This chapter discusses the Erdoğanist nation-building project, which aimed t to create its own desired citizen: Homo-Erdoğanistus. Erdoğanists openly express that they have a desired citizen creation project. However, they have a different name for it: Dindar Nesil, the pious generation. Erdoğan has consistently argued that it is the state’s duty to raise a religious generation. For at least the last decade, the AKP has been using many apparatuses of the state as well as the media, popular culture and Erdoğanist educational foundations to raise this generation, whichis not only religious but is also staunchly Erdoğanist. Homo Erdoğanistus emanates from Erdoğanism. Erdoğanist ideology and national identity, which is based on Islamism, majoritarianism, Muslim nationalism, authoritarianism, patrimonialism, personalism, the cult of Erdoğan, Ottomanist restorative nostalgia, Islamist myth-making, militarism, jihadism, glorification of martyrdom Islamist populism, civilisationism, anti-Westernism, resentfulness, vindictiveness, and anti-Western conspiracy theories. Thus, Homo Erdoğanistus citizens are under the influence of all these. Like the Kemalist relationship with Homo LASTus, Homo Erdoğanistus is the Erdoğanist regime’s favoured citizen who ascends to the critical positions of state and military bureaucracy and economic positions.

Through an analysis of the mnemonic activities of three leading civil society organizations – Baladna, ADRID, and Badil – Chapter 4 examines two collective mnemonic Nakba practices established in the wake of the Oslo Accords inside Israel and the West Bank: annual Nakba Day commemoration and collective returns to former Palestinian villages. By detailing the mnemonic symbolism and political goals of these commemorative activities, this chapter illustrates that the established forms of Nakba commemoration in the post-Oslo period articulate the urgent desire to further awareness of the Nakba among younger generations with the specific aim of encouraging the continuing struggle for the right of return (Arabic: haq al-ʻawdah). With reference to the organizations’ varying social and geographical focuses, this chapter also attests to the fact that Nakba mnemonics seek to resist ongoing marginalization while reflecting Palestinian communities’ contemporary political, economic, and cultural grievances and diverging historical mnemonic traditions. The theoretical focus on the confrontational and defensive nature of Nakba mnemonic practices does not denote that the exclusionary narrative unfolds overtly. The analyzed commemorative acts are not “sites” of a narrative collision. Nevertheless, the societal invocation of the Nakba as a “present continuous” – or an “ongoing Nakba” – does shed light on existing trends of marginalization discussed throughout the work, which hinge on a retaliatory screening out of any past suffering of the out-group.

This chapter discusses the use of popular culture and the personality cult of Erdoğan in creating the desired citizens of Erdoğanism, the Homo Erdoğanistus. Media, entertainment and pop culture are used to raise the Erdoğanist generation. One of the influential tools of doing this is to manufacture and propagate the personality cult of Erdoğan via different narratives, acts, speeches, performances, emotional instances, movies and TV dramas. All these have been informed and guided by the Erdoğanist ideology. Also, via historical movies and dramas, socio-political reality is shaped to help the Erdoğanist political cause. This chapter discuss, first, Erdoğan’s personality cult and its propagation. Then it elaborates on Erdoğanist myth-making and the rewriting of history. This is followed by an analysis of how reality has been shaped by using movies and historical TV dramas. The chapter then focuses on Erdoğan’s open and direct support for these movies and dramas.

This chapter introduces the book and its general themes. It discusses the traumas, insecurities, anxieties, fears, and victimhood and siege mentality of the Turkish nation, stemming from the agonising collapse of the Ottoman Empire. It then explains how these negative collective emotions paved the way for the Kemalist Turkish state’s desire to create a homogenous secular Turkish Sunni Muslim Turkish nation, composed of desired citizens with this ethno-religious and political identity. This nation-building and social engineering project caused other undesired ethnic, religious and political minority identities to be securitised, stigmatised, demonised and criminalised. After this discussion, the chapter moves on to elaborate on the emergence of the counter-hegemonic Erdoğanism, its own nation-building and desired citizen creation projects in addition to its own undesired citizens project. After very briefly discussing the similarities and differences between these two ideologies and regimes, the book summarises the citizenship typologies used in the book: the desired citizen of Kemalism, Homo LASTus; the desired citizen of Erdoganism, Homo Erdoğanistus and the shared tolerated citizen of both regimes, Homo Diyanetus.

