some scattered thoughts on Turkey, Israel, the Kurds...I think that's everyone

My feelings about the Turkey-Israel schism are complicated, to say the least. Readers of this blog should by now be aware that I am not much of a fan of the Turkish state, especially Kemalism and its disturbing attitude to ethnic minorities, repressive laws that jail anyone who has an alternative view to official state accounts of Turkish history, harassment of scholars of the Armenian genocide abroad, and most lately their role in devastating Iraqi agriculture and now its water supply, too. For all these reasons it never surprised me much that Turkey and Israel were such close allies throughout the 20th century.

Despite a lot of sympathy for the Palestinians among its people, the Turkish state had closer ties to Israel than any Arab state (though Egypt was pretty close.) Despite all the hype about Erdogan among Arabs in the past year, this relationship has only changed in any substantive way in the past two weeks with talks of cancelling defense agreements and water and energy deals with talks of keeping relations between the two countries to "a minimum," whatever that means. Meanwhile a free trade zone with Lebanon, Syria and Jordan was set up and the US is blaming the EU's longtime shutting Turkey out for this supposedly new east-oriented foreign policy.

I don't have a lot of love for Kurdish politicians either, who killed off thousands of their own people in a civil war in Northern Iraq in the 1990s, repress political dissidents, seized territory from Christian and other ethnic minority villages and that's not even getting into the whole PKK mess. Regardless, anyone with any principles whatsoever needs to recognize that the treatment of Kurds in Turkey has been atrocious and hasn't changed significantly enough under the AKP. With all that said there are some differences between the significance of raising the Palestinian issue and the Kurdish one.

Essentially, both the Israeli and Turkish governments do not give a crap if a bunch of random people in the US or the UK don't like them. Protests of such governments should be directed not only at their actions but also at our own governments' consent and material support for such regimes and at changing those policies, otherwise our protests are little more than useless performance art. There isn't an equivalence between the attitudes of Western governments towards Israeli vs Syrian, Iranian or even Turkish policies. Israel has only been rewarded with a deepening of ties with Western countries in recent years, as Naomi Klein so succinctly explained:

The world has tried what used to be called "constructive engagement." It has failed utterly. Since 2006 Israel has been steadily escalating its criminality: expanding settlements, launching an outrageous war against Lebanon and imposing collective punishment on Gaza through the brutal blockade. Despite this escalation, Israel has not faced punitive measures—quite the opposite. The weapons and $3 billion in annual aid that the US sends to Israel is only the beginning. Throughout this key period, Israel has enjoyed a dramatic improvement in its diplomatic, cultural and trade relations with a variety of other allies. For instance, in 2007 Israel became the first non–Latin American country to sign a free-trade deal with Mercosur. In the first nine months of 2008, Israeli exports to Canada went up 45 percent. A new trade deal with the European Union is set to double Israel's exports of processed food. And on December 8, European ministers "upgraded" the EU-Israel Association Agreement, a reward long sought by Jerusalem.*

It is in this context that Israeli leaders started their latest war: confident they would face no meaningful costs. It is remarkable that over seven days of wartime trading, the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange's flagship index actually went up 10.7 percent.

A trade agreement was also signed between Quebec and Israel in 2008, and of course just last month Israel was admitted into the OECD with Turkey's support. Conditions for the billions of US aid dollars still have yet to be placed on Israel with respect to the situation in Gaza, Jerusalem, or the expansion of settlements. Turkey, on the other hand, still isn't any closer to getting into the EU. When people tell me Israel is singled out, basically I agree: they're singled out for preferential treatment. As far as activism goes, to act as if they're the only government in the world that gets targeted is absurd, Tibetan activists single out China, activists for Ken Saro-Wiwa singled out Nigeria and Shell and Iraq activists and the Brussells tribunal singled out the USA. That's what activists do. Getting away for something for sixty-plus years doesn't entitle you to immunity (sorry, Polanski) and time is up.

As far as Israel criticizing Turkey for the Kurds goes, I don't know why they'd want to go there considering that they provided the weapons that killed them. As for the Armenians, the Israeli record there isn't great either. American companies are going on trial for selling chemical weapons to Saddam, and I am all for everyone else being held accountable. If they do go there, it wouldn't be anything new. The Kurds have long been used as pawns by Iran, Syria and the US in regional disputes only to be abandoned when they were dealt the severest of repurcussions.

We could talk about Turkey and Iran forever but I hope people reading all this make distinctions between governments and their peoples and also know that there were Kurds among the flotilla activists, including one of the dead. At the same time, it was unfortunately really predictable that it had to be the death of foreign activists and not Palestinians that would spark global outrage and any kind of a policy change(how lasting that change will be is still yet to be seen.) I hope that most people are smart enough to realize that ultimately this isn't about Turkey, it's about the Palestinians, and not fall into the trap of defending anyone that doesn't deserve it.