The Al-Aqsa Flood invites us not to pity Gaza but to join it

The protests and demonstrations of solidarity staged all over the world against the crime of genocide that Zionist Israel has been committing in Gaza for 109 days are regarded as a sign that the conscience of humanity has still not died. Indeed, the scenes of solidarity with unprecedented crowds that we see, first in Europe and also in the US and Latin America, are enough to make one hopeful for humanity.

The leadership shown by South Africa, only 2 percent of whose population is Muslim, in bringing Israel before the International Court of Justice also showed that the event in Gaza is a human matter beyond being a matter of religion. (By the way, for those who ask where Turkey is in this matter, let us say this. The chairman of the TBMM Palestine Friendship Group, Hasan Turan, and its other members, whom we visited last week with the delegation of the Justice and Democracy Forum, explained that 3 members of parliament had been assigned on behalf of the group to follow the hearings and to give every kind of information and document support. It is also known that three thousand lawyers from Turkey are now working effectively to collect information and documents against Israel and deliver them to the relevant places.)

"Solidarity with the Palestinians" is at a level never seen in the whole world in the face of any massacre, genocide, or human rights violation, earlier or even currently taking place. Yet the genocide in Gaza is not the world's first and only genocide, or the only event that should have raised the conscience of humanity. In Syria, close to 1 million people were killed by the regime's own hand or by the Russian and Iranian forces the regime called into the country, and 12 million people were displaced. The tragedy is still going on there, but nobody there cares. In Myanmar, 500 thousand poor, wretched people were subjected to genocide by being humiliated, crushed, and burned in the most severe ways. Nobody hears of anyone staging a protest or a demonstration here and there as a token remedy. In Yemen, hundreds of thousands of people, with their wives and children, died bombed or from hunger because of the senseless war and occupation there, and the problem still continues; there was no demonstration anywhere in the world for this either. Currently in Sudan, again through the proxy wars of certain international balances, hundreds of thousands of people are face to face with death. It does not even trigger anyone's feeling of pity. In Rwanda, 800 thousand people were slaughtered under France's supervision within two weeks, and by the time people heard of what happened, the event was long past.

Looking at all these events, we can say that humanity has shown much greater sensitivity toward the genocide that Israel has been committing against Palestine in Gaza for 109 days than in relation to the other events.

According to one thesis, conscience cannot remain silent in the face of this oppression because people are more inclined to solidarity with the oppressed and the victimized, to empathize and take a stand. This thesis does not explain why greater sensitivity is being shown here than in the other events. As for oppression, perhaps greater oppressions were committed in Syria, but people did not nurture the same empathy with the oppressed of Syria; they did not even see Myanmar, Rwanda, Yemen.

Undoubtedly one reason is that the event is taking place right in the heart of the modern world and that practically every moment of it is documented live. Israel is seen as a Western country in the Middle East, and the Western world sees Israel as the only actor in the Middle East to carry out its own values, its order, even its plans. It built its own citizens in the modern age with these rote ideas. But at the same time, with everything it does, Israel shows the violation of all the criteria formed in Europe. Israel is in fact becoming an experience in which all the stories the Western world tells itself and the world have flopped, and a disappointment for European citizens both about Israel and about their own countries.

The third and real reason is that the victim is not at all powerless and weak, and this is a reason that needs to be dwelt on in itself, one that requires us to review the myths of solidarity with the victim. That people are always in solidarity with the victim and will always side with them is only a myth. Many politicians who invest in this myth make a separate effort to place themselves in the position of victim. The examples they trust are those who came to power after really having experienced a victimhood in the past: Erdoğan's story in Turkey is such a story. İmamoğlu, for example, wanted to imitate the same story, but it did not take.

People identify with the victim only when they find in that victim something that will represent themselves, when they see a potential that can meet their own hopes and expectations. People did not support Erdoğan when they were being victimized merely because he was a victim; they loved him and became attached to him because they saw in him the intention, will, and ability to remove the injustices from which they themselves also suffered and to correct the distortions.

The oppression that is being lived in Gaza before people's eyes, documented instantly, is bringing the conscience of humanity into the open. But in the resistance against it too, people see a heroism capable of coping with the injustices and oppression on which the world we live in is built. There is a participation not only in the oppression in Gaza but in the redeeming force, the resistance, the rebellion against it.

In the patience, perseverance, and the way of looking at life and death shown by the people who die, are wounded, and are pulled from the rubble, as much as by the resisting brave men of Gaza, one feels a total way of life, an invitation to a worldview, to a salvation.

Thus the Al-Aqsa Flood, while having an effect that awakens people against the media order, the production-consumption order, the ideological chains in which the world finds itself and which have taken all humanity captive, heralds a flood in the real sense that is coming. In this flood it kindles a light of hope that those who board the ship of resistance in Gaza will be saved.