Showing solidarity with Gaza in Astana

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan visited Kazakhstan earlier this week to attend the 10th Summit of the Organization of Turkic States (OTS). In addition to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and Kyrgyzstan’s President Sadyr Japarov, Erdoğan met his Azerbaijani counterpart Ilham Aliyev and attended the meeting of the OTS heads of states. The Turkish leader returned to Türkiye following his meeting with Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev on Friday.

The OTS summit, which took place against the backdrop of escalating great power competition in the international system as well as new crises and Israel’s massacres in Gaza, was obviously crucial to integrating the Turkic world. Having supported Azerbaijan’s victorious military campaign in Karabakh, President Erdogan single-handedly facilitated closer cooperation between his country and various regions including the Caucasus and Central Asia.

To ensure that integration takes place in a stable and peaceful manner in the region, where Russia, the United States, China and the European Union continue to compete against each other, there is a constant need for new ideas and initiatives. Unlike in the 1990s, Türkiye has the ability to make greater contributions to the Turkic world with the multidimensional capacity it developed in defense, diplomacy, and other fields.

With discussions underway in Astana, Kazakhstan on making the Turkic world’s integration faster and more successful, however, the Turkish delegation kept thinking about the situation in Gaza.

On Thursday, the Israeli army targeted the Jabalia Refugee Camp for the third time to massacre civilians yet again. The Western leaders, however, continue to refrain from calling for a humanitarian cease-fire. U.S. President Joe Biden was compelled to mention a “pause” for the sake of the hostages after his speech at a fundraising event in Minneapolis was interrupted by a protestor.

Growing backlash

Ironically, Israeli and pro-Israeli politicians face a growing backlash in the United States and across Europe. Even the Western media’s pro-Israel bias cannot hide the fact that bombing hospitals, schools, churches, mosques, bakeries, marketplaces and refugee camps amounts to a war crime. Considering those developments, more and more people conclude one cannot conceal Israeli aggression or the massacres in Gaza behind the Holocaust discourse. As such, the world comes to believe that Israel is indeed engaging in genocide.

Craig Mokhiber, the Director of the New York Office of the U.N. High Commissioner of Human Rights, thus resigned citing the organization’s failure to stop the “genocide” in Gaza. Around the same time, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken encountered protestors with fake blood on their hands during a Senate hearing. Protests erupting in Western cities and on college campuses, too, suggests that the unfolding situation elicits a conscientious response from the international community.

Curiously enough, however, the Western media continue to criminalize such pro-Palestinian demonstrations as commentators for major news outlets attempt to block the West’s conscientious reaction in two ways. First, they demand that the world turn a blind eye to the Israeli army’s killing of civilians regarding what happened to the Jewish community during World War II. At the same time, they argue that such demonstrations threaten to destabilize Europe – which, they say, already faces the danger of Arabs and Muslims. By saying that the European street has turned into the Arab street, the mainstream media’s commentators attack Europe’s leftists, multiculturalism and migration policy. Ironically, it is such protests in Western cities that mildly mitigate the embarrassment caused by the Western governments’ endorsement of the Israeli massacres.

The vast majority of Western politicians refuse to see that the crisis that Western civilization currently faces is merely exacerbated by the mass killing of Palestinians in Gaza by Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. What fuels anti-Western and anti-Jewish sentiment is Israel killing another child every 10 minutes and the muted response of the world’s most powerful nations – not protests taking place across the globe. Russia and China, in turn, take advantage of Israel’s ‘eclipse of reason’ more and more effectively.

[Daily Sabah, November 3, 2023]