This chapter summarises and discusses the findings of the book. It elaborates on how the hegemony of the Young Turks (and later Kemalist Republicans) and the Erdoğanist counter-hegemony in Turkey use very similar methods to build their nation, the same tools for social engineering, and the same procedures for the production of citizenship to establish and consolidate their respective hegemonies. The two opposing but influential political ideologies of modern Turkey have sometimes even used the same discourse, albeit for different purposes. There is also a significant degree of overlap between their undesired citizen categories. These are two different regimes relying on two different ideologies, but both of them target, otherise, and even demonise (mostly) the same groups, including Kurdish nationalists, Alevis, non-Muslims, leftists, liberals and practising Muslims who do not completely support the regimes. In addition to desired and undesired citizen typologies, Kemalism and Erdoğanism also have a liminal citizenship category, identity and typology: tolerated citizens (Homo Diyanetus). The chapter also summarises the innovations and contributions of the book, highlights its limitations and discusses potential future studied on the topic. Lastly, the chapter looks at the future of Erdoğan's nation.

Section II of this volume centers on the collective mnemonic invocation of the two watersheds under review. The focus in this part lies on national memorial days – Yawm al-Nakbah (Arabic: Nakba day) and Yom ha-Shoah (Hebrew: Holocaust day) – and on places of commemoration. Through differentiating between non-physical and physical mnemonic acts, the two chapters that make up this part testify to the different mnemonics that have arisen as a result of the diverging political reality that exists in both societies under review. Within the 1948 borders, access to former Palestinian villages has meant that Nakba commemorations encompass physical mnemonics that center on former Palestinians localities, whereas restrictions on Palestinian movement into Israel have meant that non-site-specific commemorative acts dominate in the West Bank. The existing political circumstances have created a further disparity in the official nature of the Israeli and Palestinian institutes and organizations involved in commemoration. In the Israeli context, the three main Holocaust memorial institutes under examination in Israel, namely Yad Vashem, Lohamei Hagetaot, and Yad Mordechai, conform with the official state narrative. Conversely, the absence of Palestinian governance in Palestinian society inside the 1948 borders and post-Oslo hostility toward the PA has meant that an overt state-sanctioned narrative has largely remained absent in Nakba commemorations, leading civil society organizations on both sides of the Green Line to adopt a dominant role in mnemonics.

This chapter analyses the Kemalism’s tolerated citizen creation project via the state’s powerful Presidency of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) that controls all mosques and employs all imams and preachers in Turkey. Kemalism wanted to keep Islam under its strict control to prevent its potential use for opposition. Thus, it made it illegal to have private mosques or to function as a non-state employer of imams. However, the Kemalist state also wanted to use Islam as a helping hand to build the nation based on the majority’s sectarian as well as ethnic identity. Thus, it worked to create a secularist and Turkish nationalism-friendly Islam –what I call ‘Diyanet Islam’. Before AKP came to power there were about 75,000 mosques in Turkey. The Diyanet used these mosques as adult education and indoctrination centres by politically instrumentalising weekly Friday sermons that are attended by about 60 per cent of the nation’s adult males. After elaborating on and defining Diyanet Islam, the chapter proceeds to discuss the Kemalist construction of a tolerated citizen category that I call ‘Homo Diyanetus’. Homo Diyanetus refers to a practising Sunni Muslim citizen of Turkey who follows the state manufactured Diyanet Islam, reveres the state and Atatürk, is Turkish nationalist, militarist and is definitely not a member or participant of any other religious group, brotherhood or movement.

Chapter 3 examines the development of the first Palestinian curriculum in the aftermath of the establishment of the first Palestinian Ministry of Education in 1994. A close reading of Palestinian educational plans’ content and the elucidation provided by officials reveals that the incorporation of the 1948 War and its catastrophic effects on Palestinian society – highlighted in the continual usage of the term al-Nakba – were considered crucial to furthering national identification and a historical consciousness among Palestinians. Nevertheless, this chapter reveals that the conservative educational outlooks favored by the Palestinian Ministry of Education coupled with the influence of Israeli lobbying efforts led to the production of educational content that lacks an in-depth historical analysis of the 1948 War and the mass displacement that ensued. Notwithstanding the existence of a tepid Nakba narrative, the latter part of this chapter illustrates that the Nakba’s societal significance can be found in the overt and intentional omission of the Holocaust in the Palestinian curriculum. Reactionary educational policies in the domestic sphere are deemed a materialization of Zygmunt Bauman’s victimhood politicization – a quid pro quo, which, as a result of Israeli educational and societal treatment of the Nakba, brings about a retributive omission of “their narrative.”

The third part to this work employs a body of scholarly literature to both highlight the presence of the past in mass mediation and the reciprocal nature between mass media and the society it serves. By focusing on the existence of “mediated memories” in Israeli and Palestinian mass media, Scoop on the Past illustrates the usage of the past as a prospective memory in line with the society’s contemporary concerns. Both in Israeli-Jewish society and in Palestinian society, traditional forms of mass media are analyzed that in the period under review have enjoyed the largest readership and circulation and, consequently, constitute the most important cadres sociaux. An historical analysis of media content produced on the respective memorial days – Yom ha-Shoah and Yawm al-Nakbah – highlights the construction and maintenance of a national collective memory vis-à-vis these historical events. The primary focus on anniversary journalism is accompanied by a secondary analysis on the construction of daily Nakba and Holocaust media memories. In this context, semi-structured interviews held with Palestinian and Israeli journalists on their role as memory agents testify to the desire and need to include their societies’ respective pasts in routine media so as to continually evoke the past and its contemporary meaning.

The conclusion provides a comprehensive overview of the mnemonic plasticity and the societal usages of exclusionary in the two case studies under review. The conclusion emphasizes the different political frameworks that have driven the rise and perpetuation of the exclusionary narratives in Israeli-Jewish and Palestinian society within the mnemonic realms reviewed while also highlighting the context-specific manifestations of the ensuing denial practices. Although this work does not propose a method of fusing the two foundational narratives or suggest ways in which the identified exclusionary narratives can be challenged and modified, the conclusion does set forth the practical and theoretical applications of this work, both in the Israeli-Palestinian arena and beyond. In addition to offering a practical applicability to non-regional scholarship and cross-cultural initiatives, it is the intent of this work to provide fertile ground for future scholarship on Israeli-Jewish and Palestinian mnemonic discourse in an effort to challenge the idealization of the past’s invocation and, instead, expose its neurasthenic and disabling effects in “service of the nation.” Concluding remarks to A Battlefield of Memory thus also address existing scholarly voids and potential future application of this work as a result of the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian crisis.

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.