Addressing the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) in December, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan crossed the line against Israel and accused the country of failing to respect rights, justice and humanity for Palestinians and inciting crises in the region.Mr. Erdogan needs to put his own house in order before criticizing others. To understand Erdogan’s unsubstantiated accusations, one must get the picture of how Israel and Turkey treat their own minorities. While the Nation-State Law of Israel recognizes the country as a homeland of the Jews with Hebrew as its official language, the same law gives Arabic a special status to be managed by laws. The Israeli Arab citizens have the freedom to study in standard Israeli schools, Arabic schools or even Jewish schools. In addition, all government publishing, including traffic signs, posts, documentations and identifications, are printed in Arabic alongside Hebrew. The Israeli Arabs freely practice their religion in the Jewish state, and there are even Islamic parties in Israel. In fact, Israel is the only Middle-Eastern country where Jews, Christians and Muslims coexist peacefully. The constitution of Turkey, on the other hand, emphasizes a monolithic Turkish identity of the state and people, with absolutely no reference to the existence of Kurds or other minorities within the borders of Turkey. The Turkish constitution affirms that only Turkish can be taught as a “mother tongue” to Turkish citizens, thus imposing Turkish on Kurds as their primary language. Given that Turkey fails even to legally recognize the existence of more than 15 million Kurds within its borders, Erdogan has no right to criticize Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. Despite Erdogan’s criticism, Israel has allowed some autonomy to the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and has transferred the rights of the natural gas offshore Gaza to the Palestinian Authority. Turkey, on the other hand, refuses all autonomy to Kurds.Even Saddam Hussein, the former dictator of Iraq who used weapons of mass destruction and massacred hundreds of thousands of Kurds in Iraq, granted a shady autonomy to the Kurds, allowed education in Kurdish, occasionally wore Kurdish traditional clothes and even attempted to learn Kurdish.It is grotesque of Erdogan to accuse Israel of failing to respect the rights of Palestinians when his own country is stepping over the rights of Kurds in Turkey and in the region. Imagine if the Israeli government prevented Israeli Arabs from voting in Arab areas of Israel by relocating ballot boxes away from towns to discourage people from expressing their voting rights, and committed other electoral irregularities to reduce the tally of the Arab parties in the Knesset, or that Israel complained about the use of Arabic language in Japan or Arabic tweets posted by American military, or that Israeli officials publicly stated that they would fight an independent Arab state, even in Africa, or that Israel refused to negotiate with Arab parties that recognize the territorial integrity of Israel and were willing to engage Israel to work out a peaceful solution to the Israel-Palestine issue, and that Israel sacked elected Arab mayors on unfounded charges.Erdogan cannot accuse Israel of inciting crises in the region when his own government is working with ISIS-linked groups. Imagine if Israel invaded a neighboring country on the basis of fighting terrorism but with the sole intent to ethnically cleanse the area and to dismantle a diverse Arab-led administration that recognized the right of Israel to exist and sacrificed thousands of lives in the war against ISIS, and that Israel perceived an Arab entity as an existential threat to Israel, or that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and his top lieutenants were killed in Israeli-controlled zones of a neighboring state. Perhaps Erdogan should look at the mirror before making criticisms of others. Instead criticizing Israel to consolidate radical Islamists around himself, he should respond to the calls of the Kurdish leaders to resume negotiations to resolve the Kurdish issue in Turkey. Only then may Erdogan earn the right to criticize other countriesThe author is a freelance political observer.
