Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan hinted on Sunday at a party convention that he is determined to invade Israel to end the Palestinian conflict, should Turkey possess enough military strength to do so.
“We have come far with our defense industry, with imports and exports. Brothers, no one can fool us: we must be very strong, because then Israel could not stir trouble in Palestine as it does”, Erdogan stated.
“Just as we entered Karabakh, just as we entered Libya, we will do the same with them. There is nothing preventing it. We only need to be strong, and then we will take these steps. We will take them”, he asserted.
The remarks, circulated on video by the Turkish state news agency Anadolu, were made during a gathering with party delegates in the northeastern city of Rize.
In 2020, Turkey sent troops to Libya to defend the internationally recognized Government in Tripoli against rivals in the Libyan civil war.
Turkey never officially intervened in Nagorno-Karabakh, though Azerbaijan’s military victory over the Armenians in the 2020 war owed much to Turkish-made unmanned aerial vehicles.
Turkey, a longtime ally of Israel and a major trading partner in the Middle East, cut diplomatic ties last October over the Gaza conflict and in April limited Turkish exports to Israel.
Erdogan argues in all his speeches for a resolution to the conflict through the creation of a Palestinian state bordering Israel on the 1967 lines and offers Turkey’s participation in the negotiations as a “guarantor power.”
In his Rize speech, he also pushed back against a charge from a political Islamist ally of the AKP that Ankara failed to invite Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to speak in parliament.
“We have severed all trade with Israel, we have broken relations… and they tell us we should invite Mahmoud Abbas to address Parliament. Who says we did not invite him?” Erdogan asked.
“We have invited Mahmoud Abbas, but unfortunately he has not given us a positive response. From now on we will act accordingly”, Erdogan said, noting that he had already hinted the previous day that Abbas should apologize to Turkey for rejecting the invitation.