefarvaim. After the mixing of the population, the name “Kutim” (Kutans), which the Jews gave to them, denoting those who came from the Assyrian city of “Kuta”, later acquired the negative meaning of “Jew, Israelite”. Thus, Kuti was used as a specialization of Nokri (Kadushin 1972: 41, Novak 2011: 56).
8- Jew-Sâmirî: The tribes of Judah and Benjamin, who formed the Kingdom of Judah, the capital of which was Jerusalem in the south, which was destroyed by the Babylonians, took the name “People of Judah” (Am Ha-Yahuda) on their return from the Babylonian exile, in order to distinguish themselves from the Sâmirîs who later converted to the Jewish religion. Later, the Israelites were called “Jews” by other tribes in reference to the region of Judah where they lived. Thus, after the fall of the Kingdom of Israel and the Assyrian exile (721 B.C.), the identity of “Israelite” versus “Sâmirî” was formed when Quti became a Sâmirî, and later, after the fall of the Kingdom of Judah and the Babylonian exile (586-536 B.C.), the identity of “Jew” versus “Sâmirî” was shaped (Adam 2002: 22-3).
9- Judeo-Christian: (Nozeri, Nazarene)
10- Israelite-Amalekite (Dajjal):
11- Ishaqi-Ismaili
Here, the last two Jewish marginalizations (Amalekite, Ishmaelite) can only be understood by looking at the difference between ancient and modern (theodicyal) marginalizations. The identity distinctions of nations like Israel and Iran, where the crisis of theodicy has reached its peak, are not universal linguistic, but gnostic-theodicyal. Like Yazid in Iran, the figure of the Amalekite for the Israelite represents not only the other who is different from his own language and religion, but also the Feindbild (boogeyman image), the ontic enemy. For Israelis and Iranians, Amalekite and Yazid are the proper names of the Antichrist that the Messiah will destroy in the end times. This enmity is based on an ontic, eternal, dangerous perception of threat: “It is us or them, if we exist, they do not exist, if they exist, we do not exist”.
The words of Israel’s spiritual leader Ovadia Yosef (1920-2013) on peace with the Arabs are a striking expression of this mentality: “How can you make peace with a snake?” (2000) (https://www.timesofisrael.com/5-of-ovadia-yosefs-most-controversial-quotations/).Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s address to the Israeli army during the Israeli massacre of Palestine (October 28, 2023), referring to the prophecy of Isaiah about what the tribe of Amalek did to the Children of Israel, “The Torah tells us, ‘Remember what Amalek did to you. Yes, we remember and we fight.” His address to the Israeli army is an expression of ontic enmity (https://www.indyturk.com/node/670446/t%C3%BCrki%CC%87yeden-sesler/i%CC%87srailin-ebedi-d%C3%BC%C5%9Fman%C4%B1-amalek-filistinliler-ve-araplar).
The word bild (form) here is the equivalent of asl. This means that in the theodicy of the theodicy of the other, form=race outweighs never=religion. Due to the fact that the primary asabiyyah (race) outweighs the secondary asabiyyah (religion), the conflict between asl and form, religion and race gives rise to ambivalence. The most striking example of this in the world is the ambivalent attitude of Jews towards their fellow Muslims and Christians. Jews are known to be of the same Semitic race as Arabs, of the same Abrahamic race as Jesus Christ and Christians, and of the same ancestry (children of Abraham) and religion (Ahl-i Kitab=Nuhî). However, Jews consider Jews, Christians and Muslims to be religiously close others, whereas they consider them to be distant others.
The reason for this ambivalence is that, due to the so-called “envy-i akran” (envy of peers), the primary lineage (racial) animosity outweighs the secondary reason (religious) animosity. On the one hand, Jewish scholars, who regarded Christianity as the religion closest to them, on the other hand, considered the Christian belief in the Trinity to be a shirk contrary to monotheistic Judaism, strictly forbade a Jew to enter a church (Adam 2002: 44).
Hebrews and Arabs are known as the children of the same race (Semites) and ancestor (Abraham). However, the Israelites deepened the distinction between Jews and Arabs with the Israelite-Amalekite distinction after Noah and the Isaacite-Ismaili distinction after Abraham. Here, the difference between the Israelite-Amalekite and Isaacite-Ismaili distinctions from the other marginalizations of the Jews draws attention. While other Jewish-foreign distinctions are religion-based, the Jewish-Arab distinction is race-based. While religion can be chosen, race is not chosen, it is given. Therefore, the Israeli-Amalekite distinction expresses a more essential, permanent and dangerous marginalization. For example, the Jewish scholar Raphael Patai, in his books The Arab Mind (1973) and The Jewish Mind (1978), makes this antagonistic distinction with an essentialization based on a comparison between the Arab Mind and the Jewish Mind. As one might expect, the product of this comparison is negative stereotypes about the Arab mind/race and positive stereotypes about the Jewish mind/race.
The Arab national tradition divides the Arabs into two major historical divisions:
A) Arab-ı Bâide. The tribes of Âd, Thamûd, Median, Tasm, Amalika, Jâsim, Abdi Dahm, Ubeyl, Hadûra, Jadîs and First Jurhüm, who lived in the ancient times of history, are the main branches of Arab-ı Bâide. They established various states in Arabia and spread their sovereignty as far as Syria and Egypt.
B) Arab-i Bâkiye. The Arabs whose lineage continues are divided into two main branches:
1. Arab al-Aribe: Yemenite or Southern Arabs. The Kahtanites, descendants of Kahtan (Ābir (Eber) b. Şâleh (Şelah) b. Fînân (Kaynân) b. Erfahshad (Arpakshad) b. Sâm b. Noah), one of the descendants of Noah.
2. Arab-i Musta’ribe (Arab-ı Mütearribe): Arabs of Hejaz or North. Adnanites, descendants of Adnan, one of the descendants of Ishmael, the son of Abraham.
The name Amalika (עֲמָלָלֵק, عماليقة) is not found in any historical source other than the Old Testament. According to the Torah, Amalika is the world’s oldest tribe, whose homeland was the land of Edom (Deuteronomy, 36/16), located between the Gulf of Aqaba and the Dead Sea. Sumerian tablets reveal that Amalika was the tribe of Meluh, from whom the Sumerians received stones, minerals and timber for their temples in 3000-2500 BC. According to legend, Allah taught Arabic to the Amalika after confusing the languages in the Tower of Babel, and thus Amalika became the first nation to start speaking again. Arab historians, by adding this to the legend of the mixing of the languages of the Israelites, accepted Amalika, whom the Torah calls the first nation, as the ancestor of the Arabs and claimed that ancient nations such as the Philistines, Canaanites and Misrids were of Arab origin. After Abraham, Amalika and then the Jurhum tribe built the Kaaba. According to tradition, Ishmael was sent as a prophet to the Amalika and Jurhum tribes in Yemen, took his first wife from them, who is reported to be Egyptian in the Torah (Tekvîn, 21/21), and Joseph was taken to Egypt during the reign of an Amalika pharaoh.
Amalika, mentioned 24 times in the Old Testament as a person and a tribe, is described as the eternal enemy of the Jewish nation: “Amalika was the first among the tribes and will be destroyed in the end” (Numbers 24/20). The tribes referred to here are the seven tribes (Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, Jebusites) with whom Jews are forbidden to exchange daughters. In the Old Testament, Amalika is described as “their hand is on everyone and everyone’s hand is on them” (Genesis 16:12), indicating that they were constantly at war with themselves and with others.
There were deep historical reasons for the Jews’ hostility to Amalika. The Amalekites had constantly harassed the Israelites during their 40-year wanderings in the desert after leaving Egypt. On the other hand, the Amalekites and the Medianites were the first known camel warriors in history. The Old Testament describes how the Amalekites and other nomads, who forced the Israelites to live in the mountains for seven years in the XI century BCE, were so numerous that neither they nor their camels could be counted (Judges, 6/5; 7/12). It is well known that the Ishmaelites, the descendants of the Prophet Ishmael, and the Hagarites, who are believed to be descended from the tribe of his mother Hagar, had their homeland in Palestine-Jordan (Genesis, 21/13-21) and that the Jews hate the Palestinian Arabs the most in the world for this reason, as we see in our times.
In Jewish religious literature, Isaac and Ishmael are compared as the good and the bad sons of Abraham for a preposterous reason. The distinction between Jews and foreigners is based on the distinction between the circumcised and the uncircumcised. In Jewish understanding, circumcision is considered a sign of salvation and impurity, while uncircumcision is considered a sign of wickedness and impurity (Kalisch 1878: II/91). According to the Zohar, which is considered one of the main works of Jewish mysticism, Ishmael was circumcised against the rules (at the age of 13) and Isaac was circumcised according to the rules (on the 8th day). Thus, the distinction between the circumcised and uncircumcised made for the Jews-Centiles was applied to the Jews-Arabs as the rightly circumcised and the wrongly circumcised.
This is why the birth of Ishmael was considered unfortunate for the Israelites, and Jews and Arabs were compared as the children of Isaac and the children of Ishmael. The statement of Ovadia Yosef (1920-2013), the spiritual leader of Israel, on this subject is mind-boggling: “Arabs, He is the people of evil. God says in the Talmud that He regrets creating the Children of Ishmael” (2000) (https://www.timesofisrael.com/5-of-ovadia-yosefs-most-controversial-quotations/).
