What kind of Kuva-yi Milliye movement is Hamas?

In the process of Turkey's liberation from the occupation it suffered after the First World War, through the fire of freedom that the Kuvayı Milliye movement also kindled, 19 May is an important date. Yesterday, on the occasion of the anniversary, we found ourselves recalling and repeating quite a lot of what we know about the Kuvayı Milliye movements, both on how 19 May was reached and on the path followed afterwards on the road to Turkey's independence.

When a country is occupied, resorting to resistance against the occupying forces, waging armed struggle on the path of resistance, is regarded everywhere in the world as the most legitimate way. No one but the occupiers themselves can accuse the patriotic forces who take up armed resistance against occupation of being terrorists, disturbers of the peace or bandits. Of course there were those who accused Turkey's Kuvayı Milliye forces of banditry and disturbing the peace. Who were they? The occupying British and Greeks, and in the early period the French and Italians. But these accusations did not deter them from the path of delivering the homeland from enemy occupation, of breaking the unlawful hand that touched their country and their place of worship.

We said that President Erdoğan's saying, in the face of an occupation that has nearly invaded the whole world, that Hamas is not terrorist but only a Kuvayı Milliye movement is not a stance to be belittled at all. Unfortunately there are those who belittle it. And by whom? By those who have so far not lifted a finger for Gaza, and who, even if they wished to lift one, could do nothing. Or by those whose reason for not lifting a finger is in fact that their hearts never burned for Gaza in the first place. Let us pass over some of them. But let us not pass over those who wag their fingers in the name of Turkey's so-called founding principle or philosophy because Erdoğan likens Hamas to the Kuvayı Milliye movement.

In saying that with this analogy Erdoğan has led Turkey astray from the real founding principle, one notices an arrogance that still goes on claiming this country in the name of a deviant and supremacist position. A supremacism and exclusionism in the name of a secular, Westernist power. Yet the reality they should engrave in their heads by now is that the essential character of the true Kuvayı Milliye is opposed to that secularist and Westernist occupation to begin with. The mind they represent is itself the occupier's mind. The Kuvayı Milliye was fighting its hardest battle precisely against the treason that this mind represents, which threw the doors wide open to the occupiers from within. This mind has come back to life and stands before us, questioning and condemning what Turkey could possibly have to do with Hamas. While shamelessly acting as spokesman for the occupier Israel, which calls Hamas terrorist, they put on airs about nationalism, ultra-nationalism, even true Kuvayı Milliyeism.

Let us speak more openly: describing Hamas as a Kuvayı Milliye movement is not only because it too is going through, in its own field, a similar experience in the same category as the Kuva that once fought in Turkey for the defence and liberation of the homeland. Rather, with the resistance it displays, Hamas is a force that defends Turkey itself, and therefore it is directly a Kuvayı Milliye.

Erdoğan in fact states this more clearly, to the full extent of its meanings: "If this raging state, this terrorist state is not stopped, with their delusion of promised lands they will sooner or later turn their eyes to Anatolia. Hamas is carrying out the forward defence of Anatolia in Gaza. Are you so blind that you cannot see this?"

Do we not now see more clearly that Zionism's expansion strategy based on that perverse interpretation of the Promised Land directly targets Turkey's territory as well? All the lands on which the PKK terror, which has occupied this country for 40 years, has set its eyes lie within these promised lands of Israel. Does even this tell us nothing? Shall we pass over it, saying what does the PKK have to do with Israel? And what could be the aim of the similar unlimited armed and monetary support that the United States, which gives Israel unlimited support to commit such oppression, such massacres, this unprecedented genocide with impunity, gives at the same time to the PKK-PYD-JPG in northern Syria in these promised lands?

In fact Hamas is perhaps waking up the whole world, but it is waking Turkey first of all from its deep sleep, and reminding us of these historical facts: 107 years ago, with the fall of Gaza, the first great step of the Ottoman defeat was taken. From the moment the Gaza gate fell, Ottoman lands were opened to invasion by British occupying forces. From that day on, after losing everything, Ottoman-Turkey covered quite a long road on the way to independence through small gains.

Today too, in Gaza, the eye has been set on those never sufficient gains obtained in the name of that independence. The Promised Land goal is directed at the direct occupation of Turkey as well. Despite this occupation goal, this threat being known, it is never right for Turkey to behave as though nothing is going to happen.

Turkey needs to rewrite its national security policy document placing precisely this threat of Israel at its centre. In this policy document, friends and enemies must be redefined according to the nature of the threat.

Those who call Hamas terrorist from the viewpoint of the Zionist forces that have set their eyes on Turkey's territory must be counted as Turkey's enemies as well.

The finger of those who wag their finger at those defending Hamas in Turkey, on the grounds of secularism, nationalism, the realism of international relations and other made-up reasons, must be counted as the very finger of the occupying forces, and what was done in the past must be done to them again.

Hamas, by defending Turkey with its heroic resistance, richly deserves this honourable designation. But it does not stop there; with its unparalleled heroism it writes an epic. At the same time, because it defends its own land against occupation with this nobility, and continues to teach the whole world lessons in humanity while doing so, it also deserves to be written in golden letters in the history of world resistance.