Turkey suspends all trade relations with Israel. This was announced by the Turkish Ministry of Trade on Thursday. “The Israeli government continues its aggressive stance and the humanitarian tragedy in Palestine is worsening,” the official statement said.
“Turkey will strictly and decisively implement the new measures until the Israeli government allows an uninterrupted and sufficient flow of humanitarian aid to Gaza,” the statement continued, adding that the agency is working with its Palestinian counterpart to ensure that the measures do not affect Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank the bank of the Jordan.
Israel criticizes Ankara’s decision. “This is the behavior of a dictator who overlooks the interests of the Turkish people and businessmen and ignores international trade agreements,” responded Israel’s head of diplomacy Yisrael Katz. He ordered his people to look for alternatives both in domestic production and in imports from other countries.
Neither side has yet specified whether the ban on exports and imports also applies to the trade of third countries with Israel – for example, oil from Azerbaijan flows to Israel through the Turkish port of Ceyhan, the al-Monitor server recalled.
The total volume of trade between the two countries reaches 5.4 billion dollars annually. At the same time, the Turkish economy is still struggling with a long crisis, which was contributed to by the unorthodox fiscal policies of the Erdogan governments. Although inflation has already fallen compared to last year, it is still hovering around 70 percent.
Neither Hamas nor our government wants a two-state solution
Read an interview with an Israeli whose 79-year-old uncle is still a prisoner of the terrorist movement Hamas for more than half a year:
The Turks join South Africa’s lawsuit
In the first phase, in response to domestic pressure due to the war in Gaza, Turkey restricted trade with Israel in 54 product groups, now followed by a complete freeze on trade. Also on Wednesday, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan announced that his government was joining South Africa in going to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) claiming that Israel’s actions violate the 1948 UN Genocide Convention.
On Thursday, the Turkish ruler Erdogan commented on the current wave of protests at American universities. “Sympathetic students, academics at American universities, including anti-Zionist Jews, are speaking out against the massacre,” he said in Ankara, adding that “the massacre in Gaza should stop.”
The postponement of the visit to the White House, where US President Joe Biden was supposed to receive him next week, may also be related to the sharpening of Erdogan’s attitude towards Israel. Both sides justified it with organizational reasons.
Turkey was the first country with a majority Muslim population to recognize Israel in 1949. In recent decades, however, relations between the two countries have cooled – Ankara severed diplomatic relations in 2010 due to the shooting of ten pro-Palestinian activists who were sailing on a ship trying to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza. Although the two countries reconciled six years later, other crises followed.
After the October 7 terrorist attack by Hamas and the subsequent retaliation by Israel, Erdogan became one of the most vocal critics of the war. He even compared Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini or Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin and called him “the butcher of Gaza”.
However, even in Turkey, opinions on the war in Gaza are not completely unified. While the vast majority of Turks condemn the killing of Palestinian civilians, they do not necessarily share Erdogan’s view that Hamas is not a terrorist organization. While Erdogan speaks of Hamas as a group leading the liberation struggle, the re-elected mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem Imamoglu, recently called Hamas terrorists.
