As an incredibly devastating, genocidal, war rages on in West Asia, Turkiye has stepped forward to mediate in the European war between Ukraine and Russia, now entering its third year after Russian military operations began when negotiations between Moscow and NATO failed. It was the Cold War-origin North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s relentless eastward expansion to incorporate other neighbouring states into its military alliance that prompted Russia, earlier, to annex Ukraine’s small but, strategically important, Crimean Peninsula.
That failure of NATO-Russia diplomacy then led to more NATO absorption of other east European states in Russia’s 
immediate neighbourhood which had earlier been Cold War allies of Moscow. It was after repeated warnings, by successive Moscow governments, against such NATO expansion right up to Russia’s borders, that saw current Russian President Vladimir Putin’s military intervention in Eastern Ukraine.
Ethnic Russian-populated Crimea’s takeover was part of Moscow’s operations in support of autonomy struggles by minority Russians in eastern Ukraine. Ukraine, a bare 160 km. directly across from Turkiye’s long Black Sea coast, is now the theatre of Europe’s biggest war since the Second World War.
The war has seen Naval clashes in the Black Sea and Naval force intrusions by hostile NATO Naval units in the Sea all of which has placed Turkiye in a zone of conflict that has harmed the Turkish domestic economy-especially its lucrative tourism industry and, international trade.
Turkiye President Tayyip Erdogan publicly made the mediation offer after talks with his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Istanbul last Friday. President Zelenskyy did not reject the offer but the war-weary Ukrainian leader gave no indication of a time line for such a badly needed negotiation. Analysts say that the need to end the war is also sorely felt by Russia as well as the rest of Europe and neighbouring Central Asia, too.
The Russo-Ukraine war completed its second year last month with most analyses agreeing that while Ukraine is further battered and exhausted by the attrition, Russia, being the far bigger military power and economy, shows capacity for continued military action. Just last month, Ukraine again lost control of Adviivka – a small, but strategically important – city in Eastern Ukraine to Russian forces after Kyiv had earlier recaptured it from the invading Russians.
Black Sea
Turkiye, who is thus compelled to be on an economically wasteful military footing in case of a spill-over of the war. Ankara must also contend with the far worse conflagration to its south in Syria, Lebanon, and Israel-Palestine, courtesy of the bloody adventurism of the Israeli Likud-Zionist regime, now forcibly headquartered in the Israeli-occupied, majority Palestinian, holy city of Jerusalem.
Turkiye was a military-ruled, tame, Western ally when an aggressively expansionist European-Jewish colony first set roots in Palestine in the 1940-50s having terrorised and driven out the indigenous Palestinian population. Turkiye was one of the countries nearby that had to host that displaced Palestinian population – along with Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Egypt.
The destabilisation of Syria was begun by the United States under President Barak Obama who had been ridiculously awarded the Nobel Peace Prize just before his destructive military adventures in Somalia, Libya, Syria and Yemen. The creation of chaotic, non-State conditions in Libya, Somalia and Yemen – all three once being secularist, modern and broadly stable entities – brought millions of more refugees to Turkiye from the entire region.
It says much of Turkiye society, one of the world’s oldest, richly composite, civilisations, that it has untiringly hosted and cared for these many millions of foreigners with little of the “anti-migrant” phobias now displayed by culturally intolerant Western Europe and North America. This openness is part of Turkiye’s own slow transition from military dictatorship to liberal civilian democracy. It is this domestic political transition that has freed that country of its previous servility to the Western power bloc, even as Ankara continues to command respect as one of NATO’s crucially located military allies.
President Erdogan is Israel’s biggest critic by far among NATO members. His support for Palestine is highly popular and is likely to further expand his domestic voter base, despite serious criticism by Turkish civil society of his authoritarian style and Islam-centric politics.
Port proposal
While Turkiye’s leaders search for solutions to bitter wars to their north (Ukraine) and south (Palestine), Washington, the “leader of the Free World” (whatever that is), still chooses to lavishly provide arms, ammunition and full political backing to its protégé, Israel, in its months-long, genocidal, onslaught on Palestine. Having cast its veto against three attempts by the UN Security Council to enforce a ceasefire in Gaza, the United States can only repeatedly posture in response to Israel’s brazen military barbarities.
