Recently, Turkish President (read: Dictator) Recep Tayyip Erdogan used his appearance before the UN General Assembly to rail against Israel and its “oppression” of the Palestinian Arabs.
During the rant, Erdogan hinted at his militaristic ambitions (already being manifest in Turkey’s onslaught against the Kurds) by suggesting that if the international community remained unwilling to step in against Israel, then “words are no longer enough.”
To make his point, Erdogan held up a four-phase map of Israel and the expansion of Jewish sovereignty in the Holy Land over the past century. The Turkish leader insisted that this showed the gradual conquest and occupation of historic “Palestine.”
It was an exercise in blatant hypocrisy.
Not only does Turkey today illegally occupy portions of northern Syria and continue to deny the Kurdish people the right to self-determination, what Erdogan conveniently left out of his presentation was the fact that prior to the British Mandate and the birth of the State of Israel, there was no nation called “Palestine” because the Turks were occupying this land!
For more than 400 years, the Holy Land was part of the Turkish Ottoman Empire, and not once during that entire period did they ever dream of granting statehood to the local Arabs.
The above video by YouTuber Hananya Naftali likewise revisits the fact that the local Arabs had a chance in 1947 to gain a state of their own, but turned down the offer in hopes of fully eliminating the Jewish presence. Which, of course, was also sidestepped by Erdogan.