From Tahrir to Taksim

There’s an old Israeli saying: “A guest passing through sees every problem.” While I don’t know how accurate that expression is, I do know that I could foresee the recent riots in Turkey during my last visit there, just a few months ago. Even then I heard plenty of people — many, many people — who had no qualms about calling Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan a “dictator.” Those same people said that no effort should be spared to bring him down.

Statements like these made a deep impression on me because I was so surprised to hear them. Until just a few months ago, before Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s apology and reconciliation with Erdogan, the average Israeli who followed TV news about Turkey or read about it in the newspaper lived under the impression that Turkey as a whole, or at least the bulk of Turkey, is becoming something like Iran. The overall feeling was that the country spoke with one voice, the resolute voice of Prime Minister Erdogan. Ever since his Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in 2002, Israelis felt that Turkey was undergoing a dramatic policy shift. Local television stations substantiated this. It looked like Turkey was transforming from a tolerant, enlightened, Western nation; ''an island of sanity in the Middle East,'' into something very different and menacing; a country which was doing all it could to draw closer to the Arab League, Iran or the Muslim Brotherhood.

Tensions between Israel and Turkey intensified, and statements made by Erdogan and his foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, sounded rather unpleasant, and rightfully so. The Israeli public could only conclude that these statements represented the conventional wisdom of most of the Turkish people, who had made a U-turn in the direction of contemporary Islam and were casting off a bold friendship with its one regional ally, Israel.

Apparently, other voices coming out of Turkey were inaudible, because the media has one very deceptive characteristic: It usually focuses and “zooms in,” if you will, on the official line as stated by the leadership (as it does with Iran, for example), or on violent demonstrations and other events considered camera friendly. The other voices — the silent majority, which is not quite so vociferous in expressing positions counter to Erdogan’s official policy — have no mouthpiece. (By the way, we are talking about the same press which, just one day after the riots in Turkey last weekend [May 31], was quick to post banner headlines about the “Turkish Spring,” covering the entire space above the fold.)