Palestine today is no longer merely a topic of foreign policy or a regional conflict; it has become a litmus test for the moral conscience of our era—an ordeal that measures both individual and collective awareness. The Earth itself has turned into a testing ground where societies endowed with such awareness are revealed and distinguished. The genocide in Gaza, to which we have been condemned to bear witness, along with the tragic and deeply traumatic images spreading across the world, are now etched into humanity’s collective memory. In European cities, the outrage provoked by the atrocities in Gaza has driven thousands into the streets: university students occupying lecture halls in Berlin, Palestinian flags raised before the Sorbonne in Paris, tens of thousands marching toward Parliament in London, the mourning sirens that sounded for the first time since World War II in Guernica, Spain, and waves of academic boycotts and solidarity declarations emerging from every corner of the world of culture and the arts. All of these show that Palestine is no longer perceived merely as a “geography,” but as a universal question of ethics, justice, and conscience. In Türkiye, however, although the same images, information, and reports fill television screens and social media feeds, we regrettably do not observe a comparable level of collective response. Certainly, there are individual sensitivities and personal reactions—people grow angry in their private spheres, brief outbursts of rage flare up on social media, circles of prayer form in mosque courtyards. Yet none of these evolve into the kind of mass mobilization witnessed in Western squares.
This silence is not mere indifference; it is a fragmented, self-contained noise—a meaningless, ineffective echo that, instead of awakening consciousness, turns into a chaos of discomfort. The failure of society as a whole to exhibit the expected reflex and its apathy toward all that is happening brings to the surface several questions that must be examined at a deeper level: From where does this indifference draw its strength? Why does Turkish society not engage in a confrontation similar to that seen in the West? Why has silence become such a powerful choice for the Turkish public? I believe that the answers lie within a deterministic triangle connecting collective memory, individual depoliticization, and the instrumental language of politics. Judith Butler’s concept of “grievable lives,” introduced in her 2009 book Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?, offers a crucial point of reflection. Butler examines the inequality produced when political and social orders render certain deaths, massacres, and genocides visible and worthy of mourning, while ignoring the loss of others. Through the notion of “grievable lives,” she explores which lives the modern world deems worthy of grief and which it deems disposable, thereby exposing the moral maps and motivational boundaries of modern societies in accordance with their levels of sensitivity and awareness. I am convinced that this concept can also help explain why, in Türkiye, reactions to the atrocities in Gaza remain scattered, fragmented, and confined to narrower political circles.
One of the primary reasons behind the collective silence toward Palestine in Türkiye is the fatigue of social memory. In the 1980s and 1990s, the Palestinian struggle for freedom led by Yasser Arafat’s PLO stood out as one of the rare causes around which different ideological camps in Türkiye could unite under a shared sense of moral solidarity. During university boycotts, street demonstrations organized by civil society groups of various political leanings, and large-scale aid campaigns, the Palestinian flag functioned not merely as a symbol of solidarity, but as an emblem of social identity and collective resistance.
In that period, Palestine was not viewed as the tragedy of a distant geography—or, as the leader of a secular nationalist party once put it, “the problem of Arab Palestinians.” Rather, it was perceived as a cause parallel to Türkiye’s own existential struggle: a universal human concern and a shared field of moral consciousness.
Over the years, however, this memory has been eroded by the constant repetition of trauma, giving rise, paradoxically, to a numbing “habit” that dulls sensitivity. Each new report of an attack from Gaza, each new image of bombardment, has ceased to shock the public; instead, they are perceived as recurring, almost routine events within a state of heavy desensitization. As Judith Butler has noted, the memory fatigue produced by continual exposure to trauma eventually weakens one’s ability to see, to make sense, and to respond.
At the heart of this fatigue lies the weight of everyday life. Economic crisis, the pressure of inflation, the moral decay and social stagnation within public life, the insecurity bred by unemployment, and the uncertainties surrounding the future—all these factors make it increasingly difficult for broad segments of Turkish society to dedicate collective energy to a global cause like Palestine while struggling to manage their daily hardships. In other words, the inability of social conscience to compete with the urgency of personal survival and livelihood has become one of the key reasons for this scattered and ineffective public response.
