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Istanbul Synagogue Bombings: In 1998, after two years reporting from Sarajevo, Bosnia, I moved to Istanbul. The basis of the move was my belief, based on pure speculation, that Istanbul would be an ideal base for freelancing in a slightly larger region than just the Balkans, but also including Turkey itself, and former Soviet Central Asia. I also had a close Turkish friend from my days reporting in Sarajevo, the Turkish television reporter, Serif Turgut, who was convinced that any western reporter with half a brain could find miraculous success by moving to what she rightly considered the crossroads of some of the most journalistically compelling regions in the world.
If you've never been, Istanbul is one of the most glorious cities in the world. While I dashed around Istanbul those first few weeks meeting with contacts of contacts and Turkish think tank analysts and journalists and while searching for an apartment, I had the occasion to become acquainted with Istanbul's Jewish community and its unofficial head, Dr. Isak Alaton. As I remember, the New York-based conflict resolution specialist David Phillips had come through my Istanbul hotel and he arranged a meeting for me with Alaton, one of the city's most successful businessmen (Alaton's Alarco holding company sells air conditioners throughout Turkey and the Middle East).
Isak Alaton is an extremely kind person, and he made an effort to help me meet people he thought could be useful to an American reporter trying to understand Turkey, from academics to journalists to a kind of human fixer I could call on a cell phone on short notice. Dr. Alaton also invited me to attend a synagogue event one evening to be introduced to some of Istanbul's Jewish community. On the night I was to attend, he had a driver pick me up, and take me to the location of the synagogue, which was unmarked, and heavily secured and guarded. I found that a little odd since I had never encountered the slightest bit of anti-Semitism among Turks, and in fact, understood that Turkey and Israel had a quietly quite cooperative relationship, in particular, their militaries and business elites. During the synagogue evening, Isak Alaton spoke and then, invited me to speak to the assembled group of a few hundred people. I hardly could bring myself to say more than hello, and as I remember, Dr. Alaton seemed a bit disappointed.
Nevertheless, on the occasions I had to speak with Dr. Alaton or go to the synagogue or to a lovely residential neighborhood called Nishantishi to visit the offices of the Istanbul Jewish newspaper and have tea with the editors, I always felt like Istanbul's Jewish community was evidence of something I clung hard to while covering the post war in Bosnia: that, in this case, a Jewish minority could prosper in an Islamic country, and more generally, that people of different ethnicities can live side by side (even in the Levant), and appreciate and quietly respect each other. And in the sometimes chaotic environment of Istanbul, with its nearly 15 million people, the Jews of Istanbul gave me a sense of connection and welcome.
In the end, I didn't stay long in Istanbul, just four months. Massacres occurred in Kosovo that spring, and my connections to the Balkans pulled me back to report. CBS sent me back a satellite phone, and I hopped a charter flight to Skopje, Macedonia. And while I loved Istanbul, as a journalist, I was relieved to be back in the Balkans in a conflict environment where reporting the news was sadly much easier than in Turkey's more stable environment.
I am devastated to see news today of the car bombings at two Istanbul synagogues that have killed 20 people and wounded 300, many Muslim guards hired to protect the synagogues. This is an alarming and grim development in a few weeks filled with increasingly grim and alarming news from the neighborhood. Personally, I could not be more shocked if it happened in Paris or Cleveland.
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I don't know enough to analyze what criminals would have committed these bombings, but the Turks I have spoken to say it was utterly larger and more sophisticated than any terrorism Turkey has seen before from its own leftist, Islamist and Kurdish-Pkk groups.
Istanbul is the ultimate cosmopolitan city. Turks are by and large radically opposed to the idea of mixing mosque and state, they are hostile to Islamist militant groups, their intellectual elite is largely secular, and their political and economic aspirations are overwhelmingly westward, towards greater integration with the EU. But most of all, Turks historically have valued their country's relationship with the United States.
Through Serif and other contacts from Turkey, it has been extremely distressing over the past year and a half to hear from Turks' perspective how they feel the US's war on terror is a war against Muslims, and to hear how extremely insulted, humiliated, and taken for granted they have been made to feel by George W. Bush, his administration's utterly mistaken assumption that Turks would just go along with the war in Iraq despite their stated concerns, and the just plain clumsy and incompetent diplomacy of Team Bush. Turks have historically loved the U.S., but they do not like George Bush's America. And they also, for that matter, do not like Ariel Sharon's Israel.
Turks were overwhelmingly opposed to the US war in Iraq, and they perceive many facets of the US war on terror with deep suspicion, some of it, in my view, unfounded. Clearly, a US war against Muslims would look a whole lot different than the way the war on terror has played out. But nevertheless, perception is important. And if the U.S. can't keep Turkey and Turks on its side during the war on terrorism, then the war is lost. There are only so many candidates for the "moderate, democratic, modern" Islamic states that the U.S. insists are possible, indeed which at one time it aspired to create in post-Saddam Iraq. Turkey is in my view by far the most promising of all potential candidates, imperfect, but hugely promising. It is the ultimate bellweather Islamic state for the U.S. to gauge attitudes. More so, I believe, than Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan, or Malaysia. If Turkey is lost to the U.S., then the war is totally lost.
In fact, from talking with Serif after this bombing, it is clear that Turks' first reaction to the synagogue bombings was that this was an attack *against Turkey.* But there is no denying that the resentment built up against George W. Bush and the U.S. over the past three years is real, and that the U.S. cannot take Turkey's support for granted.
Follow Up: Just spoke to my Turkish friend in Istanbul, journalist Serif Turgut. Her observations?
*These are our Jews. 100% of people here in Turkey feel like this was an attack on Turkey, not just on the Turkish Jewish community.
*We know terrorism. But this was the largest terrorist attack on the Istanbul city center in history.
*Five of the 21 killed are Jewish. The others are Muslim. From the wounded people, 60 are Jewish, the rest is Muslim. People - Jewish Muslim - are sleeping next to each other in the hospitals.
*There is no anti-Jewish sentiment after these attacks. Some of the academics and others who have provided analyses on the news after these attacks do criticize the Middle East policy and the Iraq policy.
*Diplomat Richard Holbrooke, who helped negotiate the Dayton Peace agreements that ended the Bosnian war, was recently quoted in Turkish media, saying that during the Clinton administration, polls showed that 65% of Turks strongly liked America. Now, during Bush, fewer than 10% of Turks say they like America. How much has changed in 2 1/2 years.
*After Saturday's car bomb attacks, one side in Turkey is immediately blaming al Qaeda. They were apparently very large car bombing attacks. (whether they were remote control explosions or cars driven into the two synagogues is not clear). There is much sense that they were too large and too sophisticated to be the work of Turkish groups. Some also speculate that "foreign intelligence" is responsible -- e.g. Iran, Iraq, or other intelligence group. Serif says that Turks have seen a lot of Kurdish/PKK and leftist terrorism in Istanbul, but never anything as powerful as this. In general she says, Islamist groups in Turkey have attacked other Islamists or people from their own group, not Turkish secularists or Jews or outsiders.