In the Zohar, Rabbi Hiyya says that the Children of Ishmael will be uprooted from the Land and the Children of Israel will dominate it. This hatred of Ishmael was later directed against his descendants, the Arabs and Muslims. In the Zohar Shemot, the Arabs and Muslims are presented as the tribe that persecuted the Children of Israel the most. Rabbi Judah said in this regard: “In truth, the exile under Ishmael (the Muslim Arabs) was the most severe of exiles” (Adam 2002: 21-8, Malan 1881: 47-9).
From David’s Palace to Solomon’s Temple
According to the Torah, the Children of Israel migrated to Egypt in 1706 BC after a great famine in Canaan. After leaving Egypt in 1491 BCE under the leadership of Moses and wandering in the Sinai Desert for 40 years, the Israelites headed for Canaan. For many years the 12 tribes of the Israelites lived independently of each other and fought off invaders from the east on their own. However, they succumbed to the formidable Philistines coming from the west. The Philistines, who established four cities, especially Gaza, on the Mediterranean coast between Egypt and Jerusalem, defeated the Israelites and kept them under their yoke for 40 years.
It is narrated that Moses used to keep the Ark of the Covenant in front of the army during battles so that the soldiers would gain strength and morale. Jalût, the three-meter-tall, giant-sized tyrant ruler of the Philistines, brought the Children of Israel to their knees and took away the Ark of the Covenant from them. Thereupon, the elders of the Children of Israel asked Ishmael, who was sent as a prophet after Moses, to appoint a king for them for jihad in the way of Allah and for peace. Ishmael informed them that Allah had chosen Talût as their king. The Children of Israel objected and asked for a sign of Talût’s kingship like the miracles of the prophets. Then Ishmael told them that the angels would bring back the Tabût-e-Secine as a sign of the reign of Tâlût. When the coffin returned, they were convinced and the 12 tribes of Israel united under the rule of Talût (Saul), the son of Kish from the tribe of Benjamin, and established the first Jewish state in history, the Kingdom of Israel (1050-930 BC).
Although Jalût challenged him for 40 days, no one in the Israelite army dared to face him because of his giant size. Finally, young David, who was visiting his older brothers who had joined the army, confronted Jalût and saved the Israelite army by hitting him in the middle of his forehead with a stone thrown from his slingshot. David won the favor of the people for killing Jalût at the cost of his life. However, this favor caused Talût to become jealous of David, to whom he had given his daughter as a reward, and banished him from the country. The Israelites recognized Talût’s son Ishbosheth as king after his death, but the tribe of Judah gathered in Hebron (Hebron is the second largest city in the West Bank after Gaza) and proclaimed David (1055-1015 BC) as king.
Later, David defeated the Philistines and brought the southern tribes of Judah and the northern tribes of Israel under his rule. However, the fact that Jerusalem was in the hands of the Jebusites prevented the northern and southern tribes from uniting. David took Jerusalem (Jerusalem, Uru-Salim, Dâru’s-Salâm) around 1000 BC, made it his capital and built a fortified palace of stone and cedar wood on the hill of Zion, which even the “blind and lame” could defend in 13 years. Thus the name of the hill became synonymous with the city, Jerusalem, the City of David or Zion.
For the first time in the history of the Children of Israel, prophethood and rulership came together in the person of Prophet David. In the Holy Qur’an, it is stated that after killing Jâlût, David was given both rulership, wisdom, property and prophethood (Baqara 2/251). David became a king at the age of 30, a prophet at the age of 40, like all prophets, and died at the age of 71. He brought the Tabût-e Sekine, which had been taken back from the Philistines and placed in the city of Kiryat-Yearim during the period of the Judges, to Jerusalem and placed it under the cowhide tent sanctuary he built in accordance with nomadic traditions.
The Prophet Dawud wanted to build a magnificent temple in Jerusalem worthy of the glory of the Tabût-e-Saqineen, like the Bayt al-Haram in Mecca, where Allah had honored the Children of Ismail. However, the Prophet of the time, Nathan, whom he consulted on this matter, informed him that his era was the era of war, in which much blood was shed, and that the construction of this temple would be bestowed upon his son who would rule in the era of peace. Indeed, “Solomon”, from the Arabic word “silm” (peace), literally means “peace-loving”. Thereupon, David made the necessary preparations such as materials, laborers and plans and willed the construction of the temple to his son Solomon (1015-975 BC) (Graetz 1891: I/150).
From Jerusalem to Jerusalem
Before the construction of Solomon’s temple, Israel was religiously and politically disorganized. Divided into 12 tribes, the Israelites offered sacrifices to God at various places of worship, especially Gibeon. Jerusalem became the religious and political center of the Land of Israel, the holy city of Judaism, the eternal city, the eternal province, the utopia of Judaism, with the construction of the Temple, called Bayt al-Maqdis in Arabic and Bayt-ha-Mikdash in Hebrew, by Solomon between 964-957 BC. This is why Jerusalem has been the main subject of the Crescent-Cross conflict throughout history and Zionism in our time. The confusion over issues such as the Temple of Solomon, Al-Aqsa Mosque, and Beit al-Maqdis has also been a factor that has increased the intensity of this conflict. In this article, we will tell the unknown truths about Jerusalem and its religious content.
Jerusalem is divided into two parts: Walled East (Old) Jerusalem and Walled West (New) Jerusalem. East Jerusalem is built on four hills: Zion in the south, Moriah in the east, Akra in the west and Bezeta in the north. The most important of these are the hills of Zion and Moriah. The two hills of Zion and Moriah, from which the word “Zionism” derives, are the equivalent of the two hills of Safâ and Marwa in Mecca mentioned in the Qur’an (Al-Baqarah 2/158), as evidenced by the similarity in sound (Dawud 1992: 104). The connection between Zion and Moriya, and Safâ and Marwa is understood in the Qur’anic references to judgment and prophethood, and David and Solomon, also mentioned in the Qur’an (Al-Baqarah 2/158). In the Holy Qur’an, Allaah declares that He made Prophet Noah and Prophet Abraham and some of their descendants into Prophets and Messengers by bestowing the Book, judgment and prophethood, and that He also gave the Children of Israel the Book and Prophethood (An’am 6/83-89, Maryam 19/49-58, Ahzab 33/39-40, Anbiya 21/78, Niml 27/15-44).
Interestingly, in Arabic, judgment is a masculine word and prophethood is a feminine word. The Meccan equivalents of the hills of Zion and Moriah in Jerusalem, Safa and Marwa, are also both masculine and feminine words. Safa is the hill southeast of the Ka’bah and Marwa is the hill northeast of it. In particular, the six great prophets of the ulu’l-azm have epithets with the form “Allah’s…”. Adam Safiyyullah, Noah Najiyyullah, Abraham Khalîlullah, Moses Kelîmullah, Jesus Rûhullah and our Prophet Habîbullah. Israel, which was given to Prophet Ya’qub, literally means ‘Abdullah (servant of Allah) in Hebrew, but it is also given the meaning of Safiyyullah (pure and chosen of Allah) as mentioned by Tabari in his commentary. However, this “chosenness” does not mean virtue (superiority) over other people, as the Jews claim, but it means both purity (purity from sins) and being chosen and filtered among people.
As al-Qurtubi mentions in his commentary, Adam was expelled from Paradise and separated from Eve because he ate from the forbidden tree. When Adam’s repentance was accepted by Allah, he was called Safiyyullah because he was cleansed from his wrongdoing and attained purity, and the hill where he stood was called Safa in the masculine form, and the hill where he stood was called Marwa in the feminine form because Eve was a mer’e (woman). In other words, contrary to Christianity, which assumes that Adam (man) came into the world as a hereditary sinner, a potential criminal, he was considered to have opened a white page for testing on earth. In the dictionary, Safâ means “slippery stone, hard rock” and Merve means “soft small stone, pebble”. The Hebrew word moriah (מוֹרִיָּה) is said to come from the Arabic word hora’a (הוֹרָאָָה), which is related to the word rivayet (Sharp 1808: 3,6).
Likewise, the words for judgment and prophethood, which are attributed to David and Solomon in contrast to Safa and Marwa, are both masculine and feminine. Just as Safa is higher than Marwa, Zion is higher than the hill of Moriah. Therefore, a relationship is established between these two hills and judgment-prophecy, Dawud and Solomon:
Musakker: Safâ=Zion: ruler-Davud-palace.
Müennes: Merve=Moriya: prophecy-Suleyman-the temple.
Zion is the dominant hill of Jerusalem; Zion is the upper city and Akra is the lower city. The name Zion was first used for the Jebusite fortress southeast of Jerusalem. In Jewish tradition, Mount Sinai, then Mount Zion, was called the “Mountain of God”. The Decalogue was revealed by God to Moses at the Tûr-i Sînâ on the Sînâ peninsula. Accordingly, Mount Sinai represents the Commandment (Allah’s Commandment), Mount Zion represents the Decree (Allah’s Decree), Mount Moriah represents Worship (Allah’s Worship). The hill of Zion represents the descent from Heaven to the Land and from the People to the Truth, and the hill of Moriah represents the ascent from the Land to Heaven and from the People to the Truth. In the Torah, God commanded Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac on the hill of Moriah, and it was at this place that Jacob had his famous dream of the staircase. The mosque of Melchizedek, the servant of God who congratulated Abraham, is also on this hill. It was on the hill of Moriah that David envisioned building the sanctuary for God.
