President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Tuesday hit out at Western governments for shielding Israel over its attacks on the Gaza Strip “at the cost of their own reputations.”
“Western countries that have lectured us about democracy at our universities for years have failed this test,” Erdoğan told an opening ceremony of the higher education academic year in the capital Ankara.
He accused Western countries of “failing" to prevent the Gaza genocide, saying they have lost their credibility for the sake of protecting Israel.
“The genocide in Gaza has shown that the Zionist lobby has exerted control over the world’s most prestigious universities,” Erdoğan said.
Erdoğan also lamented the corporate and sometimes physical punishment students, especially in U.S. universities, have faced for their support of Palestine.
Over the past year, the scale of the killing and destruction in Gaza has prompted some of the biggest global demonstrations in years, including in U.S. colleges like Columbia, UCLA, Harvard and Yale, which saw weeks of pro-Palestinian campus encampments demanding institutions stop doing business with companies that support the war.
But the response of law enforcement was brutal, with riot police storming camps, tearing down barricades and tents, firing tear gas and stun grenades to dismantle the camps, and making indiscriminate arrests.
Many academicians were fired for their vocal support of Palestine while dozens of students were threatened with expulsion of “lifelong unemployment.”
Turkish universities too rallied in solidarity with colleges around the world this year.
Türkiye has been a vocal critic of Israel since the start of the war and a staunch defender of the Palestinian cause, including holding talks with Palestinian, Israeli and Hamas officials.
Erdoğan has repeatedly called Israel a "terrorist state," accusing it of carrying out a genocide in Gaza, branding Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu the "butcher of Gaza" and comparing him to Nazi Germany's Adolf Hitler.
He often criticizes the international system's failure to stop the conflict in Gaza and now in Lebanon. He also says he is sad to see Muslim countries failing to take a more active stance against Israel, urging them to take economic, diplomatic and political measures to pressure Tel Aviv into accepting a cease-fire.
In addition to delivering humanitarian aid and halting trade with Israel, Erdoğan’s government has sought to rally international organizations, including the United Nations, NATO and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), to both restrain Israel and encourage cooperation between Palestinian factions, most notably between Hamas and the Fatah movement.
Israel’s brutal onslaught in the Gaza Strip has hit its first anniversary, which began on Oct. 7 following Hamas’ incursion into southern Israel and has since spread to Lebanon and other parts of the Middle East.
In the past year alone, Israel’s bombing killed nearly 42,000 Palestinians in Gaza, mostly women and children, and more than 700 others in the West Bank, which it has occupied since 1967.
The Israeli onslaught has displaced nearly the entire population of Gaza amid a blockade that has caused severe shortages of food, clean water and medicine.
Efforts by the U.S., Egypt and Qatar to mediate a cease-fire and facilitate a prisoner swap between Israel and Hamas have failed, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu refusing to halt the offensive.
Israel is also facing a genocide case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for its actions in Gaza.
The Lebanon escalation follows a landmark opinion in July by the International Court of Justice that declared Israel's decadeslong occupation of Palestinian land unlawful and demanded the evacuation of all illegal settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
