Israeli exceptionalism: whatever it does is excusable

If we were asked to give another name to the world order we live in, we could easily call it "Israeli exceptionalism." Within the established world order, whether we like it or not, there are rules that everyone, for better or worse, feels bound by and obliged to follow. Even war has rules, a law, an ethics, and everyone observes them up to a point, and those who do not are subject to a series of international sanctions. Even Russia is now subjected to a series of political and economic sanctions because of these rules it violated in Ukraine.

All of these rules that bind everyone are set aside when it comes to Israel. Either every measure of reason, sense and conscience is disabled and the matter is passed over with a fait accompli statement, or even that much of an absurd explanation is withheld from world public opinion.

Israel is an occupier. But in this exceptional order its occupation is normalised. It was founded first of all by subjecting the Palestinians to a great deportation from the lands it occupied in 1948. Then in 1967 it spread once more over wider lands and continued its occupation. Its occupations of 1948 were struck out, made a fait accompli and regarded now as its own land, but that it is an occupier on the lands it spread over in 1967 is a fact accepted by the whole world, including through UN reports. A series of UN resolutions were adopted that it must withdraw from these lands, but Israel recognised none of these resolutions, ignored them, and while ignoring them, committed acts of insolence. It mocked the world order disrespectfully, no one took it personally, and what it did was seen as normal. As if to say: it's Israel, whatever it does is fitting.

That was not enough: on the Palestinians living in the lands it occupied, it committed countless rights violations every day. It seized their homes, killed them arbitrarily, made occupations within occupation routine. While doing all this it committed every kind of crime against humanity, but all of it was excused, because it was treated as a society that had been subjected to genocide in the past and was now collecting what it was owed.

But the Palestinians owed it nothing. It was not the Palestinians who had inflicted those atrocities on this community. The Europeans who inflicted those atrocities on the Jews loaded their debt onto the Palestinians and unleashed Israel upon them. Israel is collecting its receivables from Palestinians who have no connection whatsoever to the affair.

What kind of debtor-creditor relationship is this? What kind of receivable is this, which grants Israel the privilege of unlimited crime, and can clear every oppression it commits and every violation it makes as though the price had been paid in advance? Europeans may be indebted to Israel because of the genocide they carried out against the Jews, but what has that debt to do with the Palestinians?

Of course we ask this in all our purity. It is a question that pure reason and conscience immediately raise. But the Western world, whose conscience has dried up and whose soul and mind have been thoroughly tarred, can open a way for itself even from here. They want to drag the whole world down this road, but the whole world is not obliged by this debt. President Erdoğan, first at the parliamentary group meeting and then at the Palestine rally, once again struck this truth in the world's face. He pointed to this debt relationship that virtually condemns self-evident truths to distortion, and said that Türkiye has no debt to Israel.

The officiousness shown in excusing every oppression of Israel, every monstrosity, disproportionate and senseless use of force, within the framework of the "right to self-defence" has no explanation other than the debt. Unfortunately, trying to excuse an aggression that has left humanity and does not befit even animals by calling it the "right of defence" is nothing other than insolently mocking humanity's intelligence. Indeed, this insolence and this mocking attitude are now perceived all over the world, and peoples everywhere are raising their reaction against Israeli exceptionalism.

WHAT HAPPENED TO PALESTINE'S RIGHT OF SELF-DEFENCE?

Against Israel's "right of self-defence," which they try to turn into a taboo, people ask: "so where is the right of self-defence of the Palestinians, whose lands are under occupation and whose lives, property and sanctities are under threat every day?" The crowds are breaking the taboo.

In the face of Israeli occupation, as from the beginning, today too it is Palestine that more needs to defend itself. Israel needs to defend itself not against Palestine but against its own aggression. The real threat to Israel comes not from the Palestinians but from its own aggression, and from America and Europe, who regard it with favour in all its crimes and even incite it. These incitements bring it face to face with the wrath and flood of the Palestinians, who are the ones truly invoking the right of self-defence.

To describe as terrorist organisations the movements that defend their own lands against occupation and try to drive the enemy out of the lands it has occupied is a cheap and disgusting cunning. The UN recognises Hamas as the organisation of a people trying to defend its own land, and that is the truth. The US, which gives the criminal occupier Israel, through the power of its weapons, the means to commit every violation and which supports it in every circumstance, has no weight whatsoever in labelling Hamas a terrorist organisation. They are occupiers anyway, and the characterisations, even the arguments, they put forward to make the legitimacy of the resistance facing them questioned have no equivalent in the language of law. Against the US and Israel, which try to make the exceptional law of the sovereign valid, universal and international law does not regard armed resistance to occupation as terror. The US and Israel are not in a position to decide that the force facing them is a terrorist organisation. Europe, because of its debt relationship to Israel, has corrupted its own legal process.

Hamas is the Kuva-yı Milliye of the Palestinian people. That in the 100th year of the Republic some CHP members, and especially Özgür Özel, tried to lash out at Erdoğan, who described Hamas not as a terrorist organisation but as an organisation defending its homeland, shows strikingly where everyone stands and what they understand of independence, freedom and the national struggle. Indeed, the Greeks too regarded the Kuva-yı Milliye movement as "a terrorist group." Should it have been surrendered to?

Meanwhile, Netanyahu's words to the Arab countries to the effect of "if we cannot destroy Hamas, it will be your turn too" are a simple, cunning ploy to make Arab countries also accept Hamas as a terrorist organisation. There is no one who does not know that the real threat to Arab countries is Israel, but unfortunately his words seem to rest on a ground of agreement with the countries that have so far accepted this exchange of perceptions with him. Even if some Arab countries do not recognise Israel, they know Hamas as Israel has introduced it to them. They need to know that the legitimacy to be gained by equating Hamas's resistant violence with Israel's aggressive, massacring, genocidal, occupying violence will be of no benefit.

They need to look at what motivates the US and European countries that line up behind Israel despite all its criminality. No good will come to them from this motivation. We must hold the ranks and close them.