The fact that the hill of Moriah, on which Solomon built Beit al-Maqdis, is also called the hill of Zion has caused confusion. This is because the relationship of the two hills to each other and to the city of Jerusalem is not understood. First, the hills of Zion and Moriah were considered as a single spiritual region that constituted the essence of the city, and both were called the hill of Zion because it was the dominant hill of the city. Second, the hill of Zion is divided into the City of David and the hill of Moriah into the City of Jerusalem. This indicates the dual character of the city according to the two functions of the ummah (religious-political), with the hill of Zion as the seat of Government and the hill of Moriah as the seat of Worship (Wells 1846: 62).
This also points to the two reasons for the holiness of the city of Jerusalem, which led to its name Jerusalem, as well as the two goals of Zionism and the logic of the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict: The divine promise of the eternity of David’s property and the recognition of the sanctuary as God’s eternal dwelling place, the Beitollah. The original name of Jerusalem is Jerusalem, which means “Land of Peace=Dâru’s-Salâm”. The word “kuds”, the common name of the city, which comes from the Aramaic “kudsha”, refers to the temple, not the city. At the beginning of the Xth century, Qarāʾī scholars called the city of Jerusalem Bayt al-Maqdis and the area where the sanctuary was located as Quds (Lassner 2017: 6). The terms “House of God” (Baytullah) for the sanctuary and “City of God” for the city also express the transfer of holiness from the sanctuary to the city.
| Yerushalayim |
| Mount Zion, City of David | Moriah Hill Jerusalem City |
| The divine promise of the eternity of David’s estate | The sanctuary as the Baytullah |
| Establishing world domination | Building the Third Temple |
| Zionism |
According to this picture, Israel’s ostensible goal is the construction of the Third Temple and its real goal is world domination. The Muslims’ goal is to protect the Bayt al-Maqdis (Al-Aqsa Mosque), which bears the same name as the Bayt-ha-Mikdash built by Solomon.
The Battle for Beit al-Maqdis
During his third invasion of Jerusalem in 586 BC, the Babylonian ruler Buhtunnasr II (Nebuchadnezzar) destroyed the First Temple (Solomon’s Temple) along with the city. The 50-year Babylonian Exile (586-536 BC), which Jews call the Babylonian Captivity, continued until the Persians conquered the region in 538 BC. Returning from Babylonian exile with the permission of the Persian ruler Cyrus II the Great, the Jews under Zerubbabel built the Second Temple (Zerubbabel’s Temple) in 515 BC. Alexander of Macedon conquered the region in 332 BC, ushering in the Hellenistic era that lasted until 63 BC. During this time, Jerusalem and the Temple were filled with statues of Greek gods. When Herod the Great captured Jerusalem in 37 BC, he replaced the Second Temple (the Temple of Zerubbabel) with the larger and more magnificent Third Temple (the Temple of Herod). In this way, Herod aimed to gain the consent and support of his Jewish subjects and turned Jerusalem into a pilgrimage center.
After the destruction of the Kingdom of Hashmonayim (140-37 BC), the last independent Jewish state under Roman rule, the Third Temple was destroyed by the Roman commander Titus in 70 BC following a revolt by fanatical Zealots against Roman rule in 66 BC. If the temples built by Solomon, Zerubbabel and Herod are listed as First, Second, Third, then the future temple would be the Fourth. However, the Third Temple is also considered in Jewish literature to be part of the Second Temple Period, which covers the period between 538 BCE and 70 CE, probably because it was built with the intention of replacing the Second Temple with a better one without forcibly destroying it.
For nearly 2,000 years, Jews prayed at ha-Kotel ha-Ma’aravi, the Western or Wailing Wall, the only remnant of the Second Temple. They believe that God’s justice, which deprived the Jews of their homeland and freedom for their sins, will bring an end to this punishment. A Messiah, the Messiah, the son of David, will rescue the Jews from captivity and exile, restore them to the Land of Maw’ûd and build the Third Temple (Garaudy 2017: 9-25, 90, Fığlalı 1981: 180).
The Messenger of Allah ﷺ reported that the first masjid established on earth was Masjid al-Haram (Ka’ba) and 40 years later Masjid al-Aqsa (Bayt al-Maqdis), and in another hadith he said: “One should not travel except to three masjids: Masjid al-Haram, this is my masjid (Masjid al-Nabawi) and Masjid al-Aqsa.” The important point that is often confused is the relationship between haram and masjid in these three. The words Bayt and Haram are the generic names of these three main mosques on earth, together with their surroundings. The term “Haram al-Sharif” is used as a common name for all three, while the term “Bayt al-Haram” (al-Ma’ida 5/2,97) is used for al-Masjid al-Haram in Mecca, al-Bayt al-Maqdis, al-Aqsa in Jerusalem, al-Bayt al-Nabî, and al-Masjid al-Nabawî in Medina. Accordingly,
1- The center of Bayt al-Haram is Masjid al-Haram, and the center of Masjid al-Haram is Kaaba,
2- The center of Beit al-Maqdis is Al-Aqsa Mosque, the center of Al-Aqsa Mosque is Quds al-Aqdes for Jews and Al-Qibla for Muslims,
3- The center of Bayt al-Nabî is Masjid al-Nabawî and the center of Masjid al-Nabawî is Ravza al-Mutahhara.
The most virtuous of the masjids is Masjid al-Haram according to the Hanafi, Shafi’i and Hanbalî sects, and Masjid al-Nabawi according to the Mâlikî sect. Established on a rectangular area of 144 acres surrounded by high walls on the Moriya hill in the east of East (Old) Jerusalem, Masjid al-Aqsa encompasses around 200 buildings, including the Dome of the Rock and Masjid al-Qibla. On the highest cliff of the hill is the Dome of the Rock, the symbol of Al-Aqsa Mosque with its majestic dome. The Wailing Wall (Western Wall), which Jews today believe to be a remnant of the Temple of Solomon, is located on the rocky base of the Tyropean valley on the west side of the perimeter wall of Al-Aqsa Mosque. Jews pray at the Wailing Wall every year on the anniversary of the destruction of Solomon’s Temple.
After the Ottoman conquest of Jerusalem, the Ottoman Empire allowed Jews to repair the Wailing Wall. When their population increased in the region, the Jews demolished the houses in the neighborhood and tried to put benches and tables in front of the Wailing Wall. When Muslims objected to this, a committee set up by the League of Nations in 1929 ruled that the wall was the property of Muslims and that Jews could pray there. When Israel captured East Jerusalem on the third day of the Six-Day War (June 7, 1967), it demolished the Moorish neighborhood in the area of the wall.
Later, Israel set its sights on the Muslim Yusufiye Cemetery, located at the foot of the eastern walls of Al-Aqsa Mosque, where Ottoman soldiers are buried, to build a Jewish cemetery. According to the news dated October 25, 2021, the Israeli administration started working to turn part of the Yusufiye Cemetery in occupied East Jerusalem into a park (https://www.aa.com.tr/tr/dunya/israil-kudus-teki-musluman-mezarliginda-park-yapim-calismasina-basladi/2401994).
According to Jewish belief, in order to build the Third Temple, it must conform to its original dimensions and the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Qibla Mosque must be demolished. This is why Israel continues to occupy Palestinian Muslim properties and homes throughout Jerusalem, while digging tunnels under the Haram al-Sharif. Ignoring UNESCO’s warning to stop excavations here, Israel persistently continues its excavations to kill two birds with one stone: To reach the ruins of the sanctuary and to collapse the Dome of the Rock and the Qibla Mosque.
On July 30, 1980, the Israeli Parliament adopted the Basic Law stipulating that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel “whole and united”. On December 21, 2017, the United Nations (UN) adopted Resolution 10/22 calling on all member states to “refrain from establishing diplomatic missions in Jerusalem” following US President Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and his announcement to move the American Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
From Anti-Semitism to Zionism
Zionism and anti-Semitism are concepts that emerged in the XIXth century and which are still not clearly defined, despite the fact that countless articles and books have been written about them. In my opinion, this confusion stems from three reasons.
1. Link the concepts of Zionism and anti-Semitism
2. By dividing the main historical phases
3. The inability to differentiate between the Western and Eastern worlds.
The French Jewish intellectual Bernard Lazare (1865-1903) wrote Antisemitism: Its History and Causes is still one of the main sources on anti-Semitism. However, this book was written in the second of the three historical phases of anti-Semitism and exclusively on anti-Semitism. Lazare (1903: 185), however, emphasized the difference between the Western and Eastern worlds in terms of anti-Semitism, and that anti-Semitism is a matter for the Western world. We can express the truth he draws attention to as follows: In the Islamic world, there is hatred of Jews but no persecution; in the Western world, there is both hatred and persecution of Jews.
Hikmet Tanyu (2005: I/206) expresses this as follows:
“February 12, 1880: The word “anti-Semitism” is coined in Germany. Anti-Semitism emerges among Western Christians, especially in Spain, Russia, France, Germany and America. Turkey is one of the few countries where anti-Semitism is not organized as an organization, where there is no mass hostility against Jews. There has never been any systematic anti-Semitism in Turkey, even among individuals.”
