Today, Benjamin Netanyahu went to the UN and gave a speech that, unless you were paying close attention in World History I, you would not understand. Netanyahu is speaking to a world that has long forgotten what Constantinople had to do with Istanbul, and what the Ottoman Empire's collapse in 1918 actually caused for the world 100 years later.
I feel like he needed a translator to explain a world map that no one really understands anymore.
The old question was, "What has Athens to do with Jerusalem," and it was first posed by Christian theologian Tertullian about AD 200. Though it was initially about philosophy/theology, it is still the question that matters geographically and socially.
Netanyahu sees a Middle East still grappling with the ghosts of empires and the failure of Western leaders to understand or read the lost maps of centuries ago. So when he talks about Greece and Cyprus against Turkey, he means the fall of Byzantine Constantinople in 1453, Cyprus under Ottoman rule after 1571, and the still-divided Cyprus after 1974. When he's castigating Turkey for trying to take over Syria and Lebanon, he's pointing back to the unfinished business when the Ottoman Empire collapsed after WWI.
When he speaks of Iranian hegemony, he's not seeing just modern Shiite radical ambitions, but also an ancient Persian imperial memory. He is pressing back against the desire for Iran to move into the spaces that the collapse of the Ottoman Empire left weak and that Turkey imagines as within its sphere. When he looks at the West Bank and calls it Judea and Samaria, he sees a Biblical map still living underneath a modern diplomatic chart.
When he turns the word genocide back on those who accuse Israel of it, it is irresponsible to ignore the genocides of the Armenians by the Ottoman Turks from 1915-1916 or the mass extermination of the Holocaust, or the killing of Iranian protestors by the Iranian regime. Netanyahu isn't speaking into or from a vacuum.
This is not some random rambling of a world leader. These conflicts are ancient, and they still hold meaning today. The media heard a list of countries and leaders, and they will not know how to interpret it beyond that. Netanyahu was invoking a civilization map. Athens, Cyprus, Constantinople, and Jerusalem are still connected to one another. The old worlds still have addresses.
~Matthew Sichel