We must also acknowledge the role of a highly politicized media environment. While mainstream media outlets in Europe have carried news about Palestine to their front pages and used the issue to question government policies, most of the Turkish media treats it superficially, framed within the boundaries set by political discourse. This prevents society from grasping the issue in its full moral and humanitarian depth. The reduction of Palestine, within the daily media cycle, to a headline that merely generates “momentary anger” stands as one of the major obstacles to transforming the issue into a lasting moral mobilization.
The deeper meaning behind the global social reactions to the genocide in Palestine and to other tragedies around the world is not simply about expressing outrage at a foreign policy event. The awareness that underlies such social reaction endows individuals not only with the consciousness of being part of a mass movement grounded in universal human values, but also with the moral responsibility to question their own society’s values. This is a profoundly ethical and human act.
In Türkiye, however, Palestine has remained an issue through which individuals experience but cannot express their inner anger—an anger suppressed beneath daily anxieties. As a result, our collective memory remains alive yet weary; our sensitivity to global suffering persists, yet takes on a passive form that rarely translates into action.
In short, within the Turkish social sphere, the Palestinian question has become a kind of “familiar pain.” It continues to occupy a place in individual conscience but fails to evolve into collective action. At the heart of this silence lies the convergence of exhausted memory and the burden of daily struggle. I am describing a society that remembers but cannot act, that feels but cannot organize—a passive social structure trapped between awareness and inertia.
Another major reason for the collective silence toward Palestine in Türkiye is the gradual withdrawal of individuals from being political subjects. Across wide segments of society, political consciousness has become confined to a passive state of observation rather than leading to active engagement. The daily rhythm of social media accelerates this process even further. People share content about Palestine in waves of intense emotion lasting a few hours—forwarding photos and videos from media outlets, expressing outrage, and experiencing an inner sense of catharsis. Yet they just as quickly move on to other topics; anger evaporates, and that brief ethical catharsis gives way to the ordinary flow of daily life.
This behavioral sequence is crucial because it reveals that, for many individuals in Türkiye, the Palestinian question remains a moral burden—but one that fails to translate into lasting political subjectivity. On the other hand, I must note, even if they do not represent a major social current, there are also individuals in our society who adopt a quasi-Futurist perspective reminiscent of Marinetti—those who, disturbingly, see war as a sacred act and believe that “some children are born to die.”
At precisely this point, Hannah Arendt’s theory of the public realm offers an illuminating lens. For Arendt, the public realm is the sphere where people come together to think, deliberate, and act upon shared concerns. In Türkiye, however, this realm has steadily contracted, replaced by the rapid, wide-reaching, yet fleeting immediacy of digital platforms—spaces that feed on the “moment.” For the contemporary individual, social media posts now nearly substitute for public action. Yet it is impossible to say that this digital visibility generates genuine political participation. On the contrary, it fosters a state of spectatorship. People watch, comment on, and share what happens in Palestine—but no collective action emerges from this spectatorship. As a result, the individual transforms from an engaged citizen or conscious global participant into a passive observer of a global tragedy.
It is precisely here that Judith Butler’s notion of grievable lives once again comes to mind. In Türkiye, individuals respond with sorrow to the deaths of Palestinian children, yet this grief rarely extends beyond the confines of social media posts. Mourning remains trapped within inner emotion; it fails to evolve into a practice of public solidarity. Yet, as Butler reminds us, to deem a life “grievable” is to perceive that life as intertwined with our own existence. In Türkiye, this emotional connection is indeed established—but since it does not mature into a sustained sense of universal responsibility, it remains unresolved and fragmentary, never attaining a collective form.
The roots of this depoliticization lie not only in the hegemony that social media culture exerts over moral sensitivity and global awareness. There also exists a profound sense of resignation, an incurable submission, and a deep crisis of trust. As people increasingly believe that their voices carry no weight in politics or society, they succumb to the feeling that reacting is futile.
Noam Chomsky’s concept of “spectator democracy,” which he framed as a warning, perfectly corresponds to the social landscape we observe in Türkiye today. For democracy is meaningful only when citizens act as active subjects not merely at the ballot box, but in everyday life as well. In Türkiye, however, the individual has turned into a spectator—someone who watches the performances staged by political actors rather than participating in them. The same role emerges in relation to the Palestinian question. There is anger, mourning, and pain—but no citizenly persistence, no practice of universal responsibility that steps onto the stage and takes the floor. The sociological portrait that results is that of a sensitive yet passive, angry yet motionless, informed yet silent mass. This profile constitutes one of the central links in the chain of collective silence. In Türkiye, this is precisely why the Palestinian issue remains a deep wound in the minds of conscientious individuals while its echo in the public sphere remains faint.