As we said, the endless conceptual confusion stems from the inability to examine the concepts of Zionism and anti-Semitism in relation to each other and by dividing them into main historical phases. The necessity to examine the two concepts together, as in the Zionism/anti-Zionism relationship, stems from the effect-response relationship, from the fact that the Jewish perception of others is shaped in reaction to the Jewish perception of “us and our destiny”. In our opinion, Zionism and anti-Semitism can only be fully understood by dividing them into three main historical phases according to their conceptions of Judaism, Jews and Palestine.
Zionism:
1. Ancient (before the XIXth century)-Ziono-idea: Jewish religion, Jewish ummah, Palestine as a qibla
2. Modern (XIXth century)-Zionophilia: Jewish culture, Jewish race-nation, Palestine as a homeland
3. Contemporary (XXth century)-Zionism: Jewish ideology, Jewish state, Palestine as a country
Anti-Semitism
1. Ancient (pre-nineteenth century): Judeophobia – fear of Jews
2. Modern (XIXth century): Anti-Semitism-Jewish issue
3. Contemporary (XXth century): Anti-Zionism – the danger of Israel
Let us look at how Zionism and anti-Semitism are manifested according to these stages.
The concept of “diaspora”, which refers to the dispersion of the Jews within the Babylonian State and the Roman Empire, has undergone an expansion in meaning over time with the phenomena of migration and conversion. The word diaspora, which once referred to the dispersion of Jews, Greeks and Armenians, now refers to a wider semantic field that includes terms such as “immigrant, stateless, refugee, guest worker, exile community, community abroad, ethnic community” (Yaldız 2013).
The Jewish population in the Roman Empire was estimated at around eight million. In 135, the Romans rebuilt Jerusalem as a Roman city and named it Aelia (Iliya) Capitolina, making it the capital of Palestine. Meanwhile, the Jews were massacred in 132-135 when they revolted against Rome again, and most of the survivors were forced to migrate to the Mediterranean, North Africa and Spain. Thus began the third exile of the Jews, the Roman exile and the diaspora, which lasted almost 2000 years from 135 to 1948. In 1492, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella issued an edict ordering the expulsion of all Jews from Spain.
The Jewish experience in the Diaspora era was characterized by two main concerns. First, to preserve Jewish identity against assimilation in a foreign nation, to remain Jewish. Second, the longing to eventually return to the homeland from expatriation and to reunite with Jerusalem and the Temple (Aydın 2000: 12). The wish of “Next year in Jerusalem” in the closing prayers of the Passover and Yom Kippur holidays was an expression of the Jews’ unquenchable homesickness.
The Jews thus survived as a universal ummah, living in communities adhering to the Sunnah in the countries where they were scattered, with Palestine as their qibla. However, with the advent of the age of nation-states that developed with capitalism, the spell was broken for the Jews and their relative peace of mind was shattered. In his memoir The World of Yesterday, the Jew Stefan Zweig compares the imperial state (the Austro-Hungarian Empire) and the nation-state (Austria) as the Jews’ heaven and hell. Because the Jews, with their social autonomy combined with their economic power, especially in developed countries such as France, England and Germany, began to be seen by the two elements of the term “nation-state” as “a nation within a nation, a state within a state”, as an element sinking into the emerging national state (Graetz 1891: V/3,44,358,368,361,434,478,480, Lazare 1903: 23).
Thus, in the XIXth century, the “Age of Issues”, the “Jewish Question” was born out of the conflict of the Jews with the totalitarian (one nation-one state) structure of the national state. Many articles and books were written on the “Jewish Question” in this century, including the Jewish Karl Marx’s On the Jewish Question (1844). The Jewish Question had two sides: anti-Semitism and the Jews and others who would give rise to Zionism. For national states, the Jewish Question was about breaking Jewish power and integrating them into the national state by transforming communal privileges into equal citizenship rights. For the Jews, it was to preserve their religious and ummah Jewish identity against social and national assimilation, and their Jewish privileges and status against political integration.
The two sides’ approach to the Jewish Question shaped modern anti-Semitism and Zionism. There was a critical difference between ancient and modern forms of anti-Semitism. Ancient Judeophobia was a religious fear of the Jew, while modern anti-Semitism was a racial-economic hatred of the Jew. The term anti-Semitism was first used in Germany by the German Jewish convert Wilhelm Marr (1819-1904) in his 1873 book Der Sieg des Judenthums über das Germanenthum (The Triumph of Judaism over the German World). According to Marr, thanks to the blessings they had enjoyed for centuries, the Jews had triumphed over the Germans and German society had been Judaized (Rash 2012: 85-6).
Secularism and nationalism, born of modernism in the age of nation-states, shaped the Jewish understanding of religion and nation, which in turn shaped others’ understanding of Judaism and Jews, and anti-Semitism. Under the influence of the rising secularism and nationalism in the nineteenth century, Jews began to see Judaism and Jews as culture-ideology and race-nation rather than religion and nation. Anti-Semitism was born out of the otherization of Jews as a Semitic race in line with the racial views of philologists such as Ernest Renan.
The Jewish quest for emancipation against anti-Semitism has progressed from the ancient (pre-nineteenth century) Ziono-idea to the modern (nineteenth century) Zionophilia and from there to contemporary (twentieth century) Zionism. In ancient times (before the XIXth century), when Judaism and Jews were seen as a religion and an ummah, the understanding of “Palestine as a qibla”, which we call “Ziono-idea = Zion ideal”, was dominant. ‘Aliya means “migration” of Jews from one place to Palestine for the purpose of settling. The term, which was used in the Middle Ages to mean “the holy expedition of a Jew to Palestine” in order to join the Jewish ummah that would meet annually in Palestine and to raise his spiritual level, began to be used in the modern era for migrations made with the aim of realizing the ideal of Zionism.
In the XIXth century, there was a shift from the ancient Zionist ideology to modern Zionophilia, from “Palestine as a qibla” to “Palestine as a homeland”. In 1881, on the initiative of Dr. Leon Pinsker, a Russian Jew, the movement of the Friends of Zion (Hibbat Zion, חיבת ציון) was founded in response to attacks on Jews in Russia. The founders of Hibbat Zion also established another organization called Bilu (ו”בילו) to organize immigration to Palestine. On June 30, 1882, 14 pioneering Zionists went to Palestine to buy land and establish the first farms and colonies, establishing the first agricultural villages of Petah Tikva and Rishon le-Tsiyon, which would later become towns or cities (Sampter 1933: 25).
The first mass ‘aliya to Palestine took place in 1882 and the second continued from 1904 until World War I. The third major Jewish ‘aliya to Palestine took place between 1919 and 1923. This wave of immigration, organized by the Ha-Haluts (Pioneer) organization, brought tens of thousands of Jews to Palestine. After the third ‘aliya (1920), the previously established security force ha-Shomer was abolished and the organization called Hagana (Defense) was formed; this organization provided the security of the Jews until the establishment of the modern Israeli army (Tsahal) in 1948 (Arslantaş 2011: 641-2).
Although the word “Zion” had been in use for about 2500 years, the word “Zionism” was coined by the Austrian Jew Nathan Birnbaum (Mathias Acher) (1864-1937) in his article “Nationalitaet und Sprache” (Nationality and Language) of February 16, 1886 (Sampter 1933: 13). However, this was only a nomenclature for ease of expression in the nineteenth century, the century of -isms; Nathan Birnbaum was far from political Zionism based on the project of a “Jewish state” as in the case of Theodore Herzl. Ziono-fili as proto-Zionism, which emerged in the nineteenth century as a reaction to anti-Semitism as anti-Jewish racism, referred to the movement of Jews who, tired of oppression in the countries they lived in, sought refuge in Palestine as their eternal homeland.
Later on, religious Zionism as Ziono-fili transformed into political Zionism as the project of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine led by Theodore Herzl as a result of the overlapping demands of Westerners and Jews. The Jewish national state had three elements:
1- Jewish nation
2- Jewish state
3- Jewish land
While Latin America was first considered for the Jewish State, Chaim Weizmann (1874-1952) argued that it must be established in Palestine. In this respect, if Theodore Herzl was the father of Zionism, Chaim Weizmann was the father of action.
We can divide Zionism into two main parts, ancient and modern, and three parts in total:
A-Old
1. Religious Zionism (mesianism) (Sampter 1933: 13).
B-Modern
2. Political Zionism
3. Imperial Zionism
Religious Zionism, also called Messianism, refers to the concept of Jews meeting in Palestine as the qibla to await the coming of the Messiah. Political Zionism meant Jewish nationalism, the ideology of the nation-state, and imperial Zionism meant Britain’s ideology of world domination. It was this imperialist dimension that turned political Zionism into a dangerous project for both Jews and the world. It was no coincidence that the Dreyfus Affair took place in France. Because traditionally, anti-Semitism was a product of Catholicism and France was the center of Catholic Europe. Therefore, Zionism found a base among Jews who were overwhelmed by the oppression in Eastern and Western Europe. Jewish intellectuals in Germany, England and especially America, who lived in relative comfort, saw the danger more clearly at the very beginning of the movement and took a firm stance against Zionism and warned their co-religionists.
