Is Israel always to blame? What I discovered in the comments on the Turkish series "Sumud" | Tiki Tavro

I watched the Turkish series "Sumud" as an Israeli, and I quickly realized that the most interesting story is not just on the screen. It is in the comments. And there, to tell the truth, I discovered something that did not really surprise me — but it certainly grated on me: as usual, Israelis are presented in a negative, one-dimensional, and almost complexity-free way.

One could, of course, argue that a series is a work of art. It is allowed to choose a point of view, it is allowed to be critical, and it is allowed to present Israel as its creators see it. But when you watch a series and then read the comments, you cannot ignore the gap between a complex reality and the image built from it.

Specifically, one of the comments that kept recurring around the religious Israeli character wearing a head covering was particularly interesting. From the perspective of some Turkish viewers, this head covering is a hijab — and they found it hard to understand how an Israeli woman could be religious and wear it. This might sound trivial, but in my eyes, it says a lot. How little we really know each other, and how quickly we build a complete picture of a person based on a few external markers.

And then came another comment that surprised me: support for the statement that a Jew and a Muslim woman should not be together. Not because I want to turn this into a discussion about relationships between people of different religions, but because the comment itself demonstrated how much the series succeeds in generating an emotional and strong discourse around Israeli and Jewish identity.

And that is exactly what interests me about this phenomenon. Not just what the series says — but what the viewers believe as a result. Because when Israelis are shown again and again through negative, cruel, or insensitive characters, and when the comments accept this picture almost as a given, an image is created that is very difficult to break.

And I ask myself: where in all this are the Israelis who are just… people? The Israelis who work, love, raise children, travel, laugh, fear, argue among themselves, volunteer, help others — and above all, the Israelis who are much more complex than the character television chooses to present. I do not expect a Turkish creator to tell the Israeli story as I would tell it — but I am interested in asking why we receive the same picture again and again.

Israel as a problem. The Israeli as the guilty party. And the complexity — remains off-frame. Perhaps that is why the comments on "Sumud" interested me almost more than the series itself. Because they do not just reflect what viewers think about Israel. They reflect how much a certain image of Israel has already become the default for some of them. And that, in my eyes, is much more interesting than just another series. Because a series ends, the credits roll, but the image that remains in the viewer's mind continues long after the screen goes dark.