Now this what I call classic”BDS-washing”. The drama king himself (still full of himself after his public walkout on Peres at Davos 2009), is now laying out conditions for resuming normalization of ties with Israel, ironically, by talking to an Israeli newspaper:
“We do not need Israeli tourists. We have succeeded to fill their places, and, in the past year, 31 million tourists visited Turkey,” he told the Maariv daily, during the regional World Economic Forum summit in Istanbul.
Erdoğan added: “The crisis over the matter of the occupation and relations with Israel is not harming the Turkish economy.”
During a reception in the gardens of the Dolmabahçe Palace during the WEP conference, Erdoğan told Maariv that normalizing relations between Turkey and Israel is conditional on three steps: “First and foremost, Israel must apologize for the raid by Israeli soldiers on the Mavi Marmara ship two years ago. Also, Israel must pay reparations to the families of the victims. The third condition is that Israel end the naval blockade on the import of goods into the Gaza Strip.” His country would not compromise on those conditions, the Turkish prime minister clarified, even if the crisis between the two nations deepens.”
Puh-lease, spare us the self-serving, pseudo-anti-zionist theatrics, more despicable still coming from a warmonger and neo-Ottoman wannabe imperialist. Yes, BDS is a necessary complement to any military and political resistance strategy, but it can never be a substitute for a genuine anti-imperialist / anti-Zionist foreign policy, let alone a tool for legitimizing imperialism and NATO invasions of resisting countries. In the grander strategic scheme of things, and if one had to make a choice between the two evils, he would be doing Palestine a much greater service if the Israeli tourists remained but he kept his blood-soaked hands off Syria.
