Turkey responds with antisemitism

The Israeli-Gaza War has prompted a significant rise in antisemitic incidents in Turkey. A second-hand bookshop in Istanbul went viral for displaying a sign saying “Jews Not Allowed”, and the Etz Hayim Synagogue in Izmir was spray-painted with the slogan “Murderer Israel”.

Süleyman Sezen, an AKP (Erdoğan’s party) councillor in Samsun, said in a council meeting: “Historically, everyone gets angry with Hitler because he was racist. Hitler had a saying: ‘You will curse me for every Jew I did not kill.’ This is true. Once again I honour Hitler’s memory.”

Şahzade Demir, an MP for Hüda-Par (a Kurdish Islamist party allied with Erdoğan, and linked to the militant group Kurdish Hezbollah) called for Turkish Jews who volunteer for the Israeli army to be prevented from going and stripped of their citizenship. The next day, he held a press conference in the Turkish parliament with Basem Naim, a Hamas spokesperson. This was echoed by the far-right Islamist newspaperYeni Akit went further with their front page headline “Strip the Servants of Zionism of their Citizenship”, claiming falsely that Turkish Jews are by default citizens of Israel, and that many have gone to fight in the IDF since the Hamas attacks.

Hamas

The Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said that “Hamas is not a terrorist organisation, it is a liberation group, ‘mujahideen’ waging a battle to protect its lands and people,” and said that the Israeli attacks on Gaza “amount to murder and mental illness.” Initially his comments on the war were more cautious, but this changed after the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital explosion.

Turkey and Israel have mostly had diplomatic and economic ties since 1949. Since Erdogan came to power, ties have been disrupted from time to time, though, so far anyway, always later reknitted.

Throughout his time in office, Erdoğan has been consistent in saying that Hamas are not a terrorist group. When the external Political Bureau of Hamas relocated from Damascus to Qatar at the beginning of the Syrian Civil War, the somewhat errant figure Saleh al-Arouri built his own semi-autonomous base in Istanbul, with (at the very least) the consent of the Turkish state. He stayed there until 2015.

As with most international tragedies Erdoğan has seized on this conflict as an opportunity to increase his own prestige, both abroad and at home. There will be municipal elections in March 2024, and last time Erdoğan’s AKP lost the big cities, despite their attempts to overturn the results. Turkey has now put itself forward as a potential U.N guarantor for an independent Palestine, pointing to their successes as the guarantor of the Azerbaijani state’s right to Nagorno-Karabakh, which it has just ethnically cleansed.

Azerbaijan

In recent decades Azerbaijan has been a key military ally of Israel, in large part due to both states’ hostility to the Islamic Republic of Iran. Israel is heavily reliant on Azerbaijani oil, and Azerbaijan is heavily reliant on Israeli weapons: in 2021 approximately 65% of Israel’s oil was imported from Azerbaijan, and from 2016 to 2020 69% of Azerbaijan’s weapon imports came from Israel. Israeli-manufactured Harop drones were central to Azerbaijan’s victory over Armenia in 2020, and Israeli-manufactured Pegasus spyware is used to crack down on Azerbaijani dissidents. Beyond these immediate concerns, there is also a shared interest in denying and downplaying the Armenian genocide among the Turkish, Azerbaijani, and Israeli states.

The response to the Israel-Gaza war in Azerbaijan has been very different to that in Turkey. Instead of seeing massive protests like its counterparts in Turkey, the Israeli embassy in Baku has been covered in flowers and teddy bears, and the government has put out statements condemning “violence against civilians” calling for de-escalation and a two-state solution. At the moment it seems unlikely that Turkey would force the issue with Azerbaijan, and Azerbaijan is in a privileged position due to its reasonably friendly relationship with both the US and Russia.