Politics itself stands out as one of the most critical dimensions of Türkiye’s limited reaction to the Palestinian issue. For one of the principal forces that nourishes—or dulls—a society’s moral sensitivity is the political language it is exposed to. Today, compared to most governments worldwide, the Turkish administration stands out as one of the few that most forcefully articulates the tragedy in Palestine on the international stage, takes notable initiatives to end it, develops policies toward this aim, and publicly declares its support for the oppressed Palestinian people. I deliberately exclude from this discussion the scope and nature of the diplomatic channels and limited commercial activities that continue with Israel—perhaps necessarily so in certain domains—since those belong to another dimension of debate concerning realpolitik and international dynamics.
Yet the seemingly forceful and reactive rhetoric displayed at the governmental level has not, except within certain political circles, transformed into a large-scale social movement or organized mass mobilization. Among the nations of the world, one might expect Turkish society to be the most vocal in its defense of Palestine and to manifest the broadest, most pluralistic reaction across the ideological spectrum. However, in practice, it is primarily the socio-political groups aligned with the ideology of political Islam that have embraced the Palestinian cause in an organized and consistent manner.
Undoubtedly, the sensitivity shown by this socio-political bloc is significant for keeping the genocide in Gaza on Türkiye’s agenda and ensuring that these atrocities remain visible. Yet in the independence, isolation, and monopolization of the Palestinian issue by this particular ideological camp—which should, by its very nature, embody a universal and collective sensitivity—lies a problem that deeply concerns the rest of society. For I believe that the conscious solitude of the political Islamist segment is not merely a passive condition but the result of an active motivation.
And this motivational, actional, and reactional foundation underlying their self-isolation cannot be explained solely by the diffuse focus or lack of awareness within the broader social consciousness that I have previously described as rooted in social and economic strain. One of the key reasons why a collective reactive momentum has failed to emerge in Türkiye is that the politics of Palestine has been confined to a specific ideology—compressed into the intellectual monopoly of a single worldview.
While political Islam often attributes the relative indifference of more secular or national segments of Turkish society to the fact that the victims of the genocide are “Muslim,” and uses this argument to adopt a moralizing and accusatory tone toward those it deems insensitive, we might ask: does the ideological and political posture represented by Hamas—which has effectively governed the Gaza Strip since 2007 as a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood—also provide an emotional motivation for political Islam’s conscious isolation and self-contained stance on the Palestinian issue?
To put it differently, could it be that political Islam in Türkiye, particularly since Hamas’s rise to power in Gaza in 2007, has come to treat the Palestinian resistance as a vehicle for what Abraham Harold Maslow, in the field of psychology, termed “self-actualization”? Would it be misguided to suggest that political Islam has, to some extent, instrumentalized the politics of Palestinian resistance as part of its own existential process of self-realization?
I must underline this point carefully: the religion, language, or ethnicity of a people subjected to genocide is irrelevant. Just as in the case of the Uyghur population in East Turkestan, who have been subjected to a silent genocide by the Chinese government, their primary identity is not Turkish, but human.
However, in the specific case of Palestine, I believe that one of the reasons we have failed to generate a comprehensive social response—one that could unite all intellectual circles and encompass individuals from divergent political backgrounds—lies in the limiting and exclusionary sharpness of the reactionary discourse adopted by political Islamist ideology. This discourse, adorned with its own terminology, jargon, and symbols, constrains the way this oppression is embraced. I believe that such a mode of reaction, which ought to rest on universal sensitivity, instead tends to Islamize the Palestinian issue through a theocratic approach within the political sphere.
Moreover, I must point out that the close relationship between this ideological camp and the current ruling party has created among other segments of society a perception of an organic link—an identification of the “Palestinian cause” with the very existential identity of the ruling party. Thus, I wish to draw attention to a deeply flawed subconscious assumption prevalent within Turkish society: the idea that to speak out for Palestine, or to develop a discourse about Gaza, would somehow be perceived as aligning oneself with the government.
In this sense, one of the major obstacles to broader public ownership of the Palestinian cause in Türkiye is the monopolization of the issue by political Islam—the transformation of the Palestinian struggle into an inward-looking, self-enclosed, and ideologically driven narrative that serves as an existential doctrine rather than a universal human cause.
