Talking Turkey About Turkey - Part I by Gerald A. Honigman May 30, '04 / 10 Sivan 5764
The Turks are upset with Israel these days.
The same folks who have declared over one-fifth of their own non-Turk Kurdish population (over ten million people) to be "non-existent" in the past (they're really just "Mountain Turks", don't you know) and have taken steps to outlaw Kurdish language and culture (Arabic is one of Israel's two official languages), are allegedly mad at Israel for going after the Arab terrorist infrastructure in Gaza. These are the same folks who have killed tens of thousands of Kurds over the years in the name of their own security, have invaded neighboring Iraq for similar reasons, etc., etc., and so forth and so on.
Now, don't get me wrong. I like the Turks, for the most part at least. But Turkey's relationship with Israel must not be an unbalanced affair - something to use when relations are on the downswing with Syrian Arabs, for example. Now that they're again on the upswing, Ankara needs its excuse to back off from the Jews. Gaza, shmaza.
Talk about guts. Ankara complains about Israel not wanting Arabs turning Gaza into a terrorist base and threatens to withdraw its ambassador -- while Israel has agreed in theory to an Arab state being set up there -- but totally nixed the idea of an independent Kurdish state being set up in adjacent northern Iraq, for its own security reasons. Think about that for a minute. We'll return with vengeance to this point a bit later.
It is time to really "talk turkey", if you know what I mean. Israel has neglected a brave people - the Kurds - who have helped many Jews in the past. Just ask the hundreds of thousands in Israel who originated in Iraq. Israeli leaders have done this largely to not anger the Turks over this painful issue. So the Turks' policies towards the Kurds were treated in a hands-off manner.
If the Turks, however, insist on joining the rest of the world in applying hypocritical double standards towards the Jewish State, the time has come for certain truths to at long last come out in the open. So let's begin.
The ink had barely dried on the exchanged letters between President Bush and Prime Minister Sharon back in April 2004 over the Gaza disengagement plan when the State Department masters of foggy doublespeak began to whittle away at any real progress that may have been made.
While I welcomed President Bush's apparently fleeting April 2004 remarks about Israel not having to return to those 1949 UN-imposed armistice lines (and, for the first time, in public, I heard him call them just that, not "borders"), or not having to consent to national suicide by allowing millions of real or fudged descendants of Arab refugees a "right of return" (half of Israel's Jews originated in Arab/Muslim lands), it could be argued that all of this was very late in coming. An earlier dose of these facts of life could have eliminated the Arab hope of Israel being offered up on a silver platter by its "friends" -- a la Czechoslovakia, 1938 -- and perhaps led them to negotiate more seriously. I also wish that Mr. Bush would have explained all of this to much of the world that was watching him on television in different terms, not simply as "new facts on the ground."
The territorial adjustments Israel deserve have to do with justice, not simply the imposition of power.
The disputed lands in question, which Israel came to "occupy" as a result of renewed Arab hostilities in 1967 (being blockaded -- a casus belli -- etc.), were not Arab lands, but unapportioned areas of the original 1920 Palestinian Mandate that all peoples were allowed to settle in. Top legal scholars such as Eugene Rostow and others have written extensively about this. Indeed, the League of Nations' Permanent Mandates Commission and other sources recorded Arabs pouring into the Mandate from all over the Middle East and North Africa because of the economic development going on due to the Jews. Any 22nd or 23rd Arab state that might be created -- and a second, not first, Arab state within the original 1920 borders of "Palestine" (Jordan emerging out of the lion's share in 1922) -- must not emerge at the expense of the security of the sole, minuscule state of the Jews.
