JERUSALEM - Minutes after I walked into the Israeli Foreign Affairs Ministry at about 10 a.m. today [April 8], the sirens sounded in remembrance of the 6 million Jewish souls who had brutally vanished by the end of World War II. Although there is no Holocaust denial in Turkey, there is a growing and deepening perception that Israel has become just like its Nazi perpetrators — cruel and merciless in the way it treats the Palestinians. From the Islamist-based Justice and Development Party (AKP) members to the ordinary Ahmet, Mehmet, Leyla and Fatma on the street, Turks by and large consider Israel a “genocidal state.” While there may be room to educate the Turkish people on what the Holocaust really means for Israelis and the Jewish people, their current views of Israeli treatment of Palestinians makes this tragic chapter in history less important for their consideration. I have even heard from the Turkish diplomatic corps that Israel should overcome this traumatic experience in its societal psyche and stop thinking about everything from a security prism, which they see as the true cause of horrible mistakes Israel makes with its recent Gaza offensives. The more Palestinians get killed, the more support Israel loses from the Turkish public and international community, they say. To them, Israeli actions are the root of the debates challenging its legitimacy.

Although it gave me no pleasure after that two-minute silence, I nevertheless asked Yigal Palmor, the spokesman of the Israeli Foreign Affairs Ministry, what he makes of those criticisms of Israel that it has become equally or worse than its Nazi perpetrators when it comes to its treatment of Palestinians. With Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's apology over the May 2010 Mavi Marmara incident, there is an expectation that Turkey and Israel will finally find a way to normalize their relations. But it is no secret that the Erdogan government has boldly sided with the Palestinians and specifically with Hamas, and their perception of the dynamics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is very much impacted through the prism of such questions. And the way they decide to resolve their differences on these sensitive issues will actually determine as to how this new relationship between Turkey and Israel will be formed.

Yigal Palmor: Look, I will be very honest. When I hear these comparisons, I feel that they are extremely offensive because these two cases cannot have any reasonable comparison whatsoever. The situations cannot be compared no matter how critical you may be toward Israeli policies. First of all, the Jews in Germany and Europe never fought the Germans or anyone else. They were not organized in any way that enabled them to fight nor did they have the desire to fight anyone. They were a minority in all those countries and some of them were more assimilated. Others kept to themselves depending on the social and political situation in each country. What happened was that the regime in Germany became a violent racist regime with violent intentions toward many people. That does not need any proof because we all know what Nazi Germany did, and how it concentrated its racist intentions on Jews and Gypsies and carried its madness beyond propaganda to industrial and systemic extermination.

There was no war with the Jews. Jews were rounded up everywhere by the Germans. And they were either burned alive or shot en masse in forests, or concentrated in ghettos and then transported to camps. The only objective was to make them work until they died or indeed to kill them in an organized and systematic manner, which we call extermination. This has been abundantly documented by historians from different nations at different times. And in the process, we have lost approximately 6 million of our souls. We really never recovered from the war. Jewish people accounted for approximately 20 million and today we’re 13 million. So we’ve not yet really recovered. Before the war, the majority of the Jewish people resided in Eastern Europe and today the majority of Jews are in Israel and America. We are still on the way as a society — if there is any collective psychology — to understand what happened. If someone denies that, they provoke obviously very deep feelings and reactions.