At the core of the Zionism debate was the issue of whether the Jews were a nation or an ummah. Because the acceptance of the Jews as a nation by the two elements of the “nation-state” would require the acceptance of the state and legitimize political Zionism. According to the Zionists, the Jews were a nation; according to the anti-Zionists, led by Orthodox and Reform Jews, they were an ummah. Zionism was a distortion of the mission of Judaism, a betrayal of the Jews. The mission of Judaism is spiritual, not political; it is to spread the divine ideal of peace, justice and love throughout the world. A Jewish state would be a global ghetto state where Jews, who are seen as surplus in the countries where they live, would be concentrated, and would only play into the hands of the enemies of the Jews (Raisin 1919: 332, Sampter 1933: 28,53,369).
Theodore Herzl, the father of Zionism, had planned to convene the First World Zionist Congress in Munich, but was forced to organize the congress in Basel, Switzerland in 1897 due to the fierce opposition of the Orthodox and Reform rabbis there. According to the German rabbis, the attempt to establish a national Jewish state in Palestine was contrary to the Messianic ideals of Judaism. According to Maimonides, the Third Temple will not be built by human hands, but will descend miraculously from heaven to earth in due time.
From the Age of Ideology to the Age of Lies
Literally, truth means fixed, falsehood means unstable (changing). As can be understood from the prayer of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ, “O Allah, who turns the hearts, make my heart fixed on your religion”, the heart that is fixed by faith is on the truth, and the heart that is not fixed is on falsehood. Falsehood=lie is both in the word and in the universe, as the expression “false world” implies. The modern world has been wrapped in a web of lies through two developments, general and specific. The general one is nihilism (loss of truth and value) starting with Kant and Nietzsche, and the specific one is Zionism-Islamophobia. We can summarize this as “the triumph of might over right” for the first time in human history.
The simultaneous emergence of ideologies in general, Zionism in particular, and the modern mass media as a propaganda machine in the nineteenth century, known as the “Age of Ideology”, was no coincidence. Because the aim of the intellectuals was to make the masses accept ideology as the savior truth through propaganda and persuasion as more or less a distortion of the truth. Ideological propaganda reached its peak in Zionism because of the necessity to convince more than one side. The Zionists had to engage in an intensive propaganda that would eventually turn into an industry of lies in order to convince both their own nation and the Western public opinion, especially with regard to the establishment of the Jewish state through the usurpation of the land of Palestine.
As a result, in the modern world, the “truth-as-showed” has replaced the “seen and apparent truth” in the ancient world. The media has turned into a disinformation machine in the service of Zionism with the Big Lie doctrine of Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, who said, “The bigger the lie, the more people believe it.” The Pope anecdote is enough to give an idea of this dirty cold war tactic. The Pope, who visited New York for the first time after his election, was bombarded with questions as soon as he stepped off the plane, and a mischievous journalist asked, “Are you going to visit a brothel?” Stunned for a moment by the question, the Pope replied, “Is there a brothel in New York?”. The next day the newspapers came out with the following headline: “The Pope asked “Are there brothels in New York?” as soon as he got off the plane!”
Our century has been an era of a dirty cold war aimed at turning truths inside out (making truths appear false and falsehoods appear true), distorting facts, inventing lies, and defaming the good (Islam and Muslims). Israel, which turned into a massacre machine against the Palestinian people even before it was officially established in 1948, tried to camouflage its cruelty with the media lie industry and to gain legitimacy by deceiving people with the academic lie industry.
The Mediatic Lie
In Israel’s October 2023 attack on Palestine, the dirty media cold war reached its peak with the hot carnage. Yocheved Lifshitz, an 85-year-old female Israeli prisoner released by Hamas on October 23, 2023, said, “The Kassam Brigades told us that they were people who believed in the Quran and that they would not harm us. They provided us with the same conditions they had in the tunnels. We ate bread and feta cheese and cucumbers just like them.” The Zionist-controlled media, on the other hand, reported the same news with the headline “I experienced hell!”.
Even more exemplary was the discomfort felt by Israelis, who seek to trap the world in a web of lies, at Lifshitz speaking the truth. “It was a mistake to allow Lifshitz to make a statement on live television,” Israeli state television KAN quoted an Israeli broadcaster as saying. Roy Cohen, the media officer of the Israeli basketball team, also commented: “Allowing this press release to be made should be criticized.” Israeli Rikki Blaiberg posted: “It’s unfortunate he came back, let Hamas take him back”, while Yehud Gainot, an Israeli, insulted the 85-year-old Lifshitz by calling him “leftist garbage” (https://www.yenisafak.com/hayat/serbest-birakilan-esirin-hamasin-kendilerine-iyi-davrandigi-yonundeki-ifadeleri-israilde-tepki-cekti-aciklama-yapmasi-hataydi-4570000).
Academic Blackout
Israel’s attempt at academic blackout was a striking example of the saying ““Yavuz hırsız ve sahibini bastırır / He who robs his neighbor is not afraid of him. “. Jewish academics dared to portray the justified reactions in the Islamic and Western world against Israel for its massacre of the Palestinian people as an attack on Israel, and to turn the truths in front of the eyes of the whole world upside down. The basis of this audacity was anti-Semitism, the scope of which was expanded. With the cudgel of anti-Semitism, the Zionist regime had succeeded in building a global empire of fear in which people of conscience and intellectuals would not speak any truth against the Jews. However, people of conscience and intellectuals could not refrain from speaking out against Israeli oppression based on Zionism, which in turn touches the religious sources of Zionist Israeli oppression, Judaism.
For this reason, in order to prevent any criticism of Israeli oppression, Israeli Prime Minister Menahem Begin said, “There can be no distinction between anti-Israelism and anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism”. Founded in 1927 in Paris, France, LICRA (La Ligue Internationale Contre le Racisme et l’Antisémitisme = International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism) At the National Council, Andre Monteil adopted Begin’s slogan: “Anti-Zionism is just another form of anti-Semitism”: “Today’s anti-Semitism has apparently found a more acceptable term: People are no longer anti-Semites, but anti-Zionists” (Garaudy 2017: 8-9).
However, people of conscience, outraged at Israel for its horrific persecution of the Palestinian people, did not give in to this deception. In 2003, the Council of the Association of University Teachers (AUT) in the UK passed Resolution 54, which declared that anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism:
“The Council recognizes that anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism, and resolves to give all possible support to members of AUT who are unjustly accused of anti-Semitism because of their political opposition to Israeli government policy”.
Likewise, NATFHE (The National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education) adopted a resolution at its conference in June 2005 stating that “To criticize Israeli policy or institutions is not anti-Semitic”. Thus, the two unions rejected the claim that “one cannot distinguish between anti-Israelism and anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism”. Nevertheless, motivated Jewish scholars such as David Hirsh (2018: 148) have argued that while formally the statement “Anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism” is true, de facto the distinction has disappeared, and that criticism of Zionism and criticism of Israel fall under the same rubric of anti-Semitism (Campbell 2019: 26-8).
Anti-Zionism can be broadly defined as opposition to the existence of the state of Israel; therefore, one can hardly distinguish between anti-Israelism and anti-Zionism. Since Israel is a Jewish state based on the Jewish holy books, criticism of Israel would inevitably lead to criticism of Zionism, and criticism of Zionism to criticism of Judaism, anti-Semitism. Therefore, the Zionists felt the necessity to put all criticism of the Jews in the same bag, in an all-or-nothing logic.
Jewish scholars have developed different strategies to counter this development:
1. Expanding the definition and scope of anti-Semitism to include criticism of Zionism and Israel,
2. Labeling justified reactions against Israel for its horrific atrocities against Palestine as “new anti-Semitism, the return of anti-Semitism”,
3. Dividing the anti-Semitic front, separating its perpetrators. Authors such as Jeffrey Herf (2023) have divided anti-Semitism into right, left and Islamic.
4. But the real enemies of Jews and Israel were Muslims, Arabs and Palestinians. Therefore, Jewish scholars such as Raphael Israeli attributed the new anti-Semitism to Islam and Muslims and turned this accusation into Islamophobia.
However, the Zionists overlooked the grave danger that this “all or nothing” attitude posed to Israel and the Jews. In accordance with the principle of “If something goes beyond its limits, it will turn into its opposite”, it was destined that blocking all justified criticism of Israel and the Jews would turn into an explosion of reaction and a total criticism of Israel and the Jews. As Israel increased its oppression of Palestine, people of conscience would raise their voices, and even Jewish media barons would not be able to stand in front of this global flood. Jewish academics such as Robin Shepherd (2009) had concluded as early as 2009 that the State of Israel had lost its legitimacy in Western public opinion. Israel’s massacre of Palestine, which began on October 7, 2023, led to the recognition of its loss of legitimacy by the entire world community.
The End of the Chain of Persecutions and Lies
Oppression was the cover-up of the truth, the lie, the truth. With the logic of Goebbels, no matter how big the lie and how many believers there were, the lie would never stick and the truth would never be established; as the words “The liar’s candle burns until the end of time” and “Haram has no building” indicate. Israel was established as a product of the modern age of oppression shaped by Zionism. Therefore, undermining the legitimacy of Israel, as the tip of the iceberg, would allow the age of oppression that lies beneath the iceberg, the big picture, to be seen.
Turkish Jew Errol Gerald said in a television program in 2012, “History books do not write. We (crypto) Jews from Thessaloniki, together with Atatürk, established three states in the twentieth century: Russia, Turkey, Israel”, he confessed. The Zionism-Kemalism marriage, which was revealed with this confession, was more clearly seen in Israel’s October 2023 attack on Palestine. Ehud Olmert, the former Prime Minister of Israel, stated that “the Jewish lobby in Turkey is stronger than the lobby in Israel”. Israel’s real enemy was the Arabs. It was not a coincidence that in Turkey, the Zionist-Kemalist section, led by a racist party, manifested Islamophobia as Arabophobia.
