Yochanan Visser is an independent journalist/analyst who worked for many years as Middle East correspondent for Western Journalism.com in Arizona and was a frequent publicist for the main Dutch paper De Volkskrant. He authored a book in the Dutch language about the cognitive war against Israel and now lives in Gush Etzion.
Few people have noticed that Trump’s historic decision to recognize Israeli sovereignty over all of Jerusalem coincided with the commemoration of a centenary since the Ottoman Turks ended their occupation of the holy city.
On December 9 1917 Hussein el-Husseini, the mayor of Jerusalem, together with other local officials offered two soldiers of the British army the surrender of the city after the Turkish army left Jerusalem without setting up a fight.
The British soldiers, who were cooks and wanted to make breakfast for their commander, reportedly rejected the offer and made clear they just wanted some eggs for their chief.
The Turkish army, which had occupied Jerusalem for more than 400 years, never returned to Jerusalem but current Turkish President Tayyip Recep Erdogan aspires to become the city’s sole patron and to restore Turkey’s influence on the Arabs in Israel and Jerusalem in particular.
His aspirations are part of his Ottoman complex and he doesn’t hide it.
During a meeting of his AKP party in 2016, Erdogan told the crowd to remember the Battle of Manzikert in 1071, when the Turks defeated the Byzantine Empire and went on to dominate much of the Middle East until Great Britain and France defeated the Ottoman Empire in 1919. During the same gathering he vowed to make Turkey “a great nation” and “a great power” again.
This is also the reason why Erdogan organized an emergency meeting of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation after US President Donald Trump announced the United States would move its embassy to Jerusalem and recognized Israeli sovereignty over the city.
At the conference in Istanbul Erdogan, who is currently chairing the OIC, spat fire over Trump’s move and said it constituted the crossing of a red line for Muslims. READ MORE