If we consider the broader global context, political Islam—whose ontological legitimacy within the increasingly secularized Islamic world has begun to wane (and, according to some, has already been lost)—has, in the case of Palestine, exhibited a policy of isolation and monopolization. But does the psychological reaction this stance provokes in other sectors of society have any legitimate basis? Absolutely not.
Still, it would be reductive to attribute the collective silence in Türkiye solely to the politically possessive and consciously isolated rhetoric of political Islam. For I must also note that large segments of society have developed a conscious silence toward the issue of Palestine precisely because they view the government’s support for Palestine as a reason for detachment. Indeed, this stance is not merely a form of political distancing—it amounts to mortgaging one’s individual conscience to the opposition against power itself.
The issue of public sensitivity toward Palestine, which is the main subject of this essay, must be examined separately from the question of whether the government’s position on Palestine is genuine or politically motivated. My concern here is not with the praxis of realpolitik but with the position of collective social consciousness vis-à-vis Palestine.
When the government, sincere or not, raises its voice for Palestine—taking a side and making itself visible in the international arena—the decision of opposition circles to remain silent, interpreting such gestures merely as “authoritarian propaganda,” effectively imprisons a universal human tragedy within the narrow confines of domestic political rivalry. It amounts to a denial of universal moral consciousness.
It is precisely at this point that Judith Butler’s concept of grievable lives must be recalled once again. As Butler emphasizes, what determines whether a life is grievable should not be political preference, but the bare truth of being human. Yet in Türkiye, certain socio-political circles that ignore the suffering of the Palestinian people for the sake of consolidating their oppositional stance fail to realize that, in doing so, they inadvertently serve the same outcome as the political Islamist discourse they oppose—namely, the instrumentalization of Palestine. In both cases, Palestine is stripped of its universal moral ground.
Therefore, the attitude of those who, out of opposition to the government, refuse to speak up for Palestine should not be seen merely as political silence; it must also be read as a form of moral blindness that undermines collective conscience.
When we consider this passive state of memory in Türkiye—a memory in which Palestine is neither forgotten nor deeply remembered, that occupies the conscience but fails to guide the flow of life—the concept of memoricide (the destruction of memory) used by Israeli historian Ilan Pappé in his book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine becomes strikingly instructive and cautionary for Turkish society as well.
As Israeli journalist Gideon Levy—known for his critical articles in Haaretz opposing Israel’s occupation policies—powerfully expressed: “Forgetting Palestine is Israel’s systematic policy; but the true tragedy is that the world allows this deliberate forgetting.”
Türkiye’s stance, perhaps, is not one of active forgetting, but rather of passive permission. At this point, the gap between historical responsibility and present-day apathy has become stark. Turkish society, which once viewed Palestine as a mirror of the universal struggle for humanity, now perceives it increasingly as “someone else’s tragedy.” This transformation is a tangible symptom of the historical rupture that nourishes our silence. For when responsibility is not transmitted, memory produces only momentary reactions—it cannot give birth to lasting practices of solidarity.
Türkiye’s collective silence in the face of the persecution and genocide in Palestine should not be read merely as a symptom of cognitive deficiency or indifference, but as a mirror—a reflective instrument. For the absence of a collective, society-wide reaction reveals, in fact, the inner tensions of Turkish society itself, the circular stagnation of its political sphere, and the retreat of its intellectual world.
Today, the Turkish public undoubtedly possesses the potential to echo the resounding voices of resistance seen across Europe and the United States—mass and unified popular movements that have emerged despite the dismissive, censorious, and even complicit policies of their own governments. Yet in Türkiye, this potential is suppressed—buried under the fatigue of memory, the condition of being an object rather than a subject of the political sphere, latent fears, ideological monopolizations, and individual passivity.
The lesson to be drawn here is clear: to stand with Palestine does not mean to align oneself with the government; to remain silent is not, in itself, an act of opposition. The struggle for Palestine—and for all innocent peoples subjected to oppression and injustice around the world—demands an engagement that transcends local political divisions and calls for a higher moral agency.
Turkish society must ground its conscience beyond such false dichotomies. To break the silence and to shatter the chains that bind our collective will is not only to stand by Palestine—it is, in the universal sense, to stand by the oppressed wherever they are, and, in the local sense, to keep our collective moral consciousness alive. Above all, it is a requirement of universality and of humanity itself.