Anti-Semitism or opportunism?

Israel has committed incredibly brutal acts, not only in the latest operation on the Gaza Strip, during which, according to a U.N. probe being debated at the General Assembly, the Jewish state “committed actions amounting to war crimes, possibly crimes against humanity,” but also in the past decades during which Palestinians were denied their inalienable rights, headed by their right to live in an independent state on their homeland.

The scenes of young Israeli soldiers satisfying their sadistic instincts on Palestinian people without discriminating either gender or age; Israeli forces bulldozing Palestinian homes; use by Israeli occupation troops of weapons and bombs banned by international conventions in indiscriminate attacks on civilian Palestinian settlements; shelling of houses where soldiers force Palestinian civilians to assemble in the first place and thus killing innocent civilians en masse; the incredible aerial bombings of Gaza by the Israeli air force were just some of the horrible developments that enraged the international community, and of course the Turks.

“Palestinian terrorists have been shelling our civilian settlements and forcing our people to live in a constant state of panic,” and such Israeli remarks delivered as an excuse of the December attacks on the Gaza Strip should of course be heard. Yet, how many people were killed in months of shelling of Israeli territory by Hamas rockets and how many Palestinians were killed in the few days of the December blitzkrieg of the Israeli armed forces on Gaza? More than 1,000 Palestinians fell victim to the merciless Israeli attacks, while the death toll of the Israelis, excluding the December operation, was incomparable at all. Right, what Israel did was to a certain extent an act of self defense but at the same time it was an operation during which methods of extermination of a society en masse was applied, reminiscent of an immense tragedy Jews were subjected to during World War II. Israel and its allies in the U.S. Congress and elsewhere are correct that Hamas has been guilty of war crimes and perhaps committed crimes against humanity as well, but even though the present-day Turkish government and many governments in the Middle East tend not to see the bitter reality, elected or non-elected Hamas is a terrorist gang as long as it did not lay down arms and opt for civilian politics, and there is a difference between a terrorist gang and a state.

Irrespective whether the U.N. General Assembly accepts and sends to the Security Council a draft resolution endorsing the so-called Richard Goldstone report accusing Israel as well as Hamas of committing acts of crimes against humanity and undertaking some serious war crimes during the December attacks on the Gaza Strip, and irrespective whether the permanent five members of the Security Council use their veto power to block such a resolution at the council, there is nothing abnormal in any government condemning Israel for its indiscriminate violence on the Palestinian people.

Yet, if such condemnations come in front of cameras as part of a political strategy devised to woo, on the one hand, the conservative and mostly anti-Semitist Arab neighborhood and on the other, the domestic electorate who might have been upset with a government for some other reasons, such an attitude would be a short-sighted political opportunism that might succeed in distracting public attention from some serious failures of a government for some time, but at the same time might produce a very dangerous anti-Semitist thunderstorm in a conservative neighborhood that is already vulnerable to such exploitation.

If a conservative mayor, for example, assails the ambassador of Israel in front of cameras with the aim and intention of pleasing his political boss, the prime minister, the next day some lunatic conservative Islamists might consider it appropriate to try to shower the Israeli ambassador with eggs on his visit to a university. I have no intention of downgrading or neglecting the severe anti-Semitist nature of such developments in Turkey, yet is it not coincidental that whenever the government has some serious headaches on some important and irrelevant issues, we either have an attack on Israelis or some sort of a controversy related to the military.

Besides, if the Turkish government is so keen on human rights and crimes against humanity, why is it preparing to host yet again a butcher from Sudan?

Tragicomedy, is it not?