Keep watching Turkey

No one expected that Turkey's new foreign policy initiatives would be passed over quietly by anyone. Turkey, whose every move and every step is subject to every kind of assessment, and the AK Party government in Turkey, once again showed on this occasion how important they are in setting the agenda and determining balances, not only inside the country but outside it too.

The initiative Turkey took toward ending a state of crisis that had lasted 7 months with Russia and 6 years with Israel, and reaching a certain resolution, was quickly assessed by the opposition as the bankruptcy of Turkey's foreign policy. First of all, how can the foreign policy of a country able to make a maneuver that has resonated so much, echoing loudly in one way or another throughout the world, be assessed as bankruptcy? We would like an answer to this. Second, the fact that in reaching this point of agreement Turkey has been in the position of the one requested rather than the one requesting is a clear sign of its rising power, and this needs to be seen.

Third, this political step is not in principle a retreat from the policy pursued until now; it is a harvest of that policy.

Of course, since those making these criticisms define politics at some point as standing like a stake, as a requirement of this definition they assess a political maneuver as the bankruptcy of a politics.

Though the only field in which they regard politics as standing like a stake is their absolute opposition to the AK Party and President Erdoğan. Apart from that, they are also seen to have a dizzying speed in maneuvers of every kind of cooperation with everyone and on every ground.

While the CHP's own Kemalist codes stand above the party, and while its nationalist attachment on the Kurdish issue is known to all, the temporary alliance it has built with the HDP merely because it will bring a gain in opposition to the AK Party is increasingly on the way to becoming the party's permanent identity. The envoys sent to the US itself for a possible coup against the AK Party by leftist intellectuals close to the CHP in the days of the coup were also recorded as a fresh anecdote about the CHP's view of the US, of foreign policy, of matters such as Turkey's independence. In fact, for the CHP, to be extremely radical in belief and extremely pragmatic in practice in foreign policy is the best definition.

In the face of many chronic problems of Turkey, there is a paradigm that for many years has turned non-solution into a political economy in every field, with a politics that describes

"the best solution is non-solution"

. In this understanding, since friendships and enmities are both eternal, there are no changes in politics, and once problems arise one must get used to living with them.

In contrast, there is an entirely different paradigm that perceives politics as solving the problems that emerge for certain goals, as advancing toward the goal by solving problems.

Those who look from that paradigm do not see politics as a field of metaphysical constants.

Problems are solved to the extent they can be solved, and the one who takes the initiative to solve them comes out ahead.

Hearing the criticisms made especially by Kılıçdaroğlu and the CHP members over the agreement with Israel, with which our relations had reached the breaking point six years ago because of Mavi Marmara, one cannot help asking when the CHP became such a radical enemy of Israel.

Turkey had set three conditions for the normalization of the relations severed after the Mavi Marmara incident.

These conditions sufficiently expressed that the demand for normalization had come from Israel and that this demand had gradually turned into pressure bringing in international parties.

Without these demands and pressures, Turkey was not seriously bothered by the severing of relations with Israel. Relations could have gone on like this for a longer time. That is, the side wanting the restoration of relations was not Turkey but Israel.

After six years, only after its conditions were met, Turkey agreed to take this normalization step.

Turkey's conditions, of course, were not met exactly as it wanted. Turkey wanted more, and still continues to want more. It wants the Gaza blockade to be lifted entirely. It wants Israel to give up its settler policies entirely. It wants it to give up its occupying, oppressive policies against the Palestinians

.

Having made such an agreement does not prevent Turkey from taking a stand against the policy Israel continues on these matters, and does not require it to remain silent about it.

On the contrary, Turkey will still continue to demand that Israel withdraw from the lands it occupied after 1967 and that the Palestinians return to their own lands, and to press for it.

It is our wish that all these conditions be fulfilled, but until they are fulfilled, there is at present an urgent obligation to intervene in a bleeding that must be stopped.

From here, from comfortable settings, it is easy to be radical on behalf of the people of Gaza

.

Yet the people of Gaza are deprived of their most basic humanitarian needs, and these needs must be seen to.

For this reason, the agreement is not against the people of Gaza as some try to distort it, but on the contrary an agreement made for the people of Gaza themselves and with their interests and basic human rights primarily in view. Were it not so, such enthusiastic messages of thanks would not have come to Turkey for days for what it has done from and for the people of Gaza. Most recently the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the world issued a message of thanks in the same direction.

It is of course possible to ask what this normalization step brings to and takes from whom. But this question must be asked while constantly keeping in view a very basic reality of politics. In politics seeking to gain alone is neither acceptable nor possible. An agreement cannot be one-sided; by its nature it has parties, and it is not possible to make or sustain an agreement without a sustainable mutual gain for every party.

The agreements with Israel and Russia are essentially not Turkey's transition to a new phase of foreign policy, but a step in harmony with, and consistent within, the foreign policy it has pursued until now. Those who have difficulty understanding this policy are piling on in the hope that something from this maneuver may fall to their share. We advise them to keep watching Turkey a little more carefully.