Mehmet Agar and Moshe Dayan: ’Illumination’ and the aftermath

Conflicts, especially the ones that have existed for a long time, create an interesting kind of blindness for the parties to them. Obvious facts for an outsider can become invisible for the parties to the conflict. Look at Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Turkey’s Kurdish problems for examples.

From looking Turkey to Israeli-Palestinian conflict it is crystal clear that there will be no solution to the conflict there in the near future. I guess our Kurdish problem is seen similar to the outsiders who do not have the emotional backlog of this conflict and who can look at it from an objective point of view. Turkey and Israel have been running in their own vicious circles for quite some time now.

There are, of course, different parties within parties in these conflicts. There are those who are against violence; they are those who believe they can solve these problems by smashing the other party and so on and so forth. Once people have positioned themselves in these conflicts, it is a rare occurrence to experience any shift in their perspectives and positions. Hawks remains as hawks; pigeons remain as pigeons. The greater and the deeper the conflict the more sectarian positions we have. Therefore if there are position changes, mostly it happens in a negative way, violence silences peaceful voices. However, there are some surprising exceptions to these general rules. There are some people who have experienced a kind of illumination; the meaning of the things surrounding them changes significantly to them. I am talking about Hawks who has leading positions in conflicts on the side of one of the parties and who, later on, became advocates peaceful solutions.
Israel and Turkey have two well known examples of this rarely acknowledged phenomenon of “illumination” after having hawkish positions for a long time. These are Moshe Dayan in Israel and Mehmet Agar in Turkey. Dayan was a soldier and Agar was a police chief. They may not be very similar in terms of their character, their backgrounds and their worldviews. However there are significant similarities in their positions in conflicts and in the aftermaths. I have some little book knowledge about the sins of Moshe Dayan while I know very well the notorious concepts and structures created by Mehmet Agar in the name of struggling against Terror. For this article though, my attention focuses on their “aftermaths”; their positioning themselves after having leading roles in the conflicts and societies reactions to them. Moshe Dayan the iconic figure of the six days war gradually repositioning himself in Israel politics. He once said “I have traveled a long road from the battlefield to the peace table” and his words “If you want to make peace, you don’t talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies” become a guiding principal for peacemakers around the world. Mehmet Agar, a fearsome police chief then, who is the creator of 1993 concept (fight terrorists with their own methods), came to the point to say “The members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) should be made to come down from the mountains. Everyone should overcome the fear of division of the country... They better make politics in plains rather than wandering around armed in the mountains.”

The blindness of illumination

However, they have both shared the same destiny. After having “illuminated”, their popularity and power have vanished gradually. Dayan died in 1981 but Mehmet Agar still alive and has just left the chairmanship of True Path Party very recently, after his party’s crushing defeat in the last elections. I believe the “illumination” of hawks creates a kind of illusion on their behalf. Things have become suddenly so clear to them, they see that the conflict they are dealing with can not be solved with the mehods they have been using and they start to believe that if they tell this “obvious truth” to their followers everyone understand and make a direction change.

This illusion is also reinforced by the blinding light of the reflection of their charisma within the society, which is something they mostly owe to the conflicts they directed. However, when they start to talk about peace and nonviolent methods they lost their charisma and influence over the society or at least we can say so for these two examples I am talking about. I wish it would not have been like this. I wish both Israel and Turkey could have drawn some lessons from the journey of their hawks and could have benefited from the “wisdom” their journey created. Israel were not able to benefit from the journey of Dayan but I hope Turkey can benefit from the vision of Mehmet Agar and others who get a deep insight into the conflict and the circle of violence.

Otherwise we may be talking about the PKK and terror for another 30 years.*

By the way I have to say that I am really tired with the fact that because of the unbearable intolerant atmosphere here in Turkey, as writers we come to a position in that we should explain everything with footnotes. In this connection for those of you who may be too much sensitized with this analogy between the conflicts in Israel and Turkey, this is nothing to do with the nature or the root causes of these problems but because of the similarities of these ongoing conflicts in terms of their duration and repetition themselves they are mentioned here together.