Although Turkey’s largest and most important Jewish communities—Istanbul and Izmir foremost among them—were located on the country’s western coast, Ankara was also once home to a sizable Jewish population. In the 1930s, it numbered some 5,000 souls, most of whom lived in a separate neighborhood in the old part of the city; now only two dozen are left. Jeyan Idil Aslan, a resident of Ankara, recounts a visit to the now-decrepit Jewish quarter:

The existence of the Jewish population in the city dates back to the 1st century BCE. They [came under the rule of] the Ottoman empire during the [14th century]. Sephardi Jews who moved to the region [following the expulsion from Spain in 1492] had an important place in the city’s economy. In the 19th century, their number decreased as a result of many disasters and epidemics. . . . Jews were [also] engaged with many different types of craftsmanship. . . . They were heavily affected by the fire that destroyed the most beautiful neighborhoods of the city in 1916.

Visiting the neighborhood left me with a feeling of sadness. To see the beautiful houses leaning to their sides as a result of neglect; not to be able to see the garden of the synagogue, let alone to go inside. The Jewish Quarter is in the middle of the city, but it appears today an abandoned space. This history falls to the ground brick by brick every day.

For many years, Lebanon has been a de-facto satellite of Tehran, which exerts control via its local proxy militia, Hizballah. The problem with the U.S. policy toward the country, according to Tony Badran, is that it pretends this is not the case, and continues to support the government in Beirut as if it were a bulwark against, rather than a pawn of, the Islamic Republic:

So obsessed is the Biden administration with the dubious art of using taxpayer dollars to underwrite the Lebanese pseudo-state run by the terrorist group Hizballah that it has spent its two years in office coming up with legally questionable schemes to pay the salaries of the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF), setting new precedents in the abuse of U.S. foreign security-assistance programs. In January, the administration rolled out its program to provide direct salary payments, in cash, to both the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) and the Internal Security Forces (ISF).

The scale of U.S. financing of Lebanon’s Hizballah-dominated military apparatus cannot be understated: around 100,000 Lebanese are now getting cash stipends courtesy of the American taxpayer to spend in Hizballah-land. . . . This is hardly an accident. For U.S. policymakers, synergy between the LAF/ISF and Hizballah is baked into their policy, which is predicated on fostering and building up a common anti-Israel posture that joins Lebanon’s so-called “state institutions” with the country’s dominant terror group.

The implicit meaning of the U.S. bureaucratic mantra that U.S. assistance aims to “undermine Hizballah’s narrative that its weapons are necessary to defend Lebanon” is precisely that the LAF/ISF and the Lebanese terror group are jointly competing to achieve the same goals—namely, defending Lebanon from Israel.