Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has sharply criticized what he described as "hostility towards Sharia," the religious law that is part of the Islamic tradition, equating it with hostility towards Islam.
Well, the Zionist movement and the plan to create a Jewish state in Palestine dates back another 50 years – a time when Palestine was a part of the Ottoman Empire, so if he was familiar with it I’m sure he had some opinion.
The movement was very different before Israel was a state. There were militant branches, but it was not an overall militant movement and the idea of the displacement, let alone the apartheid and eventual genocide of Palestinians was far from universal. And really, in the 1930s, the focus was more getting as many Jews out of Europe as possible.
EDIT: FWIW, I just found this-
Now in his mid-twenties, Mustafa Kemal was obsessed with the idea of Westernizing the Ottoman Empire. While in Palestine, he went to Jerusalem in order to seek the counsel of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda. Revealed in his 2011 biography of Mustafa Kemal, Princeton scholar M. Sukru Hanioglu writes that the young officer hoped to understand from Ben-Yehuda how he had managed to reinvent the Hebrew language after millennia of disuse and make it a cornerstone of Zionist culture. Mustafa Kemal would mimic this feat in 1928 by changing the Turkish alphabet from Arabic to Latin characters. Though we know little of his attitude towards the Zionist project, Mustafa Kemal’s encounter with Ben-Yehuda shows that he was acutely aware of the tiny Jewish renaissance that was taking place in Palestine, and he may have seen it as a validation of the nationalist enterprise he would launch several years later.
Good find. Your Google skills are better than mine… or maybe I just gave up too soon.
I did find on Wikipedia, though, that the original Zionist plans were for a secular state with majority Jewish citizens, so yeah, definitely not what we have today.
Not really surprising since Moses Hess was a socialist Jew who inspired both Karl Marx’s ideas on communism and Theodore Herzl’s ideas on Zionism. Hess did become religious later in life, but when he was at his peak, he was inspired by the Jewish philosopher Spinoza (who was very close to an atheist) and Renaissance humanists. I have read that Herzl was an atheist too, but I’ve never tried to confirm it. I do know that, as you said, his vision of Israel was of a secular state and his impetus was mostly “Jews need to get the fuck out of Europe before we’re all killed.” And he was pretty much right, unfortunately.
Well, the Zionist movement and the plan to create a Jewish state in Palestine dates back another 50 years – a time when Palestine was a part of the Ottoman Empire, so if he was familiar with it I’m sure he had some opinion.
The movement was very different before Israel was a state. There were militant branches, but it was not an overall militant movement and the idea of the displacement, let alone the apartheid and eventual genocide of Palestinians was far from universal. And really, in the 1930s, the focus was more getting as many Jews out of Europe as possible.
EDIT: FWIW, I just found this-
https://www.thetower.org/article/ataturk-ben-gurion-and-turkeys-road-not-taken/
So it sounds like he was at least somewhat sympathetic to some Zionist ideas in the 1930s.
Good find. Your Google skills are better than mine… or maybe I just gave up too soon.
I did find on Wikipedia, though, that the original Zionist plans were for a secular state with majority Jewish citizens, so yeah, definitely not what we have today.
Not really surprising since Moses Hess was a socialist Jew who inspired both Karl Marx’s ideas on communism and Theodore Herzl’s ideas on Zionism. Hess did become religious later in life, but when he was at his peak, he was inspired by the Jewish philosopher Spinoza (who was very close to an atheist) and Renaissance humanists. I have read that Herzl was an atheist too, but I’ve never tried to confirm it. I do know that, as you said, his vision of Israel was of a secular state and his impetus was mostly “Jews need to get the fuck out of Europe before we’re all killed.” And he was pretty much right, unfortunately.