A rocket was launched against a naval base in İskenderun in the Hatay province, claiming the lives of seven sailors in an act of violence presumed to be the handiwork of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Or was it? The co-occurrence of the two events flushed the conspiracy theorists from beneath the bushes. “We do not think the two attacks are a coincidence,” said Hüseyin Çelik, deputy chairman of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party). The minister of the interior, Beşir Atalay, was also reluctant to attribute the incidents to mere happenstance. The inference was that having failed to fire a warning shot across the bows of a Turkish boat ferrying supplies to Gaza, the Israelis were employing others to issue a more deadly warning to Turkey and its military not to overstep their reach.There is another explanation, which is that despite circling round the issue, Turkey has never really fully addressed, root and branch, the causes of its Kurdish problem. From time to time that problem flares up, and its timing is never right. As long as there is no widely accepted political solution, the advocates of violence will always slip in the back door. A belief in conspiracies is in a sense an admission of powerlessness: that the reasons things go pear-shaped are engineered by manipulative forces beyond one’s control.
Of course, it is this sense of events slipping out of control which is among the most worrying aspects of Turkey’s current standoff with Israel. As if the nation did not have enough issues to deal with, it has now taken on responsibility for the Middle East. If the government appears to be taking a hard line on Israel, public opinion is shouting that it should take a harder line still. A recent public opinion survey undertaken by the MetroPOLL organization reports that 60 percent of the population believe the government has under-reacted to events. If pressure continues to build then Turkey will continue to back into uncharted waters.
There must be suspicion among the cynical few that the government is not displeased with the current crisis with Israel. Its total command of the headlines and the uniformity of the popular outrage has usefully overshadowed debates over constitutional reform, unemployment and the resurgence of the PKK. However, such cynicism would be misplaced; a more realistic view is that the government is genuinely concerned that those of its citizens trying to run the blockade in Gaza are now wagging the dog of Turkish foreign policy. One can only assume there is debate among the highest echelons between those who believe that the last week has served to redefine Turkey’s new soft power in a positive way and those who worry this exercise is getting out of hand; the contrast between a Turkey which enjoys more prestige and one which risks dismantling its carefully nurtured image of an ambassador between different regions. Distaste for the policies of the Netanyahu government aside, a Turkey able to speak to Israel presents a very different picture to the world than a Turkey which might adopt the anti-Zionist discourse of the Middle East.
This, I speculate, may explain the interview which Turkish spiritual leader Fethullah Gülen gave to the Wall Street Journal. As reported, it is a bold statement which runs against the grain of the current mood and of the demarches coming from the government. It is even at odds with the main editorial policies of the newspapers associated with his movement, including the one you are reading now. In the interview, Gülen openly criticized the organizers of the flotilla, saying that their failure to seek accord with Israel before attempting to deliver aid “is a sign of defying authority, and will not lead to fruitful matters.” We are being invited to pause and take a deep breath.
