Istanbul police shield Jews attacked en route to Chanukah celebration

Pro-Palestinian demonstrators shouted slurs against “Zionists” outside the synagogue.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Turkish police intervened in Istanbul on Sunday evening to protect a small group of Jews who were confronted while walking to a Chanukah celebration at a local synagogue.

Video posted online from the final night of the holiday shows several dozen men holding Palestinian flags gathered near the Neve Shalom Synagogue as attendees arrived for a scheduled candle-lighting ceremony.

Protesters can be heard shouting, “Zionists, leave the country,” and “You can’t celebrate!” before police officers pushed them away from the entrance and established a secured perimeter in front of the synagogue.

One demonstrator charged, “They are celebrating the occupation of Jerusalem under [the cover of] Chanukah celebrations.”

In the footage, a man is seen being forced from the scene by two individuals who appear to be plainclothes security personnel as he shouted that “they are making Zionist propaganda.”

A protester identified as Hakan Begdilli later complained on X that police and special operations officers “are protecting the Zionist killers as if they were a human shield,” adding that “even filming a video from the opposite sidewalk is prohibited.”

Blaming local Jews for Israeli military actions taking place hundreds or thousands of miles away is a classic form of antisemitism – one that has surged worldwide since the Hamas-led invasion of Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, in which terrorists massacred, raped, and burned nearly 1,200 people, triggering the war in Gaza.

Since then, antisemitic rhetoric has increasingly entered the mainstream in Turkey.

Newspapers have called for revoking the citizenship of Turkish Jews, using language that “portrays all Turkish Jews as natural collaborators with the State of Israel,” according to a June report by the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security (JISS).

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has long demonized Israel, equating it with Nazi Germany even before the war.

Since Oct. 7, his rhetoric has intensified. Rather than condemning the massacre, Erdoğan defended it as legitimate “resistance” to Israeli “occupation,” while Ankara continues to host Hamas leaders in luxury accommodations.

The JISS report concluded that “while in the early 1920s, antisemitism was confined to the margins of society, today, driven by the rise of political Islam and Erdoğan’s open support for Hamas, it has become a widespread, unapologetic, sociological phenomenon.”