Last week, in his annual ‘state of the union’ speech to the US Congress, President Joe Biden (now scorned as ‘Genocide Joe’ by America’s own anti-war protest movement) made another such gesture by proposing an US military-built off-shore shipping terminal on the Gazan coast to enable direct food aid to the war-battered tiny enclave. It is an enclave packed with 2.5 million starving, malnourished, physically and mentally maimed people eerily like a Nazi death camp complex uncovered inside Germany and Poland by victorious Soviet and Western Allied military forces at the end of World War 2.
Biden’s sudden port proposal is one that totally – and shamelessly – ignores the large, official, UN-managed aid supply operations currently so brazenly blocked by Israel. He does not even refer to the deliberate and sustained Israeli blockade (which is on top of a whole regime of siege imposed on Gaza for decades). Indeed, last week, the world was horrified to see Israeli soldiers kill up to 100 hungry civilians, and injure hundreds more, when they open fire on Gazans desperately storming a small convoy of food trucks reportedly sent in by Israel itself.
The West has yet to explicitly condemn this ‘flour massacre’ as it is being labelled by the world media.
Biden’s port suggestion is already being criticised by much of the international community as being a pretence to cover up the West’s continued endorsement of the massive, genocidal, Israeli military offensive. After all, Israel’s entire military operation would be impossible if not for continuous supply and collaboration by the Western bloc.
However, it is also possible to see this port idea as more than just a propaganda distraction. Such a US military port-building operation will be the first American direct military role on Palestinian territory. It will be in Palestinian coastal waters directly off-shore from the active war/genocide zone of Gaza. Furthermore, the off-loading infra structure would involve installations (landing places, roadways into the interior) on Gazan land itself.
Most ominously, it gives the US excuse to “defend” this port operation. And such a ‘defence’ will inevitably mean more sustained US (and probably NATO) military presence on Palestine-Israel itself in the middle of a terrible war, a war with clear-cut ethnic cleansing and state territory expansion objectives.
Expelled
Long before this current war in Gaza, Israel has battered this tiny parcel of Palestine for decades since the very inception of the Zionist state in 1948, when 200,000 Palestinians, who fled or were expelled from their homes, settled in the Gaza Strip as refugees. Since then, Israel has fought at least four wars against the Gaza Strip. The number of Gazans killed in today’s latest war — 30,000 so far — is higher than the death toll of all other wars of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
And, for more than a decade, Israel had surrounded the Strip with a land, sea and air military blockade. Now, the ongoing military onslaught is little more than a continuous genocidal massacre and the physical flattening of the most of this urban zone in manner to render it unliveable.
The Hamas Movement, popularly elected to govern the Strip over a decade ago, considers the military blockade of its territory as a continuation of the Israel’s war of conquest and ethnic erasure. Thus, Hamas considers – as do most realist political analysts in terms of the law of war – its military operation on October 7th as a counter-attack by the Occupation resistance.
Most UN and international legal interpretations agree with this legal perspective – even if many may not endorse the military counter-strike methods deployed by the current Gazan government. The October 7th Gazan assault on the Israeli siege lines was led by Hamas units but reportedly comprised a unified operation that included at least four other long-extant Palestinian militant groups. In addition to the Islamic Jihad, which is religiously imspired, like Hamas, the other three are very old, secularist movements, two of the traditional Leftist – Fatah (which is in power in the West Bank), Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and the PFLP General Command.
Long before the current war, the West has chosen to verbally admonish its client state, Israel, whenever that coloniser entity carried out further aggression and expansion of its colony – annexing of Palestinian territory through military conquest or by systematic expansion of Jewish settlements or, by building dividing walls or by laws discriminating against non-Jewish people.
Washington’s ‘admonitions’ are now seen for what they are: soothing noises to create impressions of criticism as a smoke screen for endorsement of Israeli aggression and ethnic cleansing. Recently, popular American TV channel host Freed Zakaria, famous as a staunch champion of his home country in most of its recent wars, has begun strong criticism of US’s blind support for Israel’s war-like actions.
Slating the US’ token criticism of Israel’s persistent genocidal actions, Zakaria, on his television programme last week, labelled Washington’s current approach to Israel as “hapless, ineffective and immoral”. Thus, yet another week goes by of death (over 30,000), destruction and immense sufferingexperienced in full view of the watching world.