The Textbook of Memory, the first of three parts that make up this work, examines the state educational systems in the post-Oslo era in Israeli-Jewish and Palestinian society. In contravention with the stipulations of 1993 Declaration of Principles, which declared that Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA) should foster mutual understanding and tolerance, Part I reveals the existence of incompatible narratives in Israeli and Palestinian textbooks based on a negation or minimization of the other’s seminal history. Beyond examining the presentation of the other’s historical narrative in the Israeli and Palestinian curricula, the two chapters that make up Part I emphasize the exclusive and ethnocentric presentation of both societies’ own foundational history. Through an analysis of the presentation of the in-group’s own history and (the existence of) the out-group’s historical narrative, Part I of this study identifies the ways in which schooling contributes to – and justifies – the continuance of conflict narratives. By outlining the existing content pertaining to the 1948 War and the Holocaust in Israeli and Palestinian textbooks, the chapters’ dual analyses illuminate the mechanisms that remain hidden from those socialized and indoctrinated by these narratives.

The post-Oslo period in which this study is situated refers both to the buoyancy of a potential reconciliation in the immediate wake of the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords and the subsequent demise of a viable two-state solution. As evidenced in this chapter, perceptions of the formulation of the Oslo Accords and the reasons for the agreement’s key successes and failures remain a subject of narrative dissent. Rather than provide the reconciliatory framework and confidence-building measures to address past grievances, as was intended through the interim nature of the 1993 agreement, the post-Oslo period therefore witnessed an ongoing irreconcilability of key narratives. This chapter offers both a holistic understanding of the political and societal impact of these historic accords and an overview of the key events that were influenced by – and affected – subsequent implementation and interpretations of the Oslo peace agreements. The events and societal trends highlighted in this chapter do not provide an exhaustive analysis of Israeli-Jewish or Palestinian politics in the post-Oslo era; however, they do seek to render formative insights into the societal underpinnings that explain the rise and persistence of exclusionary identity politics that form the main interest of this work.

Chapter 2’s analysis of fifteen textbooks published since 1993 for Israeli middle and high-school students demonstrates that an exclusive presentation of the Holocaust in the curriculum has relied on the explicit portrayal of the Holocaust as a uniquely Jewish tragedy with universal relevance to the entire Jewish nation and, therefore, pertinent to every Israeli-Jewish youth. Simultaneously, the overt minimization of other groups’ suffering as a result of Nazi genocidal policies is deemphasized through the conveyance of anachronistic historical information and the usage of numerical aggregation practices. The chapter’s identified Zionist metanarrative lays the foundations for further exclusionary manifestations, namely the minimization of Palestinians’ fate in the 1948 War. Textbooks that illustrate a teleological movement from the center(s) of Jewish destruction, “there” in the galut (Hebrew: exile), to revival “here” in Israel, advocate a post-Holocaust justification for the Zionist enterprise and, consequently, necessitate an untainted recovery from the preceding crisis. By differentiating between Zionist, Zionist-critical, and revisionist narratives of the war, the chapter’s secondary analysis illustrates that while new historiographical writings on the 1948 War have emerged, the beneficial and practical effects of the mass Palestinian exodus are stressed in textbooks. In line with this narrative, a systematic policy of expulsion is firmly cast aside and, instead, overt reminders of traditional Zionist historiography formulating a miraculous rebirth remain.

