Last year, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called for the creation of an “Army of Islam” to attack Israel from all sides, in order to destroy it.
That was shocking, but not surprising, for Erdogan has long been outspoken in his hostility to the Jewish state. Before Erdogan, relations between Turkey and Israel had long been close. Trade and tourism between the two countries boomed. Turkey was the favored destination of Israeli tourists. Israeli technicians were modernizing Turkish combat jets. Israeli pilots practiced maneuvers in Turkish airspace. There were also plans for high-tech cooperation and water sharing.
This ended when Recep Tayyip Erdogan was elected president in 2003. He began to speak about Israel as an “oppressor” of the “Palestinians” and of the need for Turkey to express its solidarity with fellow Muslims. When Israel went to war in Gaza to stop rocket fire on its southern villages in 2009, Erdogan angrily denounced Israel for defending itself.
Relations deteriorated much more rapidly because of the Mavi Marmara episode. A flotilla of six ships attempted to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza in 2010. Israeli ships tried to stop them. Five of the six ships offered only passive resistance. Those on board the sixth, Turks on a Turkish ship, the Mavi Marmara, put up a fight against Israeli commandos trying to board, and nine armed Turks were killed, with a tenth severely wounded. This caused a furor in Turkey; Erdogan was enraged. Normal diplomatic relations with Israel were frozen — and would remain that way until 2015, when Prime Minister Netanyahu apologized for the Mavi Marmara deaths and agreed to pay $20 million in compensation. Turkey was in 2015 greatly interested in receiving natural gas — from Israel, so as to break its dependence on supplies from Russia, and that might also help explain its very brief, and very slight, warming toward the Jewish state.
But despite that short period of a scarcely discernible rapprochement, Erdogan soon reverted to type, again constantly denouncing Israel, taking the side of the “Palestinians.” This past March, an article appear in Yeni Safak, a newspaper that is regarded as Erdogan’s mouthpiece, under the title “What if an Army of Islam was Formed Against Israel?” The piece openly called on the 57 member states of the OIC to form a joint “Army of Islam” — presumably under Turkish direction — to simultaneously attack Israel from the east, west, north, and south, in order to destroy it.
So that is where relations stand between President Erdogan and Israel — they could hardly be worse.
Then last summer we discovered, to our chagrin, that Erdogan has been echoed in his hysterical anti-Israel views not only by a leading figure in his ruling AKP party, but also by a leading figure in the opposition, an opposition that many in the West surely assumed was, in contradistinction to Erdogan, sensible, liberal, secular, and above all, rational. How wrong they were.
Turkish Opposition Figure Criticizes ‘Jewish’ Award, After Founder of Ruling Party Claims ‘Jewish Bankers’ Control US Economy
A founding member of Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) accused Zionist Jews on Tuesday of secretly controlling the US economy, days before a leading opposition figure criticized the AKP for accepting a prize from a Jewish-American group.
In a tweet shared by more than 900 people, Burhan Kuzu alleged that a dozen “Zionist banking families of Jewish descent, whose numbers do not exceed 300,” oversee the printing of US dollars.
Here we go again, with the antisemitic trope of the “Jewish bankers.” Burhan Kuzu needs to be reminded that the “printing of US dollars” is not done by “Zionist banking families,” but by the United States Department of Engraving and Printing, which has been engaged in that task since long before the appearance of “Zionism” or of “Zionist banking families.” It would be fascinating to know exactly how Mr. Kuzu counted up those twelve — count them, twelve — Jewish banking families “whose numbers do not exceed 300.”
After claiming that Presidents Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy “were killed by the Zionists” for trying to wrest control of the economy back from “Jewish bankers,” he [Burhan Kuzu] called on President Donald Trump to follow in their footsteps. “But he can’t do it, because they will assassinate him,” Kuzu said. “Try it Trump, and see what happens!”
Again, just to refresh Mr. Kuzu’s curious memory: there were no “Zionists” around (and very few “Jewish bankers”) in 1865 to kill Abraham Lincoln, nor any reason for them to have wished to do so. Lincoln was, in fact, the first president to have extensive social contact with Jews in the United States, as we shall see tomorrow.