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Erdogan removed the disguise from a democracy built on graves, denial and Western amnesia

Athens and Jerusalem know the file. Europe bought the disguise. Exclusive article by Sai Gal on Geopolitico.gr

Written by Sai Gal

The conflict over Jerusalem did not expose Erdogan's Turkey. It exposed the oldest lie about Turkey before him.

Turkey’s Interior Minister, Mustafa Cifci, spoke of the “liberation” of Jerusalem and prayed that it would be ruled under Turkish rule. Israel’s Defense Minister, Israel Katz, rejected this fantasy and then resorted to Ataturk as an antidote. That was the mistake. Ottomanism is the easy enemy. Kemalism is the harder lie.

Erdogan did not create the poison. He stripped it bare. He gave an Islamist voice to a state reflex that Kemalism had dressed in uniform, diplomacy and Western ways. First the Turkish primacy. Minorities to be oppressed. History to be locked away. Crimes to be denied. Responsibility to be postponed. The West confused the suit, the salute and the portrait of what the Turks call… Ataturk with moderation.

Secularity is not innocence.

Kemalism was Erdoganism in better ways.

Not as a faith. Not as a party. As a state instinct.

The continuation was not inertia. It was a state-run operating system. Schools sanctified the myth. Courts maintained silence. Diplomacy renamed denial “sensitivity.” The army ordained itself as the priesthood of democracy. Neighbors were turned into open envelopes: Greece to be contained, Cyprus to be kept under control, Armenia to be silenced, the Kurds to be managed, Israel to be used until it became inconvenient. Islamists and Kemalists did not fight the machine. They fought for its controls.

Violence crossed regimes. The Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), the late Ottoman Young Turk regime, obliterated much of the Christian map it ruled: Armenians were displaced through deportations, massacres, and death; Assyrians were crushed in Hakkari, Tur Abdin, Siirt, Diyarbakir, and Urmia; and Pontic and Asia Minor Greeks were targeted first by the late Ottoman state and then by the Turkish national movement around Mustafa Kemal. Smyrna was the burning terminus.

The Turkish Republic did not commit every crime. But it inherited the crime scene. It preserved the result, absorbed the assets, sealed the file, nationalized denial, secularized amnesia, and sold silence as modernization.

The victims changed. The method did not.

Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians, Kurds, Cypriots, Jews, Israelis. Different events, different centuries and different policies. The same grammar comes back: coercion, elimination, denial, redefinition and then the demand that the world move on.

The file of the Republic remains open. The oppression of the Kurds was not an invention of Erdoganism! It was embedded in secular democracy through suppressed uprisings, identity erasure, banned language, and Dersim. Cyprus was not occupied by nostalgics of the Ottoman Empire. It was invaded in 1974 by the Turkish Republic, its army, and a CHP prime minister from Mustafa Kemal's own party. The attire was secular. The method already existed.

The Jewish envelope dispels Israeli romanticism.

Yes, Jews were buying land under Ottoman rule. Yes, some Ottoman officials approved transactions. Yes, Constantinople was helpful. None of this was friendship. Permission is not alliance. Access is not trust. Under Abdul Hamid II, Ottoman policy restricted Jewish immigration to Palestine and the possession of land there.The policy failed because of loopholes, inconsistency and corruption, not because of Zionism or friendship.

Then came the First World War. Cemal Pasha saw Zionism and many Palestinian Jews as a threatIn 1917, the Ottoman military authorities ordered the evacuation of Tel Aviv and Jaffa. The displaced Jews were scattered, many suffering from hunger and disease., and the Yishuv, the pre-state Jewish community of Palestine, learned what Ottoman military power meant when it stopped negotiating and started ruling. Tel Aviv was evacuated before Israel learned to idealize Ankara.

NILI* belonged to the same Jewish file. It was the moment when the Jews of Ottoman Palestine chose to help Britain end Ottoman rule. Sarah Aaronson returned from Constantinople with the Armenian catastrophe on her mind and the fear that the Yishuv could be the next victim. Absalom Feinberg died trying to reach the British. Sarah was tortured by the Ottomans and chose death over betrayal. Naaman Belkind and Yosef Lisansky were hanged in Damascus. This was not the memory of a friendly empire. It was the record of a community that had learned what Ottoman rule meant when suspicion became politics.

