Greece Mourns the Pontian Genocide on May 19. Turkey Celebrates the Opposite.
A sharp opinion piece published by The Times of Israel, written by Shay Gal, is making waves across diplomatic circles, and its central argument cuts deep: Erdogan did not corrupt a healthy Turkish republic. He simply removed the costume.
The piece traces a line from the late Ottoman era through Kemalist secularism and into Erdogan's government, arguing the state instinct never changed. Turkish primacy, minority suppression, historical denial, and expansionist pressure on neighbors were all present long before Erdogan arrived. What Kemalism did, Gal argues, was dress that instinct in Western suits, NATO salutes, and secular language, making it legible to Brussels, Washington, and Jerusalem.
The secular republic did it.
The trigger for the piece was Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz reaching for Ataturk as a counterweight to Turkey's Interior Minister Mustafa Ciftci, who spoke openly of "liberating" Jerusalem and governing it under Turkish rule. Katz's instinct to separate Kemalism from Erdoganism is, Gal writes, exactly the wrong reflex.
The historical indictment in the piece is detailed. It covers the deportation and massacre of Armenians, the destruction of Assyrian communities, the targeting of Pontian and Anatolian Greeks, and the burning of Smyrna. The Turkish Republic, Gal argues, did not commit every one of those crimes but inherited the result, absorbed the property, and nationalized the denial.
Cyprus sits at the center of the Greek dimension of the argument. The 1974 invasion was not carried out by Islamists or Ottoman nostalgics. It was executed by the Turkish Republic's army under a prime minister from Ataturk's own CHP party. The secular republic did it.
Gal's sharpest line on Greece concerns 2026, when Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis reportedly invoked both Venizelos and Ataturk in Ankara. Pontian organizations pushed back immediately. The article calls this the Greek version of the Israeli mistake: treating Kemalist language as moderation while Ankara maintains its casus belli against Greek territorial waters and continues to occupy northern Cyprus.
One date, the piece notes, exposes the core contradiction. Turkey celebrates May 19 as the start of Ataturk's national struggle. Greece marks May 19 as Pontian Greek Genocide Remembrance Day. Ankara attacks the Greek commemoration specifically because it threatens Ataturk's founding myth. The two observances cannot coexist in the same moral universe.
