Erdoğan has been consistent on Gaza

On Israel-Palestine, Ankara is more concerned with structural issues than acute humanitarian needs

There is today a global effort to achieve a cease-fire in Gaza to save Palestinian lives. People are protesting across Western capitols, the airwaves are full of indignant rage, diplomats and NGO workers are crisscrossing the world, negotiating hostages and food supplies. In the United States, two people have literally doused their bodies in fuel and set themselves on fire in protest of Israel’s bombing campaign.

Many would have expected Turkey, a highly ambitious, big Muslim country, to have played a leading role in those efforts. That hasn’t happened.

President Erdoğan clearly has strong feelings about the conflict, but did not come out strongly in the Palestinian camp after October 7. He was reluctant to cut diplomatic ties with Israel or push hard for getting aid into Gaza. The country that took Israel to the ICJ with charges of genocide wasn’t Turkey, but South Africa. In 2010, a Turkish flotilla of humanitarian aid tried to get through the Israeli naval blockade of Gaza. Today, the most visible vessels between the countries are large container ships maintaining the robust trade relationship between Turkish and Israeli firms.

Turkish officials do speak out in support of Hamas and the Palestinians as a whole, and condemn the Israelis in very strong language. Turkey has also made a show of breaking up Israeli spy rings at home, and it’s said that Turkish intelligence is helping Palestinians, including Hamas, which sounds credible. Still, that level of activity isn’t in proportion to Turkey’s current standing on the ideological spectrum. It’s also not in proportion to Erdoğan’s personal standing as the big, popular Muslim leader denouncing Western hypocrisy.

This isn’t lost on Islamists in Turkey, who are either defensive about this or outright angry at Erdoğan. Many sympathetic Islamists abroad are disappointed with Turkey. This Palestinian man, speaking in Turkish, channels this sentiment very clearly:

So what is going on? Why is Turkey so slow on an issue that is clearly foundational for its new elite? Why isn’t Erdoğan exerting more leverage on Israel? Why be in power if you’re going to be so reserved about acting out your beliefs?

Is all this consistent with Erdoğan’s Islamism?

I think it is.

Let’s take another look at that global effort to stop the Gaza war, or at least to achieve a cease-fire.

I’ve argued before that this effort can roughly be divided into two positions: most people in the West have a humanitarian and/or anti-colonialist agenda. They think that Israel’s campaign represents the worst aspects of Western power, and must be stopped. The solution is immediate cease fire and some form of structural reform in the West, or at least the U.S.-Israel relationship. Most people in the Muslim world, and especially Islamist places like Turkey, have a civilizational agenda. They are used to seeing the Israel-Palestine conflict as a symbol of the Muslim world’s defeat. From this perspective, the problem is that the West is powerful and the Islamic world is weak. The solution there is a grand revival of the Muslim world as a geopolitical power.

Note that the two positions operate on different timelines. The first position has immediate and medium-term concerns. The second position has more long-term concerns of weakening the enemy and improving the position of the Islamic world. It’s important to them, for example, that the Palestinians stay in Gaza, or that the Israelis pay dearly for their attacks, not just in blood and treasure, but with their reputation across the world. Like all realists, they are somewhat desensitized to death tolls. They care more about the economic factors, technology, military and intelligence capabilities. The most urgent question here isn’t “how can I stop this conflict?” it’s “how can I leverage this bout to improve my position going into the next?”

The Erdoğan regime has that kind of gradualism built into its DNA. Let’s briefly go back to the 1990s to understand why that is.

Back then, Turkey’s Islamist movement (often called Millî Görüş, or “National View”) was led by Necmettin Erbakan, a charismatic, but aging figure, and an up-and-coming generation of younger Islamists wanted to take over from him. Soon the Islamists were divided between the yenilikçiler and gelenekçiler, meaning roughly “novel-ists” (as in, people seeking out novelty) and “traditionalists.”

The two camps disagreed more about methods than goals. Both were devoted to the Islamist cause, both had a radical vision of a new, non-Kemalist Turkey that would rise to become a geopolitical power of its own. The question was how to get there. The younger “novel-ists” wanted to embrace the winds of change in the post-Cold War era. They wanted to adjust to the Western-dominated system, and gradually engineer change from within it. The “traditionalists” felt uncomfortable with that. It sounded like giving in to the corruption of the Western world. The way to build an Islamic order was to plant yourself in the ground, resist global powers long enough, and the country would eventually come around to support you.

In the Fazilet Party’s May 2000 congress, the “traditionalist” candidate won.

The “novel-ists” decided not to stay. In 2001, they founded the splinter party. The “AK Party” would reach out to Turkey’s liberals as well as EU capitols in order to create a new party platform. In 2002, it won national elections with 34% of the vote. The early AK Party was a mix of Third Way Liberalism and European Christian Conservatism. And it worked. The Islamists now got more and more power, and gradually eliminated threats to their rule. I’d argue that parts of the AK Party did what the traditionalists feared - people like Gül and Davutoğlu did become pretty comfortable with the Western liberal order, but Erdoğan kept bringing the movement back to its Islamist/nationalist commitments. He eventually did change the Republic from within, to the point where he can now enact some of his more radical ideas in the realms of social, economic and defense policy.