Constantinople was a hub, not a birthplace. The Israeli Mossad was founded on December 13, 1949 under David Ben-Gurion and Reuven Shiloah. Mossad LeAliyah Bet was a different Zionist immigration organization before Israel's independence. The common name is misleading! Constantinople was a route, not a starting point. Mossad was not born in Istanbul. However, some Israeli illusions were born there.

For years, Israel confused cooperation with alliance, Kemalism with moderation, and access to Ankara with trust. The Mavi Marmara crisis in 2010 did not create the problem. It simply exposed a model that was already rotting.

Europe is still making the same mistake.

Turkey's path to EU membership has stalled because the democratic process is broken: courts, elections, opposition, local government and public space. Yet Brussels continues to treat Ankara as irreplaceable through migration, NATO, energy, trade and security. The Kemalist disguise has allowed Europe to forgive without confession. Turkey did not open its archives, did not recognize its victims, and did not change its behavior. It just seemed western enough for the graves to become negotiable. Ankara didn't need absolution. It needed a disguise. Kemalism provided it.

Athens knows the trauma. And yet it continues to resort to Ataturk

Greece should be invulnerable to the Kemalist illusion. It has the archive: Smyrna, Pontus, Cyprus, Aegean. And yet Athens continues to speak as if Ataturk can be separated from this archive.

The Venizelos-Kemal rapprochement of the 1930s was diplomacy, not absolution. The 1934 proposal for the Nobel Peace Prize to Mustafa Kemal was reconciliation after the disaster. Reconciliation cannot be turned into innocence.

Kemal's house in Thessaloniki bears the same contradiction. Greece ceded the building to Turkey in 1935 and it was later converted into the Ataturk Museum. The museum is not the issue. The absolution is: a sanctuary of amnesia within a city with layers of Greek, Jewish, Ottoman and Balkan memory.

In 2026, the trauma spoke again. In Ankara, Kyriakos Mitsotakis invoked Venizelos and Kemal. The Pontic organizations immediately recognized the amnesia and reacted.

This is the Greek version of the Israeli mistake: to perceive the Kemalist language as moderation while Ankara's demands remain. Turkey still maintains the 1995 casus belli against any Greek expansion of territorial waters beyond six nautical miles in the Aegean and continues to occupy northern Cyprus. Sovereignty, territorial integrity and an end to foreign intervention remain the dossier.

One date destroys the myth.

Turkey celebrates May 19th as the landing of Ataturk in Samsun and the beginning of the national struggle. Greece commemorates May 19th as Pontian Genocide Remembrance Day. Ankara attacks this anniversary because it threatens the sanctity of… Ataturk. The contradiction is structural: Ataturk is the founding myth of Turkey. He is also part of the Greek trauma.

Europe forgot it. Israel forgot it. The tragedy is that sometimes Athens forgets it, while Hellenism remembers it.

Pontus did not forget it.

Hagia Sophia tells the same story through stone. Erdogan turned it into a mosque again. Kemal made her a museum. Neither event clears the record. Elegance is not innocence.

The myth is not partisan. When Katz invoked Kemal, the response came from the opposition pantheon itself: Kemal Kilicdaroglu, former CHP leader, Ekrem Imamoglu, imprisoned mayor of Istanbul, and Mansur Yavas, mayor of Ankara. They responded not as liberals rejecting Ottomanism, but as guardians of the myth of democracy. Erdogan's camp wants empire. The opposition guards the Kemalist shrine. Both protect the same amnesia.

Athens and Jerusalem know the file. Europe bought the disguise. The world now has enough evidence to reject both: Erdogan's empire and Kemalist amnesia.

This is an indictment of a state tradition, not a people. A democratic Turkey would open the envelopes, not seal them. Silence cannot remain the price of normality.

*NILI was a Jewish espionage network that aided the United Kingdom in its fight against the Ottoman Empire in the Mutasarifate of Jerusalem between 1915 and 1917, during World War I. NILI was headquartered in Zichron Yaakov, with branches in Hadera and other Moshavot.

Erdogan removed the disguise from a democracy built on graves, denial and Western amnesia