Turkish State’s Hypocrisy
The democratic Turkish newspaper Yeni Demokrasi has published an article exposing the false support of the State of Turkey and other Arab states to the Palestinian people. While being forced by their own people to support the Palestinian people in words, the ruling classes in Turkey is in reality supporting the State of Israel:
“Representatives of the ruling class manipulated the public in every statement and shared their anti-Israel sentiment. Erdoğan, who said, ‘If we remain handicapped, armless and tongue-tied about what happened in Palestine, we cannot be held accountable to history for this,’ has clearly remained ‘hands, tongues and arms tied’ since the day he uttered these words. In fact, his hands, tongue and arms were tied from giving support to the Palestinian people. We saw on the ships sailing from Turkey to Israeli ports that his hands and arms were not tied from serving Israel.”
The article explains that this hypocrisy is somehow reasonable for the old state because it is bound to serve imperialism, mainly US imperialism, being deeply dependent on, but unable to continue its relation with Israel openly due to public pressure.
Journalist Metin Cihan exposed shipments going from Turkey to Israel. A ship was sent from Turkey to Israel in partnership with Burak Erdoğan and Mecit Mert Çetinkaya. Immediately after the exposal, Erdoğan filed a criminal complaint against the journalist. It was decided that the journalist’s posts about the shipments would be deleted. However, this did not make the facts disappear, as the information on ships heading to Israel was available from several sources. Immediately after this the State of Israel instructed ports to hide ship information. The article explains that Israel took this step to ensure its own security. States claiming to support Palestine but act the other way round will also benefit from this, since their commercial relations won’t be disclosed.
It has also been revealed that one of the ships going to Israel belonged to a Deputy of the AKP, the ruling party in the Turkish government.
From the 7th of October to the end of November, nearly 400 ships of goods were transported from Turkey to Israel. In October TURKSTAT listed Israel as the 15th country to which Turkey exports the most. The trade relations have continued in November. The total export from Turkey to Israel was 301.9 million dollars. TURKSTAT data also reveals that there are partial arms exports from Turkey to Israel, including “other parts and accessories for weapons” worth 105,000 dollars.
