Turkey's "Palestine Fetish": More Bark than Bite

In recent years, Turkey has become one of the most vocal supporters of the Palestinian cause, trying to break the Gaza blockade with a flotilla, providing safe haven and funds to senior Hamas operatives, shrilly condemning the Jewish state, and eroding the longstanding and important Turkish-Israeli alliance. But, argues the Turkish journalist Burak Bekdil, President Erdogan rarely puts his country’s money where its mouth is. This is because, historically, the Turkish government has always cared much less about the Palestinian people than about the near-magical political value of the Palestinian cause:

“The Palestinian cause” is a unique charm that brings together Turks from different ideologies. Turkish Islamists view it as an indispensable part of “jihad”; the conservatives feel attached to it because it has a religious connotation; for the leftists it is part of an “anti-imperialist” struggle; the nationalists embrace it just because most Turks embrace it. In the 1970s, when a dozen Turks a day on average were being killed in street violence, the “Palestinian cause” was the only issue that otherwise warring fractions of the Turkish left, right, and Islamists could agree on.

Read more at Gatestone

More about: Palestinians, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF