Erdogan Says He Wants Improved Relations with Israel, But Turkey’s School Curriculum Says Otherwise

by Hugh Fitzgerald

Recep Tayyip Erdogan has had his closest collaborators let the world know that he “wants to improve relations with Israel, and hopes to sign an agreement on maritime borders with the Jewish state.” On Dec. 25, 2020, Erdogan himself called for “better ties with Israel.” He has returned the Turkish ambassador to Israel, who had been ordered home after the Mavi Marmara incident. Also this past December, Israel Hayom reported that former admiral Cihat Yayci, a close confidant of Erdogan, had proposed a bilateral agreement on the countries’ shared exclusive economic zones in the Mediterranean Sea. Four months earlier, Ankara sent a clear message to Jerusalem on its desire to start talks on the subject, but due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, talks were never held. According to Yaici’s proposal, both countries’ maritime borders would join together at Cyprus’ expense. This has no chance of being accepted by Israel, which will not betray its Cypriot ally, but the fact of Turkey’s attempted outreach to Israel is worth noting, for it takes place at the very time when Erdogan is sending a different signal, in insisting that what is taught in Turkish schools continue to follow a curriculum that is weighed down with anti-Zionist messaging.

Now we learn that the Turkish schools have steadily been increasing the anti-Israel content of their classes – a development especially disturbing in light of Erdogan’s insistence that he wants to improve ties with the Jewish state. The report on the anti-Israel messages in Turkish schools is here.

Not only did the political cooperation between Turkey and Israel deteriorate ever since President Recep Tayyip Erdogan took office almost 16 years ago, but the Turkish school curriculum has been radicalized to reflect the country’s anti-Israel stance, a new report published by IMPACT-Se, an international research and policy institute that monitors culture tolerance in schools, and the Henry Jackson Society revealed.

In his report, The Erdogan Revolution in the Turkish Curriculum Textbooks, Israeli researcher Dr. Hay Eytan Cohen Yanarocak explained that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict continues to take center stage in the Turkish education system, which presents Israel as the only obstacle to peace, completely ignoring the Palestinian terrorist activity.

The Turkish schoolbooks put the Israeli-Palestinian conflict front and center, even though, with the normalization of ties between Israel and four Arab states (the U.A.E., Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco), and the steady improvement of Israel’s ties with Saudi Arabia, the richest and most powerful Arab state, and with Egypt, the most populous Arab state, it is clear that many of the Arabs have wearied of the Palestinian matter, and are instead determined to pursue their own national interests. These interests include strengthening their security ties with Israel against threats from Iran, Sunni Jihadis, and the Muslim Brotherhood, and promoting economic relations with the Jewish state, relations which will go beyond trade and investment to include receiving technical assistance from Israel in such fields as wastewater management, drip irrigation, desalination, producing water out of the air, and solar energy – all fields where Israel is a world leader. Unlike Erdogan, the Sunni Arab leaders in the Gulf fully appreciate Israel’s role in setting back Iran’s nuclear program; they have made clear their choice of an ally – the Jewish state, the original Start-Up Nation — and are indifferent to the howls of spittle-flecked protests from the raging rais in Ramallah.

It [the school curriculum] details the Mavi Marmara flotilla crisis but does not highlight the previously bilateral relations between the two countries or the multiple trade agreements that have persisted despite numerous Middle Eastern upheavals.

Nor do those schoolbooks mention that Turkey was the first Muslim state to recognize Israel, in 1949, and had close ties, especially military ones, with the Jewish state until Erdogan’s ascendancy. Under the secular Kemalist rulers who preceded Erdogan, relations with Israel had always been good. But in the current schoolbooks of the Erdogan Era, great attention is given to the ship-boarding incident, when IDF soldiers rappelled down from a helicopter onto the deck of the Turkish Mavi Marmara, and proceeded, in Ankara’s view, to kill inoffensive Turks who were only attempting to bring humanitarian aid and break the blockade of Gaza. On the Mavi Marmara, it should be noted, there was no humanitarian aid.

The curriculum further tries to delegitimize Zionism, attributing to it every recent Middle Eastern conflict. Students in Turkey are taught that Israel’s founding in 1948 and the subsequent victory in its War of Independence would never have been possible were it not for American and European support. It further calls the Gaza Strip “the biggest open-air prison.”