Zionist-Kemalist agents of influence posing as academics and journalists have served to spread Israeli lies in Turkey. Our aim is to expose the truth obscured by these lies that poison even the minds of the children of Muslim families.
LIE 1: Palestinians sold their land to the Jews
Dr. Ibrahim Mekki is a journalist and academic specializing in the Middle East. After his master’s degree in Tunisia, he completed his PhD in Turkey in 2011 with his thesis on “Land Sales in Palestine in the 19th Century”.
Since 1869, Lebanese Christians such as Habib Besters, Nikola Sersak, Tuwayni, Mette Ferah and Selim Hūrī have directly or indirectly sold the land they bought in Palestine outside the Mutasarrıflik of Jerusalem to foreign Jews and the Zionist agency, thus the first Jewish settlements in Palestine were established. Due to the strict measures and warnings of both the Ottoman government and Muslim scholars, the people of Palestine were warned against the danger of Zionism early on, and the sale of land to foreign Jews did not even reach 1 percent of Palestine during the XIXth century. Logically, if Palestinians had sold their lands to Jews, there would be no Palestinian refugees living in misery in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon (Turgut 2023).
LIE 2: Arabs betrayed the Ottomans
Cemal Pasha, a member of the Committee of Union and Progress triumvirate, served as the commander of the IVth Army and at the same time as the governor of the Palestine and Hejaz regions of Syria (Arabia) from November 1914 to December 1917, when the Ottoman Empire entered World War I, at the behest of Enver Pasha, the Minister of War. On the instructions of the British, Cemal Pasha turned the Arabs against the Ottomans by molesting the daughters of Islamic scholars in Damascus and persecuting the people and the Sharifs. Jamal Pasha’s treachery enabled Sharif Hussein, who had been appointed Emir of Mecca by Sultan Abdul Hamid II on November 1, 1908 and who had established contact with the British in February 1914, to reinforce his plans to revolt against the Ottomans. Sharif’s son Abdullah, who was a member of the Ottoman Majlis-i Meb’ûsanı as the representative of Hejaz, met with Lord Kitchener, the British Secretary of State for Eastern Affairs, while passing through Egypt on his way to Istanbul.
Two months after the outbreak of World War I in September 1914, contacts between the British authorities in Cairo and Sharif Hussein began under the instructions of Lord Kitchener. In five correspondences between July 14, 1915 and February 18, 1916, the British High Commissioner in Cairo, Henry McMahon, deceived Sharif Hussein with the promise that Britain would recognize his caliphate in all Arab provinces, including Palestine, if he rebelled against the Ottomans, and thus the Sharif launched the Hejaz Revolt against the Ottomans on June 10, 1916 (Öke 1982: 174). Sharif Hussein’s last days in Cyprus were spent weeping with remorse for the treason he committed against the Ottoman Empire by being deceived by the British (https://www.star.com.tr/pazar/mekke-emirini-aglatan-vicdan-azabi-haber-1025840/)
Britain was simultaneously promising Palestine to the Arabs with the Arab Caliphate project and to the Jews with the Jewish State project with the Balfour Declaration of 1917. Meanwhile, Mustafa Kemal arrived in Istanbul on November 13, 1918, the same day as the occupying British Army, and settled in the Pera Palas Hotel where British officers were staying. He made the following proposal to John G. Bennett (Aubrey Herbert), the head of British Intelligence in Istanbul: “To whom he suggested the idea to organize a Turkish army under British officers” (Shaw 2000: I/359).
LIE 3: HAMAS is a terrorist organization like the PKK that does not represent the Palestinian people
The PKK is a terrorist organization that seeks to divide Turkey and kills its own people. HAMAS, on the other hand, is a jihad organization of oppressed and mujahideen Palestinian youth, founded to defend the Palestinian homeland and people against the Israeli occupation. Abu Ubaidah, the spokesman of the Kassam Brigades, said, “85% of the soldiers in our units are orphaned children whose parents were martyred by the occupation state. Today, those children have grown up and their hearts are burning with revenge” (October 26, 2023). Those who wage jihad in the way of Allah are called mujahideen and those who give their lives are called martyrs. The fact that HAMAS soldiers died smiling at the Messenger of Allah ﷺ, and some of them even died with their finger of martyrdom in the air, clearly shows that they are mujahideen and martyrs.
LIE 4: Hamas is a separatist organization formed against Fatah, the representative of the Palestinian people
The Palestine Liberation Organization (منظمة التحرير الفلسطينية Munaẓẓamat at-Taḥrīr al-Filasṭīniyyah) was founded in Kuwait in 1959 by Fatah, former Palestinian President Yasser Arafat (1929-2004) and his associates. Hamas, on the other hand, was founded in Gaza by Ahmad Yasin, Abdel Aziz Rantisi and Muhammad Taha as the Palestinian wing of the Egyptian Ikhwan al-Muslimeen organization in the early days of the First Intifada, which erupted in late 1987 to wage armed and political struggle against the Israeli occupation. The split between the two groups deepened after Hamas won the 2006 elections. Following the elections, clashes broke out between Hamas and Fatah forces in the Gaza Strip in June 2007. After the clashes, Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip, while Fatah continued to rule the West Bank. In a 2021 poll, 53% of respondents believed that Hamas was “most worthy to represent and lead the Palestinian people”, while 14% preferred Fatah.
The unspoken reasons for the Fatah-Hamas split and conflict:
1- Fatah was founded on a secular ideology (Arab socialism, Baath). Hamas, on the other hand, believes that the struggle for an independent Palestine can only be waged in the spirit of Islamic jihad.
2- This is why Fatah (Arafat) established shady relations with Christians and Jews.
3- Allegations of corruption against Yasser Arafat. While nearly three million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza were living on the edge of hunger and poverty, Palestine was rocked by a new corruption scandal when Yasser Arafat secretly lent $6.5 million from the treasury to an Abu Dhabi businessman friend (https://www.milliyet.com.tr/dunya/filistini-sarsan-skandal-5242888).
4- Hamas, which does not recognize Israel, believes that the path to an independent Palestinian state within the 1967 borders lies through armed struggle, while Fatah, which unlike Hamas recognizes Israel, believes that the path to an independent Palestinian state lies through negotiations.
5-The Palestinian Authority, established by Fatah, has fallen under Israeli control. Israel’s Minister of National Security exposed the treachery of the Mahmoud Abbas Administration during a discussion with a Shin Bet official. The minister told the Shin Bet official, “You did not take seriously the information provided by Hussein al-Sheikh, the head of the Palestinian Authority’s Directorate General for Civil Affairs. Hussein has more loyalty to Israel than you” (https://x.com/eha_medya/status/1726547181794935214?s=20). “We will not accept a new ‘Vichy government’ in Gaza,” said Osama Hamdan (November 6, 2023), member of Hamas’ Political Bureau and representative in Lebanon (https://www.marbutahaber.com/ortadogu/filistin/hamas-gazzede-yeni-bir-vichy-hukumetini-kabul-etmeyecegiz/)
LIE 5: HAMAS Started the War
The United Nations (UN) adopted its first resolution on Palestine even before the establishment of the state of Israel. Resolution 181 (November 29, 1947), as part of the UN General Assembly’s Partition Plan, provided for the establishment of two independent states, Arab and Jewish, on the territory of Palestine after the end of the British mandate in 1947, and for Jerusalem to have an international status as a demilitarized city under the auspices of the UN Guardianship Council. This resolution was not implemented due to the Arab-Israeli War that broke out after its creation on May 14, 1948, and Israel has not complied with any of the four subsequent UN resolutions (No. 194 of December 11, 1948, No. 303 of December 9, 1949, No. 2253 of July 4, 1967, No. 38/180 of December 19, 1983).
On October 27, 2023, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution calling for an “immediate, permanent and sustained humanitarian ceasefire” in Gaza. On November 15, 2023, Resolution 2712 was adopted, calling for an “immediate and extended cessation of hostilities” in Gaza. Israel did not comply with any of these either.
Unlike its predecessors, the 1983 UN resolution was like an ultimatum to Israel. The resolution stated that Israel was not a peace-loving member and called on all countries to sever diplomatic, commercial and cultural ties with Israel. It also noted Israel’s non-compliance with the UN Charter. Israel was also condemned for its occupation of the West Bank, including Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights. These occupations were described as illegal and in violation of international law and relevant UN resolutions. It called on Israel to withdraw from the territories it has occupied since 1967, including Jerusalem, stating that this is “a precondition for an inclusive and just peace in the Middle East” (https://www.bbc.com/turkce/haberler-dunya-42440136).
However, the UN was not an organization established by equal sovereign states to uphold international law, but rather to legitimize the Zionist power order that took shape after World War II. The five veto-wielding permanent members of the Security Council (America, Britain, France, Russia, China), one of the two organs of the UN with the authority to take binding decisions along with the International Court of Justice, were also the world’s largest arms producers and marketers. The only UN resolution on Israel was Resolution 10/22 (December 21, 2017), adopted after US President Donald Trump announced that he recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.
