Turkey's decision: a more just world

The level that Turkey's relations with Israel have reached in the context of the Mavi Marmara, and the policy it is displaying at this level, are securing for it a very important position in the turbulent and uncertain course of the international order. Turkey is taking the initiative to re-establish an order that, in earlier periods, had been set up entirely against Turkey and the peoples of the Middle East. In doing so, it is by no means being dragged into an unjust or aggressive position; without becoming "the party that unilaterally breaks" the agreements it has entered into earlier as a country or state, it is putting on the agenda the rewriting of the content of those agreements on fairer terms.

In its relations with Israel, Turkey is perhaps for the first time in history playing the role of a playmaker.

Since the day Israel was founded, the initiative has never been in Turkey's hands, whether in bilateral terms or in conditions that also involved the US or Europe. When we probe why this has been so, we come face to face with a picture of political incapacity and submission on Turkey's part that we will always lament. Behind this appearance of incapacity lies the influence of a military bureaucracy whose political will was fragmented and unintegrated, and which had grown largely accustomed to acting free of political will.

Although it was the institution of politics that answered to the people for the activities of this military bureaucracy, no one from this bureaucracy ever had a chance to be held to account. For in this strange division of labor, the field of foreign policy too had been largely militarized and closed to politics. Had the military or foreign-ministry bureaucracy pursued a policy on its own initiative on Turkey's behalf in this field, things might still have developed differently; yet the bureaucracy that had closed the field to politics inside Turkey was doing nothing on the global scale either but playing the roles written for it in another division of labor.

In truth, Turkey never deserved such submission, such an absence of politics, given its potential. It was never lacking in the capital needed to set up the game, to be at least an active actor within the game. The only thing it needed in order to set its material, spiritual and symbolic capital in motion toward a better world was belief in the existence of this capital and, of course, the determination to use it. In an environment where the political sphere had been narrowed one way or another, there was no way to produce this decision, which is the most important condition of politics, and there was none.

The world we live in is, by its nature, in a chaotic disorder. Its reflection on us creates the environments we call crises. What can gather it together, that is, resolve the crisis, is reasonable and regulating decisions capable of producing that decision. At a time when the world is heading toward a disorder that can no longer be endured, Turkey stands out as a country with decision-making capacity that can offer a new, gathering initiative.

What has happened with Israel is only one application of this position of Turkey as an actor holding decision-making power. Turkey is revising a decision made earlier by others, one so far from reason that no one today can stand behind it. It is making its own decision. The project called the Greater Middle East, embellished more than by anyone by its so-called radical opponents, could not form a decision, and could not have. Because it had no proposal at all that could gather together the disorder that has emerged in the Middle East. It could not have. By contrast, Turkey's present political performance holds more than enough of the decision that will gather this disorder together.

What those who imagine, in the name of a so-called anti-Americanism, that everything Turkey does here it does on behalf of the US do not realize (or perhaps, who knows, do realize) is that by this very route they are granting the US an absolute power that it does not possess at all. The mentality that has until now condemned Turkey to both the US and Israel was nothing other than the power attributed to them in this way. It is very important to be measured even when being hostile. Underestimating the enemy's power is stupidity, but imagining the enemy to have more power than it has takes you nowhere other than to surrendering to the enemy's power.

Israel is at a loss as to what to do in the crisis that has developed since Turkey took the initiative into its own hands. Foreign Minister Lieberman, faced with Turkey's decisions, is embarking on absurd quests to put Turkey in a difficult position. He talks about establishing relations with Armenian lobbies and openly supporting the PKK. Quite apart from the fact that this would amount to a declaration of war, he is in no condition even to calculate what contribution exposing the already existing Israel-PKK relationship would make to the resolution of Turkey's Kurdish question. How long can the Kurdish people stand behind an organization whose relations with Israel have been exposed to this extent? Would Israel's more open support than what currently exists make the PKK flourish? If not, what would it do? Undoubtedly this too will be the Kurds' decision.

Turkey's decision is a fairer world for everyone.

This decision will be one that forces the other actors to take a position. Those who are late in keeping pace with this decision will lose.