How can Zionism be blamed for any of the following: the civil wars In Yemen, Libya, and Syria, which have nothing to do with Israel and everything to do with despots and dissidents (Syria), contests for national power between rival heads of local militias whose views of militant Islam clash (Libya), and Sunni proxies for Saudi Arabia fighting Shia proxies for Iran (Yemen)? Can “Zionism” be blamed for the forty-year rule of the psychopath Muammar Qaddafi in Libya? What did “Zionism” have to do with the rule of the mass murderer Saddam Hussein in Iraq, who managed to massacre 182,000 Kurds in his own country, and to start a war with Iran that lasted for eight years, causing a half-million casualties? What role did “Zionism” play in Saddam’s seizure of Kuwait, which he renamed as Iraq’s 19th province, or in the Gulf War that followed, in which the Americans pushed his forces out of Kuwait and all the way back to Baghdad? What did “Zionism” have to do with the takeover of Lebanon by the terror group Hezbollah, and the economic degringolade in that country? What did the “Zionist entity” have to do with the Shi’a protests against a Sunni ruler in Bahrain? Or with the rise of the Kata’ib Hezbollah and other Shi’a militias in Iraq? What role did “Zionism” play in Erdogan’s decision to intervene in the Libyan civil war against the forces of General Khalifa Haftar, and to establish a permanent Turkish military presence in Libya, with a naval base at Misrata, and an airbase at Al-Watiya? What possible connection is there between “Zionism” and Turkey’s decision to establish still other military bases in Syria (in Idlib Province), in northern Iraq (to keep Iraqi Kurds under control), and in Somalia? What did “Zionism” have to do with the Saudi crackdown on Shi’a protests in the Kingdom’s Eastern Province? How did “Zionism” affect the war of independence by South Yemenis? Or affect the Polisario separatists in the Western Sahara? How did Zionism influence the rise, and fall, of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi? These are by no means all of the conflicts that give the lie to Erdogan’s insistence that the Israel-Palestinian conflict has been at the center of all the upheavals in the Middle East and North Africa since Israel’s founding in 1948.

Turkish pupils are taught that Israel would never have won the 1948 war without American and European help. In fact, the Jews of Israel had to fight off the combined forces of five Arab armies, while they were under a complete arms embargo from both the U.S. and the Europeans. The Jews of Israel managed to smuggle in some weapons, mostly rifles, and they managed to buy 25 used Messerschmitts from Czechoslovakia, as well as 18 used Spitfires on the open market, but that was the extent of the European “aid” to which Turkish school books allude. What official aid, government-to-government, there was from the Europeans went to the Arabs, not the Jews. What arms the Israelis had, save for the planes bought from the Czechs, arrived as the result of arms smuggling, a dicey and difficult undertaking. Throughout the war the British continued to supply arms to three Arab armies, those of Egypt, Iraq, and Jordan. The Arab Legion of Jordan was British-officered and British-trained, and led by Col. John Bagot Glubb (“Glubb Pasha”); it was well-supplied with British weapons throughout the duration of the war. The Arab Legion was the only Arab military unit, during the 1948 war, that acquitted itself well; it was victorious in its sector of operations — those parts of Judea and Samaria which in 1950 Jordan renamed as “the West Bank.” The Turkish schoolbooks that ascribe Israel’s victory in 1948 to the help of “Americans and Europeans” have got it wrong. The Jews fought without allies and, at a time of an arms embargo, were forced to rely only on what weapons – including planes – that they could smuggle in past the British ships enforcing the embargo, or produce in makeshift arms workshops inside Israel. The Arabs, meanwhile, were amply supplied with arms, especially from Great Britain; the fiction was maintained that these were regular weapons deliveries, not arms that were going to be used in the “conflict in Palestine” — so they were not subject to the embargo.

On a more positive note, the Turkish curriculum mentions the Holocaust, including Auschwitz and Kristallnacht. However, even that is done briefly.

The greatest atrocity in human history deserves more than a “mention….done briefly.” Is it only a paragraph, or a few sentences, in those Turkish texts, devoted to describing the murders of six million people? And a sentence, or perhaps two, devoted to Kristallnacht, that harbinger of far greater atrocities to come?

I suspect the offending passage, allowing the Turks to claim that “yes, we tell our students about Kristallnacht, about Auschwitz. Don’t accuse us of being Holocaust-deniers” — reads something like this: “The Nazi ideology fixed on the Jews as a primary target. Already in 1938 there was Kristallnacht, which ran from Nov. 9 to 10, during which Nazis vandalized Jewish-owned businesses. Some synagogues were also damaged. ‘Kristallnacht’ takes its name from the broken glass of the windows of Jewish-owned shops. Later there would be worse: Jews were sent to special camps, and many put to death. The most infamous of these camps was Auschwitz. Experts differ as to the total number of Jewish victims; the estimates range from 800,000 to six million, with most tending to the upper end. The collective name for that atrocity against the Jews is ‘Holocaust.’ There were millions of non-Jews from every European nation who were also killed by the Nazis – Russians and Poles, especially—and these victims of another Holocaust must not be forgotten by focusing too exclusively on the Jews killed in their Holocaust. The Zionists sometimes sound as if the Jews were the only ones to suffer. “

Would the Turkish textbook writers be capable of such a travesty? Yes, under Recep Tayyip Erdogan, they would, indeed they would.

First published in Jihad Watch.