Asked whether his plan, to transform from prime minister to president, was designed to make him a new type of sultan, Recep Erdogan’s reply was as surprising as it was touching: “I want to be like Queen Elizabeth.”
The stalking wolf that ate Little Red Riding Hood couldn’t have said it better.
The Turkish leader, who this week threatened to invade Israel, was referring to the woman who never during her 70-year reign uttered one controversial statement, as would befit the ceremonial monarch that she was and her Turkish fan now claimed he was ready to become.
In fact, Erdogan has been Elizabeth’s inversion: a loose tongue, a rash decision-maker, and an autocrat whose damage to his country and its neighbors has made him a major obstacle to world peace.
NOW IN its 22nd year, Erdogan’s reign is third in its length, after Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and Russian President Vladimir Putin, among the world’s important leaders. It’s an era, one that may end up recalled as “the Erdogan reaction.”
Like the Grimm Brothers’ wolf, Erdogan initially spoke sweetly but soon began replacing democracy with autocracy. What began with a purge of the military high command, later proceeded to the judiciary, the media, and universities.
In 2016, following a failed coup attempt, Erdogan used the crisis to fire more than 2,500 judges and replace them with indebted loyalists, while arresting 3,000 military officers and firing 6,000 professors countrywide. Hundreds of journalists were arrested. Thousands of citizens, from beauty queen Merve Buyuksarac to Olympic swimmer Derya Buyukuncu, were arrested for insulting the man who wanted to be Elizabeth.
An urge to control that reaks break havoc
Turkey thus became a police state, but Erdogan’s urge to control everything and boss everyone was even bigger, so he turned on the Bank of Turkey, making it impossible for the agency to do its job, which is to keep the currency solid.
The result has been a battered lira that tumbled from $0.75 in 2005 to 5 cents last year, and since then plunged another 40% to hardly 3 cents per lira while inflation crossed 70%, unemployment scratched 10%, and interest rates crossed 25%. Few things characterize an era more damningly than such an ongoing economic fiasco.
This, in brief, is the backdrop against which Recep Erdogan, from the depth of the $1.2 billion palace of 1,000 rooms he built himself, now told his struggling people about the people of the Jewish state: “We must be very strong so that Israel can’t do these ridiculous things… Just like we entered Karabakh, just like we entered Libya, we might do the same to them.”
As it were, the “ridiculous thing” Israel “did” shortly before this exhortation was to absorb the Hezbollah rocket that killed 12 children in Majdal Shams.
Yet such details, like facts in general, not to mention justice, or just honesty, never concerned Erdogan, whose response to the wholesale attacks Israel endures will be recalled as an emblem of his Middle Eastern gospel’s cynical hypocrisy and ultimate collapse.
THE GOSPEL Erdogan originally announced was noble: “Zero problems with neighbors,” it said, thus raising hopes for reconciliation with Cyprus, a fair deal for the Kurds, a settlement of disputes with Syria over the damming of the Euphrates, and new harmony with the European Union.
Most innovatively, Erdogan steered Turkey’s diplomatic focus from Europe, where it looked since the republic’s creation in 1923, to the Middle East, where the Ottoman Empire was centered. In between these varied goals, the strategic alliance with Israel that Erdogan inherited was to be retained, as initially it indeed was.
That was the vision. Reality was, and remains, zero harmony with everyone. Erdogan’s first failure was with the Arab world’s leaders. Having politely rejected Erdogan’s economic overtures, rightly suspecting what they faced was not the bride of Istanbul but the Grimm Brothers’ wolf, the wolf soon indeed exposed his teeth, openly backing the Islamists that challenged Egypt’s government.
Destroying diplomacy
The collapse of his Arab diplomacy was redoubled by Erdogan’s Kurdish record. Hopes that his religiosity would temper his nationalism were quickly dashed, as he upheld bans on opening Kurdish-language schools, bombed Kurdish villages in Iraq, and invaded Syria’s Kurdish north.
The same disappointment unfolded in Cyprus, where Turkey’s occupation remained intact. The occupation of European Union turf complemented Erdogan’s incitement of German Turks against the German government after it criticized his mass arrests.
Suspicions in the German far Right, that Erdogan sees Germany’s three million Turks as an avant-garde for a future Islamist uprising, were enhanced by his response to last decade’s upheaval in the Arab world.
What began with backing Egypt’s Islamists continued in the Syrian Civil War, where Erdogan again backed the Islamists, reflecting his real agenda: to fan Islamist rebellions anywhere, any time, and to do this while disguised as a democrat. That is why he keeps saying Hamas is the Palestinians’ “democratically elected” leader, even though it isn’t (what Hamas won was a regional election, in Gaza only, 18 years ago), and that is why he decries “the occupation” while he himself occupies northern Cyprus and western Syria.
It could have been different.
Turkey could have been a great engine of world peace, a natural mediator between Arabs and Jews, a moderator between Muslims and Christians, a reconciler between tradition and modernity, an engine of Middle Eastern prosperity, and a bridge-builder between North and South.
A day will come when Turkey will be all these, but before that, it will have to endure yet more of the man who crushed its freedom while inciting nation against nation and faith against faith, bandying threats as hollow as his lira, and rants as convincing as the queenly costume he once tried to wear.
www.MiddleIsrael.net
The writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is author of the bestselling Mitzad Ha’ivelet Ha’yehudi (The Jewish March of Folly, Yediot Sefarim, 2019), a revisionist history of the Jewish people’s political leadership.