History, as far as anyone knows, has never documented a genocide carried out by shipping in medicine and running mass vaccination campaigns for the population supposedly being "annihilated." Nor has it ever recorded a genocide carried out by building humanitarian zones or feeding the "exterminated" population in active combat areas with hundreds of thousands of tons of water, food, and medical supplies every single day, all while setting up field hospitals.
Israel poured enormous resources into evacuating Gazan residents from their homes in combat zones before the ground offensive even began, using millions of leaflets, text messages, and phone calls to warn them. None of that will spoil the blood libel Erdoğan has cultivated against Israel, quite successfully, for three years running. Even Donald Trump, his self-described "good friend," has stayed silent. So has his ambassador to Turkey, Tom Barrack.
"Dipping in the water while holding an unclean creature" (a Talmudic phrase for claiming purity while still sinning) is probably too gentle a phrase to capture the sheer inversion of reality that Erdoğan and his regime are pulling off against Israel, up to and including the push for an arrest warrant against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. What the world doesn't hear about nearly enough is that the Turkish president has turned his own country into a dark police state, one that has investigated or prosecuted more than 700,000 of its own citizens since 2016 on charges of terrorism or ties to terrorism. Ankara has slapped that label on more or less any teacher, judge, journalist, civil servant, or academic who refuses to fall in line.
Ethnic cleansing
Amnesty International and the UN's Middle East committee have both published detailed reports documenting torture inside Turkish detention facilities. In March 2023, a panel of international judges and legal experts submitted an evidence file to the International Criminal Court detailing brutal acts of torture, electric shocks, waterboarding, and sexual assault, against roughly 800 documented victims. That same file reportedly described how Turkish intelligence carried out illegal abductions in some 45 countries, flying Turkish citizens back home for interrogation. Some of them were never seen again.
Add to that the extensive testimony published by the UN Human Rights Office documenting war crimes and ethnic cleansing that Turkey and the militias it backs have carried out in Kurdish residential areas, expulsions, and demographic engineering, in places like Afrin in Syria, since resettled with people loyal to Ankara. It's all there in the human rights reports, for anyone who bothers to look.
The list keeps going. Documented executions. The destruction of civilian infrastructure during military operations in northern Syria and Iraq, where Erdoğan's forces deliberately bombed water facilities, power stations, hospitals, and grain silos. And that's before getting to what amounts to footnotes by comparison, like Turkey's withdrawal from the treaty protecting women from violence, or its ongoing suppression of free speech.
Time to get to work
Any honest observer has known for a long time that the main reason civilians and infrastructure in Gaza get hit is Hamas's own use of its population and facilities as human shields, a blatant violation of the laws of war. Hamas fights from mosques, dense residential neighborhoods, hospitals, and schools, and has even shot to kill civilians trying to flee.
All of this is well known to us. It isn't well known, or known at all, to much of the world. If Israel is serious about confronting Turkey's campaign of incitement and hypocrisy, it needs to get this information out there, everywhere, along with the record of Turkish aid, shelter, and funding, still ongoing, for the headquarters of the Hamas terrorist organization that massacred Israelis on October 7 and would do it again in a heartbeat if it could. Erdoğan's indictment of us could easily be flipped into an indictment of him. We just need to get to work.
