For long, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has made some very noisy claims about him being the savior of the people of Palestine. At the same time, he seems to be improving ties with Israel. Duplicity is his defining feature.
“We will not allow the Palestinian lands to be offered to anyone else," said Erdogan in an Eid Al-Fitr video message to the Muslims of the United States.
“Last week we witnessed that a new occupation and annexation project, which disregards Palestine’s sovereignty and international law, was put into action by Israel. I would like to reiterate that al-Quds Al-Sharif, the holy site of three religions and our first kiblah, is a red line for all Muslims worldwide," Erdogan added.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">President <a href="https://twitter.com/RTErdogan?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@RTErdogan</a>’s message for U.S. Muslims on Eid al-Fitr:</p>
“I congratulate my American Muslim brothers and sisters’ Eid al-Fitr on behalf of the citizens of the Republic of Turkey.” <a href="https://t.co/WvwGq53P79">pic.twitter.com/WvwGq53P79</a>
— Turkish Presidency (@trpresidency) <a href="https://twitter.com/trpresidency/status/1264615898326814720?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 24, 2020</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
Perhaps, one of the first major decisions taken by the new Israeli government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former rival, Benny Gantz, is giving Erdogan many sleepless nights. Immediately after taking over as the country’s leader for a record fifth time, Netanyahu, in a speech in Knesset, the Israeli parliament, had said that starting July 1, the government would proceed with a plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank.
In response, Erdogan has been indulging in rhetoric. Even as his team was uploading his video message on the official Twitter handle, an EI AI Dreamliner, the flag carrier of Israel, landed at the Istanbul airport.
Now a plane landing at an airport isn’t an earth-shattering event — just that it was the first Israeli aircraft to land on Turkish soil in 10 years.
<img class="wp-image-2466 size-full" src="https://indianarrative.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/israel.jpg" alt="" width="693" height="615" /> An Israel airlines cargo flight is loaded in Istanbul (Twitter photo)“For the first time in a decade, an EL AL flight has landed in Turkey to collect humanitarian aid to help the US fight the coronavirus. It loaded around 24 tons of humanitarian aid and equipment to help the virus-stricken country,” reported <em>The Jerusalem Post</em>.
<img class="wp-image-2467 size-full" src="https://indianarrative.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/israel1.jpg" alt="" width="639" height="467" /> Airport staff display Turkish and Israeli flags before the cargo is loaded on to the plane (Twitter photo)The diplomatic relations between both the countries nosedived in 2010 after 10 people, including nine Turkish citizens, were killed when Israeli commandos allegedly raided a Gaza-bound Turkish ship carrying many activists.
That the strained relations between Turkey and Israel may be no longer as ‘strained’ as Erdogan likes to put it is also evident from the fact that last month Ankara had officially confirmed to supply corona-related medical equipment to Israel.
“The Turkish government approved the sale of medical equipment for humanitarian reasons and Israel is expected to allow a similar shipment of Turkish aid to reach Palestinian authorities without any holdups, according to a senior Turkish official in Ankara. It’s too early to say whether the unexpected display of solidarity during the pandemic will pave the way for an improvement in strained relations between Turkey and Israel, once strategic allies. Before now-President Recep Tayyip Erdogan took power in 2003, Turkey was Israel’s closest partner in the Muslim world, and their militaries had strong ties,” reported <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-09/turkey-to-supply-medical-equipment-to-israel-to-fight-covid-19">Bloomberg</a>.
Looking at these recent events, many experts have labeled Erdogan as a two-faced man.
On the one hand, he’s trying to become the leader of the Muslim world; and, on the other, playing dirty games which have exposed his trickery to the rest of the world.
Aykan Erdemir, a senior director of the Turkey Program at the Washington DC-based nonpartisan research institute Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) and a former member of the Turkish parliament, explains Erdogan’s “self-defeating blackmailing tactics.”
“The Turkish president’s near-total control of domestic media outlets allows him to exploit his adventurist foreign and security policy to create a rally-round-the-flag effect and boost his image as a strong leader. I would argue that all of these ill-advised steps have already backfired for Turkey, by isolating the country to an unprecedented level and undermining Turkey’s relations with its Western allies. Lately, one of the most popular jokes in Ankara is that the Erdogan government that set out with the motto, ‘zero problems with neighbors,’ has ended up with ‘zero neighbors without problems’,” Erdemir told <em>Ethnos</em>, a Greek daily, in an <a href="https://www.ethnos.gr/english-version/107526_aykan-erdemir-it-important-remember-turkey-not-erdogan">interview</a>.
Many would agree..
