Gideon Levy : Turkey, our twin sister

SOL SALBE·LUNEDÌ 14 OTTOBRE 2019·4 MINUTI

By Gideon Levy

An exciting wave of compassion, for care for human rights, resistance to occupation and solidarity with oppressed peoples has been sweeping the Israeli Right in recent days. Every racist has become Rene Cassin, every nationalist - Nelson Mandela. Leading the charge was that human rights defender and renowned occupation opponent, the Israeli mother Teresa herself - Ayelet Shaked: "The Kurds are the world's largest nation without a country," she tweeted. "An ancient people with a special historical connection to the Jewish people. They deserve a state" - and the tears just stream down your face uncontrollably. While it is unclear whether the Kurds deserve a state because of their special relationship to the Jewish people, the ultimate good reason, or because of them being the largest nation without a state, what difference does it make. An oppressed people deserves a state. No one can remain indifferent to Shaked’s cry for justice, not what we thought. What’s the difference between the Kurds and the Palestinians? Don't make Shaked laugh.

But this is only the beginning. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, an even more determined freedom fighter than Shaked, weighed in with his renowned moral force: "Israel strongly condemns Turkey's military invasion and warns against the ethnic cleansing of the Kurds ... Israel will make every effort to provide humanitarian aid to the brave Kurdish people". Politicians have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for a lot less than that. Israel condemns an invasion of a foreign country and offers humanitarian aid to a brave people fighting for their freedom. A Home front Command field hospital is, no doubt, already on its way. There hasn’t been such a mobilisation of an entire state since Denmark's Jews  were rescued by being ferried across to Sweden.

Let us not forget Moshe Ya'alon, another well-known humanitarian, who called for help for the Kurds and Yair Lapid, our own Martin Luther King, who preached to the free world, of which he’s a prominent leader, to mobilise to assist the Kurds. Lapid has now even called  for recognition of the Armenian genocide, thereby setting a new record in hypocrisy: recognition of the other's disaster as punishment and revenge.

This is what hypocrisy looks at its worst. That is how blindness is displayed. Only the wilfully blind cannot tell the double standard that oozes out of every word of the new moral preachers who do not see the humps on their own backs. Turkey is now doing exactly what Israel has been doing for years in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon. We behaved like Turkey, we resembled Erdogan - only those who refuse to look won’t notice it. Everything is horribly similar. Starting with choosing the name for the operation, "The Spring of Peace" – one more of our barbaric operations in Gaza or Lebanon and we will also have be a Spring of Peace, just like "Peace for Galilee", "Grapes of Wrath" and "Sturdy Cliff” [the Hebrew name of Protective Edge]". The Turks, devilishly, also copied from us the Security Zone as an excuse for their occupation. Like us, they also called the hundreds of fatalities already slaughtered "terrorists". Every single one is a terrorist. Every Kurdish fatality, every dead Palestinian . There are, of course, no thousands of civilians slaughtered, neither in northern Syria nor in the southern Gaza Strip.

See the attacks on the Kurds? See the cruelty? This is exactly how the world sees Israel's attacks on Gaza. An army that launches itself at the vulnerable, in Beit Hanoun they are even more vulnerable than in Kobane, bomb for bomb, invasion for invasion, so-called war on terror - and in both cases the real war is about freedom. Hundreds of unarmed protesters have been killed over the past two years on the fence in besieged Gaza and the Israeli right is shocked by the Kurdish massacre. Wounded and disabled people from Gaza do not arrive here for medical treatment - and Israel is advocating for humanitarian assistance to the Kurds, not for the wounded and the handicapped that it has created itself.

And yet there is one difference: In northern Syria there’s somewhere to run to. In Gaza there isn’t. Only to the sea, which is also blockaded. In Gaza, you will not see refugee convoys fleeing for their lives like in Syria. The last refugee convoys in Gaza were in 1948. Perhaps that is why Netanyahu warns against ethnic cleansing, and the right-wing leader Shaked says a Kurdish state is coming. Are there any crueller jokes than these

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Translated by Sol Salbe of the Middle East News Service, Melbourne, Australia.
Hebrew original: https://www.haaretz.co.il/opinions/.premium-1.7969697