With the recklessness of this global power behind it, Israel has become even more reckless and increased its oppression of the Palestinians. It did not even allow the Palestinian people to meet their most basic human needs and turned Gaza into an open-air prison. On June 1, 2023, Clare Daly, an Irish member of the European Parliament, in her speech to the Plenary Session of the European Parliament, shamed Europe for its support for Israel, which is trying to destroy the Palestinian people:
“This month (May 2023), Israel bombed Gaza 323 times in 5 days. 10 civilians were killed. 1,100 people were displaced. More than 150,000 Palestinians have been killed or injured in Gaza and the West Bank since 2008, 33,000 of them children. The EU stands by Israel as a bystander, calling it our friend. We build houses and schools in the West Bank and the Israelis come and demolish them. We cannot consider ourselves a community of values and continue to call Israel our friend” (https://x.com/ClareDalyMEP/status/1664309346434465795?s=20).
In his address to the UN Security Council (October 24, 2023), UN Secretary-General António Guterres condemned the Hamas attacks in Israel on October 7, 2023, saying: “But we must also recognize that Hamas attacks do not come out of nowhere. For 56 years, the Palestinian people have been subjected to a suffocating occupation. They have witnessed violence and the gradual takeover of their land by settlements. Their economy has been destroyed, their people displaced and their homes razed to the ground. Their faith in a political solution has begun to fade” (https://www.aa.com.tr/tr/dunya/islam-isbirligi-teskilati-isgalci-guc-israilin-bm-genel-sekreteri-guterrese-yonelik-sozlu-saldirisini-kiniyoruz/3032757).
The reaction of the Palestinian people to this persecution that Israel is determined to perpetuate could be described with two examples and words. 1. When a cat is cornered and there is nowhere to escape, it jumps on the person or animal that is cornering it for dear life. 2. “It is better to die one day than to die every day.” Therefore, Hamas had no choice but to launch a sudden attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, for the liberation of the Palestinian people who said, “It is better to die one day than to die every day.”
On November 23, 2023, Ibrahim Karagül quoted a source who sheds light on the background of Hamas’ mysterious attack on October 7, 2023:
1- Israel had been preparing to invade Gaza for five years.
2- He was carrying out his occupation plans and activities through the Gaza model he built on six acres of land.
3- Sometime before October 7, 2023, the Palestinians learned of the attack.
4- They dealt Israel a very heavy blow that it has never seen in its history. Israel has never experienced anything like this before.
5- A year’s supply of weapons and ammunition for Palestinian fighters is ready.
6- On the other hand, they continue to produce.
7- Israeli casualties are at least ten times higher than what Israel has announced.
8- They completely destroyed Israeli unity in one region.
9- Intense fighting is still going on in the places Israel says it has “captured”.
10- Even if they sweep Gaza, it is impossible for them to destroy the resistance. Without that, they won’t be able to get in there.
11- There are at least 100 thousand people in the resistance.
12- Military training was provided to 10 thousand people every year.
13- Not only Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, but all Palestinian groups are fighting there.
14- There is joint coordination between the seven factions. Fatah’s military wing rebelled against Mahmoud Abbas and they joined the war.
15- There is a lot of labor in the tunnels.
16- It’s impossible for them to solve this structure 20 meters underground.
(https://x.com/ibrahimkaragul/status/1727685777457315991?s=20)
LIE 6: HAMAS Killed Israeli Civilians
Israeli newspaper Haaretz, citing senior Israeli security officials, reported on October 7, 2023 (https://www.aa.com.tr/tr/teyithatti/gazze/haaretz-gazetesi-polis-kaynaklarina-gore-israil-helikopteri-israilli-sivilleri-vurdu-yazdi-mi/1816977) that Hamas groups aiming to cross the Gaza Strip into the Reim region were not aware of the Supernova Music Festival in the Negev Desert in Kibbutz Reim and that Israeli civilians were killed by an Israeli gunship that intervened in the Hamas attack.
LIE 7: Israel-Hamas War
War is fought between the armies of countries as equal parties within the framework of a common law. This is the world’s most asymmetrical and cruel war between Israel and Hamas, a country that does not recognize any values, rules, morals or laws, and an organization founded solely to defend its homeland and its people. Israel, without recognizing any values and rules, morality and law, is brutally killing innocent people, women and babies, destroying temples, schools, hospitals, ambulances, water sources, in short, all areas of life, with the world’s most advanced weapons, white phosphorus bombs banned by the 1980 Convention on Conventional Weapons.
LIE 8: Jerusalem is a Palestinian Issue, Not a Turkish Issue
The term Arz-ı Mev’ûd (Promised Land), called “Ereẓ Israel (אֶרֶץ יִשְׂרָאֵל)” (Arz-ı Israel) in Hebrew, is neither mentioned in the Torah nor in the Qur’an. The first covenant concerning the Promised Land was made between the Lord Yahweh and the Prophet Abraham. “On that day the Lord covenanted with Abraham and said: I have given to your descendants the land from the river of Egypt (Nile) to the great river (Euphrates), the Canaanites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rafas, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites and the Jebusites” (Genesis, 15/18-21). Accordingly, the northern border of Arz al-Maw’ûd is Lebanon and the southern border is the Sinai Peninsula. This land, which is referred to in the Qur’an with expressions such as “Arz al-Muqaddes, the blessed land” and which is stated to have been given to the Children of Israel, is not clearly defined (https://islamansiklopedisi.org.tr/arz-i-mevud).
With the Greater Israel project based on the myth of Arz-e-Maw’ûd, the Zionists calculated to overcome the conflict between religious and political Zionism on the one hand, and nationalism and irredentistic imperialism on the other in the age of nation-states. According to the Zionist project articulated by Ariel Sharon, the main goal is no longer the defense of Israel, but expansion through the disintegration of Arab states in the region. In an article dated March 8, 1989 in Shalom newspaper, the organ of the Turkish Jewish community, it was stated: “Belief in God is not the fundamental belief of Judaism, but Arz-ı Mev’ûd is!” We can draw three important conclusions from this:
1. This understanding is the most striking expression of how Judaism was transformed from a divine religion into a dangerous ideology.
2. As this understanding spread, the distinction between religious Zionist and political Zionist Jews began to disappear. As the fanatical rabbis legitimized it, Israel increased its oppression of Muslims and sincere religious Zionist Jews became a minority. The words of Moshe Dayan, Israel’s Defense Minister in 1967, were the most striking expression of the unrestrained Israeli aggression legitimized by the rabbis: “Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother” (Cook 2006: 31).
3. This understanding shows the difference between Jewish imperialism and Muslim cosmopolitanism. Muslim cosmopolitanism, in the sense of “i’lā-yı kelimetillāh” (the glorification of the word of God), refers to the ideal of making God’s religion dominant on earth, while Jewish imperialism refers to the cause of bringing the whole world under the rule of the Jews as the chosen people.
In 1985, according to Syrian President Hafez al-Assad, Israeli Prime Minister Moshe Dayan, while visiting the Golan Heights after occupying it in 1967, told the people there, “Past generations brought Israel to the borders of 1948, we brought it to the borders of 1967, and you will establish Greater Israel from the Nile (Egypt) to the Euphrates (Turkey)”. According to an Iraqi journalist, Dayan said, “We have taken Jerusalem and now our goal is Yathrib (Medina) and Babylon.” According to other journalists, then Prime Minister Menahem Begin said that “the State of Israel will include Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Sudan, Lebanon, Jordan and Kuwait, as predicted in the Bible.”
Arz-ı Mev’ûd=Greater Israel includes 22 provinces in the south and southeast of Turkey, including Urfa. For the Jews, Urfa is the most important city to be captured after Jerusalem. Because Prophet Abraham, the ancestor of Muslims, Christians and Jews, lived in Urfa and his tomb is in this city. It is known that since the 90s, under the name of agricultural cooperation, many Israeli experts have frequently visited the region and bought land there. In October 1994, Nesim Levi, a representative of the Jewish Community of Turkey, was a guest on a TV program and stated that some of the Jewish families who had emigrated from Turkey to Israel were returning to Turkey and settling in the Urfa region. This news was confirmed shortly afterwards. Jewish population was being systematically settled in the GAP region (https://dogruhaber.com.tr/haber/26045-yahudilerin-gap-eylem-plani-ve-vahim-iddialar/).
Theodor Herzl told Abdul Hamid II that the borders of their homeland “should cover the area from the mountains of Cappadocia (around Nevşehir) in the north to the Suez Canal in the south, it should be the Palestine of David and Solomon” (Garaudy 2017: 6).
According to some, Arz-ı Mev’ûd extends as far as Yusha Hill on the Anatolian side of the Bosphorus. Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, commenting on the Israeli army’s ground operation in the Gaza Strip in response to Hamas’ attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023, said, “We are the children of Light and they are the children of Darkness. We will fulfill the prophecy of Isaiah.” (https://video.haber7.com/video-galeri/253559-netanyahu-agzindaki-baklayi-cikardi-yesaya-kehanetini-gerceklestirecegiz-hedef-nil-ve-firat-mi)
This means the declaration that Turkey is also a target within the scope of the Arz-ı Mev’ûd=Greater Israel project, which, according to Isaiah’s prophecy, extends from the Nile to the Euphrates. One of the Zionist leaders of today’s Israel has openly stated that “Israel’s security starts from the Dardanelles” (Garaudy 2017: 6). Therefore, just as Israel was established with the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, Greater Israel will be established with the dismemberment of Turkey. If Jerusalem falls, Medina, Istanbul and Sarajevo will also fall. Therefore, Jerusalem is Turkey’s number one issue.