In this process, it’s very important to adjust the speed of change. Erdoğan’s genius lies in knowing when to go fast and when to go slowly. His vision for the country remains just as radical as that of Erbakan, he just knows how to shroud it in ambiguity.

It’s a classic dispute between the radical and the pragmatist. It’s a bit of a stretch, but consider the scene below from Lincoln.

It’s the end of the American Civil War, and the Union has basically won, and its politicians are trying to figure out what comes after (commonly referred to as “The Reconstruction”). The radical abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones) has a plan to punish former slaveholders in the South by giving their lands to the emancipated slave population. Abraham Lincoln (Daniel Day Lewis) thinks this is too radical, and that an emancipatory agenda needs to be stretch across time. But leaving it to time means trusting in the people, and Stevens doesn’t think that’s a good idea:

You claim you trust them, but you know what the people are. You know that the inner compass that should direct the soul towards justice ossified in white men and women - north and south - onto utter uselessness, through tolerating the evil of slavery!

So Stevens thinks that it can’t be left to time. If Lincoln has the opportunity to do ram “hard reconstruction” down the country’s throat, he should. Stevens is arguing that leaders should trust their own moral compass over that of others. Lincoln has a very practical objection:

A compass, I learned when I was surveying; it’ll point you true north from where you’re standing, but it’s got no advice about the swamps and the deserts and chasms that you’ll encounter along the way. If in pursuit of your destination you plunge ahead heedless of obstacles and achieve nothing more than to sink in a swamp, what’s the use of knowing true north?

We suspect that Lincoln shares the abolitionist vision of freedom, but he also thinks that overly zealous defense of that vision is self-defeating. Realist leadership is about figuring out the winding path between the present moment and the radical vision. What I would add to the analogy is that the realist leader also can’t be too open about his direction of travel. He can only reveal bits of it at a time and let people guess his real intentions. That way he can pick up fellow travelers along the way.

Erdoğan too, is a consummate realist, and achieved a great deal as such. He has attained a high degree of freedom at home, but is still very careful abroad.

That gets us back to the question of Turkey’s policy on Israel-Palestine.

Erdoğan could try to take radical steps against Israel. He could lobby for a boycott of the Israeli economy, send a huge flotilla of humanitarian ships, or lead the charge at the ICJ, but those things probably interfere with his other plans. And he has other plans. He wants time to grow the Turkish economy, build indigenous weapons systems, develop relationships in the region. He also wants to manufacture more consent among the people of the region - not just among Palestinians, but among Egyptians, Saudis, and others. I’ve argued before (here and there) that he has taken this year as a time to slow down, mostly in anticipation of the U.S. elections.

The Erdoğan palace is probably also noting that Israel’s political position is deteriorating. While the Israeli public seems to be willing to engage in what amounts to ethnic cleansing of Palestinian territories (Netanyahu’s term is “voluntary resettlement”), and Western elites seem to be willing to look the other way, vocal segments of the West aren’t. If Israel’s bonds to the West, and especially the United States, can be weakened, the Islamist position in the Middle East will have improved significantly by the time there’s another war. Why interrupt your enemy when he’s making a mistake?

Of course Turkish policy isn’t very explicit. I don’t think these things are captured in some strategy document, or even discussed along these lines in strategy meetings. They certainly weren’t in the 1990s. Rather, it’s ingrained in the strategic culture surrounding the immediate leadership. This also ensures that there’s a high degree of ambiguity surrounding the core aims of the movement. That way, people can look at the Erdoğan regime and see what they want to see.

As we get deeper into the current global bout of nationalism, perhaps positions on Palestine-Israel too, will get a bit more pronounced. If you’re a humanitarian, you hold human life above any goal, political or otherwise. You try to save lives first, deal with political issues later. If you’re an Islamist (or Zionist for that matter), your political vision for the future is sacred, and you are ready to sacrifice life to attain it. You still grieve for your fallen and help your people in need, but you have a bigger vision in mind, and you accept the loss of life in striving for that goal. Hence the concept of “martyr.”

That’s why a realist Islamist strategy that’s focused on the long-term geopolitical confrontation won’t be as active in global efforts as one might expect. It’s also why I think Erdoğan’s conduct has been consistent with his larger vision. For Erdoğan, the more power he can accrue, the more justice there will be in the world. He and his team have learned to focus on that relentlessly.

What’s interesting here is that the anti-imperialist camp in the West and the wider Global South is so active that it now makes the Islamist position look bad. That’s why we see increasing tension between the realist and humanitarian camps among the Islamists.