Waswasa

The Mavi Marmara action was an event that offered the world an opportunity to expose most clearly Israel's unjust privileges and its tyrannically established order. It is the result of a common sensitivity that has rarely brought all the people of Turkey, Turks, Kurds and Arabs alike, together in parallel feelings. Very few occasions in Turkey are able to produce an alliance at this level.

The intensity of the alliance that had been achieved in the level of participation in the Mavi Marmara voyage rose to much higher levels in the face of Israel's savage attack on this ship. Israel, which attacked in international waters a ship that had set out with a wholly civilian intention and method to put an end to a crime being committed against humanity, the crime of holding a people of nearly 2 million under blockade, and martyred 9 of our unarmed, defenseless citizens, has no valid argument with which to defend itself. Because it has none, trying to steer the UN's reports questioning the incident by manipulating them with wheeling and dealing, as it has always done, could produce no result other than making a mess of things for itself, and it did not. The spear did not fit in the sack this time, because this time, as it tries to stuff the spear into the sack, it is meeting the objection and revolt of Turkey, which has called its bluff.

Israel is a country that has gotten away with all the wrongs it has committed so far, because the protection and support it receives from the US, and the shield of defense formed by the excessive understanding it receives from Europe, have made it untouchable. The vetoing by the US of a great many UN resolutions adopted against it, and its own failure to comply with those not vetoed, came to be seen as its most natural right. Thus the order it created in its own way formed a twilight zone in the Middle East which, though very hard to bear, gave a kind of feeling of permanence.

So much so that Israel's order even provided the formula for the survival of the dictators, formed after World War II and detached from their peoples, in the region.

The formula was simple: an official ideology that would never lead to any concrete action but was as anti-Israel as could be. These dictators had the right to give this anti-Israel discourse a premium forever, but none of them could have any politics that would genuinely threaten the order Israel had established in the region.

It was even known that Gaddafi was at one point seeking an atomic bomb that would destroy Israel, but he never fired so much as a bullet at Israel, because that was not his mission within this order. All the Arab countries have anti-Israel practices to the point of considering invalid even a passport that has been stamped for entry to or exit from Israel, but beyond that they have no role.

Anti-Israelism is a strange ideology that establishes their own legitimacy among their peoples as an official ideology, and even produces a discourse of grievance on behalf of Israel's injustice. The Syrian regime is a regime able to use a grievance arising from the occupation of the Golan to secure its people's support. Instead of accounting for how it failed to defend the Golan, it can use having been slapped by Israel as an occasion for pity. While this same Assad regime is massacring its own people with a greater brutality than Israel's, we learn that in the background it had in fact abandoned the Golan, with its rich water resources, to Israel through an agreement and without fighting at all.

If one of the most important factors that triggered the shaking of this complex, two-faced order that Israel established in the region, based on cooperation with fraudulent leaders, was Prime Minister Erdoğan's outburst at Davos, another was the Mavi Marmara voyage. Those who study the region closely clearly see what a disenchanting effect both events had on their own leaders. Turkey did not do these things by planning them from the start, but people who act in accordance with their character also have corresponding roles and consequences in history.

Turkey has shaken off the lethargy that had been strewn over it for quite some time and forced it to accept what is as it is. It has turned toward saying wrong to the wrong and stop to oppression as a condition of its own existence. No one can of course say that doing this is risk-free. But is there any struggle for freedom that does not involve risk? Especially in the context of the criticisms Ahmet Altan and some liberals have voiced lately, would you like to grant the state the right to prohibit any movement, any action that contains risk, do you really desire such a state? What could be the propriety of granting this interventionist initiative, which we do not grant the state at all in the Kurdish issue, against the Mavi Marmara, which acted with no intention or preparation of violence and with a wholly civilian instinct, or against the Palestinian cause?

First, the Mavi Marmara is a movement undertaken entirely by civil society and with the highest possible social support behind it. Second, Turkey's being a country that struggles to establish a more just order in its region and in the world is not a luxurious fantasy. Turkey is being asked to be content with a style of government focused only on providing material prosperity for its own people. Its taking an interest in what is happening in the region is seen as a luxurious adventurism. Yet both the prosperity provided is possible partly thanks to these regional foreign policy interests, and what happens in our region concerns us not through luxurious interests but out of necessity and in the first degree. The bombs raining on Gaza are felt directly today by the great majority of Turkey's people.

Despite a rightness that it has never been able to attain in the history of this context, the invitation today to return to the beginning of the Mavi Marmara voyage and to question the rightness of the voyage, leaving the thief almost no share of guilt, is nothing but whispering of doubt (vesvese). All of it is vesvese...