The illegal Israeli settlement of Kiryat Arba, on the edge of Hebron.
On the flight to Istanbul, I read about Anthony Barnett's trip there a decade ago. I read about the trial of openDemocracy’s contributor Hrant Dink for ‘public denigration’ of Turkey. I read Dink's last piece for openDemocracy "the water finds its crack". Then I read the tributes written by Anthony and Isobel Hilton to the writer. He had been shot dead on the steps of the office of the Armenian/Turkish publication he edited.
When I arrived, walking with a friend through a transcontinental city of house-sized flags and skyscraper bling, we found ourselves passing a large demonstration of power from the youth wing of the ruling AKP. These were mostly cheerful, polite and smiley young people, with Turkey branded T-shirts and signs saying things like “we have Erdogan, they don’t”, “BBC! We can speak English too” and “don’t use the water from the cannon, use the bullets from the tank”.
