The Israeli consulate in Istanbul is on Maslak's Büyükdere Avenue, which is not a diplomatic quarter — it is a canyon of glass towers housing banks and holding companies. The building was long ago vacated of staff; the nameplate, one imagines, polished less often than those in the lobbies of the offices above. Diplomacy abhors a vacuum, but it turns out an empty consulate makes quite a loud noise when three armed men arrive at the door.
“An empty consulate makes quite a loud noise when three armed men arrive at the door.”
France 24 tells us 18 that nearly 200 people have been arrested in the sweep that followed. That is a lot of arrests for a single morning's violence. It is also — this is a thought — a number that contains multiples: the gunmen who came, the police who responded, the investigators who fanned out across the city, and then a great many other people who were somewhere else when it happened but are now in custody anyway. The arithmetic of a counter-terrorism inquiry is never one-to-one.
The detail that sticks, reported by multiple outlets 124, is that one attacker was killed and two others wounded alongside two police officers. That is five people, which is a small room's worth of casualties, and then 200 arrests, which is a wedding's worth of detentions. The mismatch is the point. A consulate that no longer functions as a consulate — staff withdrawn, doors unattended — still draws the full ceremonial response when tested. The building's diplomatic status persists even when its diplomats do not.
Turkey and Israel both declared the event an act of terrorism, the BBC notes 10, which is to say they agreed on the genre if not the authorship. Agreement on genre is sometimes all that remains when states are not speaking to one another except through statements. The consulate itself, empty or nearly so, becomes less a place of work than a kind of institutional pronoun — a "here" that stands for a "there," a building in Istanbul that denotes a country some distance to the south-east.
The arrests continue, one assumes, though the headlines have moved on. That is often how it works: the incident resolves in a matter of hours, but the administrative gears grind on for weeks. Someone, somewhere, is still matching names to addresses, calls to records, associations to suspicions. The consulate, meanwhile, remains exactly as empty as it was the day before the attack — which is to say, a place defined less by who is inside it than by the fact that someone thought it worth approaching with a gun.