The Peak of Oppression
Oppression has been seen among human beings throughout history. However, what Israel is doing to the Palestinian people is the culmination of oppression on earth, a change of dimension. This is because Israel sees what it is doing as justice, not oppression. For them, the Torah commandment “thou shalt not kill” applies to Jews, not to non-Jews. As countless rabbis, old and new, such as Menachem Mendel Schneerson (1902-1994), have pointed out, God created only Jews as human beings and non-Jews as animals who can be killed to serve the Jews:
“The soul of a Gentile comes from three satanic sources, while the soul of a Jew comes from the holy of holies. Why is it that a Gentile is punished for killing even a non-Jewish fetus, but a Jew is not punished for killing even a Jewish fetus? The answer lies in the general difference between Jews and non-Jews. A Jew was created as an end in itself, not as a means to another end. The entire universe was created to serve the Jews alone. The statement in verse 1 of Genesis, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” means that the heavens and the earth were created for the sake of the Jews, who are called “the Beginning”. This means that everything, including the heavens and the earth, the entire universe, all discoveries, all creation, is empty in relation to the Jews. The important thing is the Jews, because they do not exist for something else, but for the divine purpose itself” (Shahak 2004: 115).
In their 2009 book, The King’s Torah, Rabbis Yitzhak Shapira and Yosef Elitzur argued that it is permissible to kill Muslims (Palestinians) as infants, who will grow up to be enemies of the Jews. On the 17th day of the Israeli offensive in July 2014, when Israel massacred more than 700 Gazans, Rabbi Dov Lior (1933-) called on the Israeli army to “kill all Palestinians and wipe Gaza off the face of the earth”. According to him, there is no such thing as a civilian in wartime, and the life of a thousand non-Jews is not worth the life of one Jew. Rabbi Ovadia Yosef (1920-2013) also heralded that Israeli soldiers who kill and maim Palestinians will be blessed by God (!) (Masalha 2014: 217-21).
Developments show that this terrible mentality is instilled in the Jewish people from childhood. “We killed Jesus, we are proud of it, we will kill you and the Palestinians” (https://x.com/CensoredMen/status/1715579583322280316?s=20), a young Israeli settler said as he tried to take over the home of a Palestinian family. In demonstrations, Israelis chanted “Death to the Palestinians; the best Arab is a dead Arab” (https://x.com/Matador_X6/status/1715583380383756361?s=20). What will be the end of the earth ruled by a people who have no value, no purpose but to kill?
Israel has compressed the atrocities committed on earth since Adam into three months starting in October 2023; the saying “There has never been such atrocities on earth” has become obsolete:
“Scoundrels. They grabbed a Palestinian girl on the street, blindfolded her and held her hostage, and they will never hear from her again. They will torture her, they will rape her, they will do everything to her, and finally they will kill her after removing her organs and throw her away. It is not enough that they bombed these people’s homes and killed their families, these Jewish scoundrels are not satisfied with blood. These are not human beings, they are cursed, despicable people who plague the world. They are a bunch of murderers. I wish the Nazis had eradicated them. The perpetrators of these atrocities are the scoundrels who escaped the so-called genocide. Zionists, the remnants of Nazis (Gökhan Kahraman, December 27, 2023, https://x.com/GkhnKhrmann/status/1739977391244460511?s=20).
“Such barbarism has never been seen in human history. They bulldozed the bodies buried in mass graves and dug them up with bulldozers. These cannot be human beings” (Metin Mutanoğlu, January 6, 2024, https://x.com/metinmutanoglu/status/1743525989643129262?s=20).
Power diplomacy between states includes boycott, blockade, embargo, threat of war, nuclear threat, proxy war, cold and hot war. However, as many Jewish officials, rabbis and intellectuals have pointed out, Israel alone in the world considers the Palestinian people as a whole as an enemy to be annihilated and massacre as the sole means of power diplomacy. The words of Ovadia Yosef (1920-2013), Israel’s spiritual leader, on peace with the Palestinians are enough to express this mentality: “How can you make peace with a snake?” (2000) (https://www.timesofisrael.com/5-of-ovadia-yosefs-most-controversial-quotations/).
In his speech to the UN Security Council (October 24, 2023), Secretary-General António Guterres said that the justification for Israel’s response to Hamas attacks cannot justify collective punishment of the Palestinian people, and that even wars have rules (https://www.aa.com.tr/tr/dunya/islam-isbirligi-teskilati-isgalci-guc-israilin-bm-genel-sekreteri-guterrese-yonelik-sozlu-saldirisini-kiniyoruz/3032757).
CONCLUSION: For a Just World
Some sayings give an idea of the fate of the Israeli oppression that has reached its peak in the end times:
1- You can’t stop before the water gets muddy.
2- The darkest moment of darkness is the closest moment to light.
Accordingly, we can draw three conclusions about the fate of Israeli oppression:
1. The End of Israeli Oppression
The first hearing of the lawsuit filed by the Republic of South Africa against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for violating the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide and massacring the Palestinian people since October 7, 2023 will be held on January 11-12, 2024.
Next Thursday will be a historic day, when for the first time in its history the state of Israel will stand trial at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, accused of war crimes and genocide against the Palestinian people in a case brought against it by South Africa. South Africa has presented a comprehensive case, documented in more than 80 pages, which means that for the first time Israelis feel threatened and their leaders are at risk of imprisonment and prosecution, and that the court’s rulings will take effect. The case has two dimensions: one is an urgent call to stop the war, which will lead Israel to reduce the intensity of the war, and the other is the prosecution of war criminals… The outcome of the case has now rallied all Zionist legal experts behind Israel, Israel finds itself in a real stalemate vis-à-vis South Africa; history will record South Africa rising up in defense of the Palestinian people, while Arab and Islamic governments either joined the genocidal war or remained silent (Turan Kislakci, January 8, 2024, https://x.com/turankislakci/status/1744235013493641687?s=20).
2. The End of the State of Oppression
Throughout history, Jews have been characterized by ambivalence, oscillating between extreme ambition and extreme anxiety. On the one hand, Zionist Jews dream of “Greater Israel” with the myth of Arz-e-Maw’ûd, and on the other hand, they live in fear that “Little Israel” will be destroyed. Although it is hidden, Israel has been living the nightmare of 2028 since its establishment in 1948. Because there has never been a Jewish state in history that lasted more than 80 years (https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20220613-palestinians-are-bound-to-win-why-israelis-are-prophesying-the-end-of-their-state/).
3. Longing for a Just World
In a secret speech in 2001, Binyamin Netanyahu made it clear that Israel had no other goal than to massacre the Palestinian people:
“What needs to be done is to hit them constantly, not once but several times, so painfully, that the price they pay is unbearable. They must pay such a price that they can never recover” (“Strike them not once but several times, so painfully, that the price they pay is unbearable”) (McKinney 2018). It was clear that this terrible mentality, which ultimately saw everyone but the Jews as enemies to be exterminated, would turn not only Palestine into hell, but the whole earth. Daniel Bernard, the French Ambassador to London, pointed out that Netanyahu’s secret speech in 2001 was at the same time drawing attention to the danger of World War III that awaited the world because of Israel:
“All the current troubles in the world are because of that shitty little country Israel. Why should the world be in danger of World War III because of those people?” (“All the current troubles in the world are because of that shitty little country Israel. Why should the world be in danger of World War III because of those people?”). Bernard was targeted by the Zionist lobby for this remark. However, according to another survey commissioned by the Council of Europe in October 2003, 59 percent of Europeans saw Israel as the greatest threat to world peace (Goldberg 2017: 189).
Every resistance movement of the Palestinian people against Israeli oppression, which can be counted as the First, Second and Third Intifada in recent history, has led to the awakening of consciences against Israel and the Jews in the Western world:
First Intifada (December 8, 1987-September 13, 1993)
Second Intifada (al-Aqsa Intifada) (September 28, 2000-February 8, 2005)
Aqsa Flood (October 7, 2023-)
The Aqsa Flood was a turning point in history when Israeli oppression, especially against the Palestinian people, reached its peak. With the cudgel of anti-Semitism, the Zionist regime had built a global empire of fear where no truth could be spoken against Israel and the Jews. But Israel’s October 2023 massacre was the final straw for world public opinion. Hamas did not kill any Israeli civilians other than soldiers in the Aqsa Flood, but Israel killed 23,000 innocent Palestinians, mostly civilians (women and children), with phosphorus bombs, which are forbidden to be used, until the date of this writing (January 8, 2023).
Since this persecution was based on the ideas in the refuted books of Judaism such as the Chosen Ummah and Arz-e-Maw’ûd, it was inevitable that the reaction to Israel would turn into a reaction to Judaism and Jews. Oppression could not be covered up forever, the sun could not be covered with mud forever, truths could not be obscured forever, consciences could not be silenced forever. The whole free world stood up against Israeli oppression. In world public opinion, Israel lost its legitimacy forever, Palestine gained legitimacy forever. The oppression, perseverance and resilience of the Palestinian people strengthened humanity’s longing for a peaceful and just world, and accelerated its turn towards Islam as the sole source of peace, justice and happiness.
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