Turkey celebrated a scaled-down 100-year anniversary as a republic on Sunday, October 29. A military parade was held with around a hundred ships on the Bosphorus Strait, a wreath had been laid at Atatürk's monument, the founding father of present-day Turkey, and there were fireworks – but no grand speech by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. His speech took place the previous day in Istanbul, where several hundred thousand people gathered in solidarity with Palestinians. According to the organizers, it was "the world's largest protest" against Israeli airstrikes on Gaza since the Hamas attack on October 7.
President Erdogan, amid applause, accused the West of being "the main culprit of the massacres in Gaza" and Israel of committing "war crimes." He affirmed that Hamas is not a terrorist organization, as he emphasized a few days earlier. He insisted that Hamas is a "liberation group waging a battle to protect its lands and people." Facing the public, Erdogan also called out Western powers, accusing them of "creating a crusade war atmosphere" against Muslims. He strongly criticized Israel: "Gaza, Palestine, what was there in 1947, and what is it like today? Israel, how did you get here? You are an occupier; you are an organization," implying that it is not a state.
The burden is heavy and unique for a president who just met with Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu in late September, after more than a decade of tension. Never before had a NATO member country denied Israel its status as a state, and thus its right to exist. And even though no majority-Muslim country considers Hamas a terrorist organization, no other government has explicitly supported the Islamist militants since October 7, except Iran.
AKP party 'angry'
So, what happened? While the Turkish government does not provide military aid to Hamas, unlike Iran, the government and the president's party, the Justice and Development Party (AKP), have, however, been hosting senior Hamas officials on Turkish soil for years. During the height of the Arab Spring, supported by Erdogan, an office of the organization was opened in Istanbul. Ankara is said to have granted Turkish citizenship to about a dozen of its members. However, Turkish journalist Deniz Yücel from Die Welt, exiled in Germany, observed that "neither the Israelis nor Hamas seem to trust the Turkish intermediary services; for years, both sides have preferred to keep their channels of negotiation with Qatar and Egypt."
Erdogan's attempts to position himself as a mediator after October 7 have yielded no results. Even worse, it appears that the White House and the Biden administration ignored Erdogan's attempts. Biden did not stop in Ankara during his visit to Israel in mid-October, and it took nearly a month and many trips in the region before Secretary of State Antony Blinken finally visited Turkey. His visit came about in a tumultuous context: Washington has been urging Ankara to approve Sweden's NATO membership for more than a year. Their ratification now rests in the hands of a Turkish parliament accused of dragging its feet and exploiting the dispute for its own benefit.
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