Israel’s leading newspapers – Yedioth Ahronot and Maariv – stand central in this chapter’s exploration of mass mediated Holocaust memories in Israel’s press. Through providing a systematic “cultural seismograph” of annual media content in these outlets on Memorial Day to the Holocaust and Heroism (MDHH) and, subsequently, daily Holocaust output, Chapter 6 evidences a heightened centrality of the Holocaust in the wake of the Oslo Accords. This chapter also reveals an increased contextualization of the Holocaust in line with contemporary societal and political concerns, including those emanating from the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian crisis. Consequently, even outside of MDHH’s ritual media event, the Holocaust remains a newsworthy narrative as it constitutes an effective and powerful prism through which to view the present. Bolstered by the framing of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the context of an ongoing threat, part and parcel of the identified prospective memory constitutes a mediated marginalization of the Palestinian Nakba. The final paragraphs of this chapter illustrate the effects of the presentation of an incessant genocidal threat, including at the hands of the Palestinians, by charting the mediated articulation of a superior, “constructionist” Israeli-Jewish victimhood narrative. The explicit allusion to the Nakba within Holocaust media output testifies to an awareness of its formative role among Palestinians, revealing that a minimization of the other’s history is not solely based on its active erasure; rather, the social silencing of the Palestinian Nakba involves debunking the credibility of the narrative and those that externalize it.

This chapter analyses the Diyanet’s Friday sermons delivered in the last two decades between January 2001 and July 2020. Attending Friday prayers is obligatory for Muslim adult males and, according to surveys, about 60 per cent of males attend Friday prayers. The state has always seen this as an adult education and indoctrination tool to propagate its religious doxa, the Diyanet Islam. To trace the change in the content and perspective of the sermons from pre-AKP times to the AKP 3.0 period, and also to investigate the worldview that is disseminated through these sermons, I have looked at topics and themes on ‘Love of Homeland’, ‘Turkish Nationalism, National Unity and Solidarity’, ‘Reconstructing History: From Nationalism to Islamist Populism’, ‘Disappearance of Atatürk’s Personality Cult’, ‘Conspiracies, Victimhood, and the Crusader West’, ‘Militarism and Sacrificing Life for Allah, Islam and Ummah’, andthe ‘Turkish Army’s Jihad’, Each of these are analysed in a separate section in this chapter. Each section starts with the last decade of Diyanet 1.0 (2001–2010); it then moves on to the Diyanet 2.0 period (2010–2020). The analysis shows that Diyanet Islam has significantly moved towards an Islamist, populist, Ottomanist with a restorative nostalgia and more intense resentment, ummatist, anti-Westernist, jihadist, conspiratorialist, and more militarist direction.

Post-Oslo Nakba anniversarial mediation became a means of expressing the communities’ concerns in coherence with the readerships’ cadres sociaux, forming the inverse of Israeli-dictated mediation in the wake of the 1948 War and Six-Day War in 1967. Accordingly, this chapter posits that Kul al-Arab has presented the Nakba as an interpretative framework for contemporary grievances resulting from Palestinians’ status as an involuntary minority in Israel. Inside the West Bank, application of the Nakba as an interpretative framework and, simultaneously, an analogical tool testifies to the mediated expression of what Dennis McQuail defined as “national problems” and “national goals.” Through repeated usage of previously censored symbolic terminology, the readership of the semi-independent Al-Quds and the PA’s mouthpiece, Al-Hayat al-Jadida, is admonished to adhere to these national objectives, which call for an end to “the permanent Nakba.” Invocation of the so-called fixed national principles is equally meant to challenge the main actor deemed responsible for their suspension: Israel. The chapter’s identified mediated convergence of the Holocaust and the Nakba testifies to the actualization of the previously-discussed defensive victimhood theory; the fallacious negation of the former’s historical veracity is symptomatic of its deemed discursive incompatibility with the Palestinian narrative. Incongruously, the Holocaust has also been conjured within Nakba media output as a means of highlighting the depths of Palestinian suffering at the hands of the Israelis. Forming a powerful realm of collective social mobilization against “the Zionist entity,” Nakba mediated output thus, at times, makes use of the most tendentious charge to debunk the Israeli aggressor and the perceived “Zionist colonial project”: the execution of a Palestinian Holocaust.