Dear Western World: please try not to self-destruct
A note on writing about the Gaza war
Hi folks,
I’d like to briefly follow up on my piece on Monday.
In it, I tried to address a question that has been bounding around my feed for a few months: why has Erdoğan’s response to the Gaza war been so reserved? People seem to think that Ankara’s relative silence is inconsistent with his Islamist commitments. I didn’t think so.
I argued that Turkey now has a long-term strategy for reshaping the region. This required patience and relentless focus on some variables like industrialization, as well as defense and intelligence capabilities. The plight of the Palestinians was a core concern for Turkey’s Islamists, but Erdoğan regime was now more focus on its structural dimension, rather than its acute humanitarian one. So it’s not that Turkey wasn’t serious about the Gaza war, it’s that it was in some ways far more serious than many seemed to think.
That was the post. I hit “send” and did some chores.
As I did, I felt some doubt rise to the surface of my mind. I sometimes fear that I’m perhaps too deep into Islamist/state sources to see things straight. Perhaps the Erdoğan people aren’t quite as radical as I think they are. Perhaps they are the comfortable, short-term pragmatists the liberal world thinks they are, rather than the long-term strategic revisionists I make them out to be.
It’s not that these doubts are very substantial, but I do like to sit with them and think them through.
I soon sat back down at my computer to catch up on the news. I listened to Erdoğan’s speech earlier that day, and found that he was basically backing up my entire argument.
He’s defensive when broaching the subject:
I would like to state this very clearly: Turkey is doing its best for Gaza and Palestine and will continue to do so. However, the solution to the problem requires establishing an effective and determined unity of understanding at the international level.
He’s clearly bothered by the Islamist perception that he hasn’t been pulling his weight. Passing the buck to the international, rather than the bilateral level (like a trade embargo) is a bit of a cop out. He’s saying that he doesn’t want to take an economic or diplomatic hit for something that’s only likely to have a negligible effect.
Then he’s going into his ideas for the longer term:
The first ground breaking for a Jewish settlement building in Gaza will alone be enough to show that the reason for this brutality is nothing else but theft, depravity and dishonor. The future of any country or people that legitimizes the systematic theft of Palestinian lands - a theft that has been going on since the Second World War - will not be secure. When the acts of murder and theft that they consider appropriate for Palestinians today are applied to them tomorrow, these countries and people will not even have the face to ask for help from anyone. The purpose of this painful but truthful observation is not to threaten anyone, but only to remind them of what will happen in the future.
This is what will happen to us if we, as Turkey and the Turkish nation, are not strong with our politics, economy, defense industry, army, social structure and institutions. Getting caught up in the excitement of daily problems and ignoring this great struggle of our country means throwing the country into a vortex. We have come a long way in every field in the past 21 years, but we are not yet at a place where we feel truly comfortable and safe. We need a little more time to finalize the projects we have initiated and to implement the programs that will follow them. God willing, we will see those days together.
I find that I could expand at length on every single sentence there, but I’ll try to be a more brief and move on to other things.
Erdoğan is describing a future in which Turkey is far more powerful, and Israel is far less so. He’s saying that Israel and its “collaborators” will be punished at that time. The way Turkey can build that kind of future is to remain focused on its “projects.” In the next 10 minutes or so, he boasts about growing Turkish weapons exports to Africa, Asia and the Middle East. I take these kinds of statements seriously.
Anyone familiar with Erdoğan and the regime he has built understands that this is a highly robust imperial enterprise, and that it fully intends to make the world very dangerous for Israel in the future. Israel assumes that it can outclass such projects indefinitely, but given demographic, economic and technological trends involved, I don’t think that’s viable. Israel also won’t be able to rely on future generations of Western leaders extending it near-unconditional support. Joe Biden was the last of the 1967 generation.
On Tuesday, I was happy to see that
, an American reporter at The Intercept covering national security, wrote a substack post entitled “Israel’s Last Chance” in which he cited my post. Here’s part of his argument:The conventional wisdom is that the lack of a peace agreement in any conflict is worse news for the weaker party. But I believe that in the context of this conflict that this logic does not hold. In the long-term, so long as ethnic cleansing is off the table, no peace is worse news for Israel than the Palestinians. Despite boasting the Middle East’s only nuclear weapons and a militarized state worthy of Prussia, Israel is a small country in a region where it is deeply isolated. A deal with the Arab states in exchange for a two-state solution, despite the compromises entailed, would grant it much needed friends and partners in the region, as well as revived legal and political legitimacy. That deal is still on the table. Yet the Israeli government rejects it, instead relying on its traditional approach of using blanket U.S. support to insulate itself from having to make any tough choices. This is not going to be a sustainable approach in a world where U.S. power is in relative decline, and views on Israel domestically are undergoing generational turnover.
I think that’s right. I also think that Hussain’s tone was appropriate. He wasn’t making a moralistic argument, he was taking the moral and political landscape as given and pointing out that Israel was going to have serious problems in the future if they continue on this path.
A third thing I read this week is by Pankaj Mishra, who has been a big influence on me over the years. In a lecture entitled “The Shoah after Gaza,” Mishra made a much broader argument about the Holocaust and its place in the international order since. He’s asking how Israel, a country that was created as a refuge for the victims of the world’s most infamous genocide, has “collapsed into violent nationalism” and is credibly accused of the same crime. His conclusions should be alarming:
Israel today is dynamiting the edifice of global norms built after 1945, which has been tottering since the catastrophic and still unpunished war on terror and Vladimir Putin’s revanchist war in Ukraine. The profound rupture we feel today between the past and the present is a rupture in the moral history of the world since the ground zero of 1945 – the history in which the Shoah has been for many years the central event and universal reference.
Mishra is known for his biting critique of liberalism, but he’s actually making a very conservative argument here. He’s saying that the Western world is destroying the foundations of the order it has built. This is beyond a moral critique, it’s a heartfelt warning.
Mishra has said that he considers himself a “stepchild of the West.” I have always identified with that, and perhaps Murtaza Hussain feels similarly. It’s strange that people like us should find ourselves in a position to make such warnings. It’s probably too late.