“Israel has become a problem for the entire international community,” Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said in a sharp attack Thursday evening in an interview with CNN Türk.
“We have no intention of backing down from our position. Israel is not only a problem for Turkey, it has become a problem for the entire world. Israeli authorities have become a burden humanity can no longer bear,” he said.
Fidan said Turkey was the first country to halt trade with Israel over its aggression in the Gaza Strip. “Our president stopped $10 billion in trade with Israel overnight. It is important to take a firm position and start doing something,” he said.
“Anti-Israel sentiment has emerged around the world, from university campuses to newspapers and intellectual platforms, because they are openly carrying out massacres,” he said. “They are openly playing a destabilizing role everywhere. In the past, they could hide this with a few simple media maneuvers. Now they can no longer hide it. Israel is now looking for a new enemy to change its destructive and shameful image in the world.”
Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar called Fidan’s remarks “sickening” and said they amounted to “clear incitement to genocide.”
“The dehumanization of the Jewish people and portraying them as an ‘intolerable burden’ is the classic language of the greatest oppressors in history,” Sa’ar said. “The enlightened world and Turkey’s NATO allies must unequivocally condemn this explicit call for Israel’s destruction.”
The Turkish foreign minister’s remarks add to the harsh criticism Turkey has directed at Israel since October 7. This week, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan responded to Israel’s historic recognition of the Armenian genocide, saying: “We do not take even slightly seriously the slanders against our country by a murder network whose hands are stained with the blood of 75,000 innocent Gazans, most of them women and children.”
Sa’ar and Erdogan
(Photo: Adem ALTAN / AFP, REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque)
Speaking after a Cabinet meeting in Ankara on Tuesday, Erdogan said Turkey’s history did not include oppression, massacres, colonialism or genocide, but rather mercy and support for the oppressed, regardless of religion, origin or identity. He also cited what he described as the moral nobility of offering refuge to those fleeing the Inquisition and Nazi persecution, as well as the resolve of Turkey’s ancestors, who he said would rather give up their crown than surrender those who had found shelter in their country.
The Turkish president added that those who malign Turkey and the Turkish people in an effort to obscure what he called their barbarity in Gaza would know this if they examined their own history.
On Sunday, Israel’s government unanimously approved Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar’s proposal to recognize the Armenian genocide.
“It is never too late to do the right thing,” Sa’ar said at the Cabinet meeting.