Milliyet columnist Hakkı Öcal said that the unconditional support given to Israel by the US and Europe has led countries in the region to look for alternatives such as BRICS. Öcal said that Israel’s efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction are forcing other countries to arm themselves. Expressing that Europe and the US have lost their credibility that they will protect Turkey’s interests, Hakkı Öcal summarized as follows:
Milliyet daily columnist Hakkı Öcal said that the unconditional support of the US and Europe for Israel has led countries in the region to look for alternatives such as BRICS. Öcal noted that Israel’s efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction are forcing other countries to arm themselves. Stating that Europe and the US have lost their credibility that they will protect Turkey’s interests, Hakkı Öcal summarized as follows:
“If Israel did not have nearly 2,000 nuclear weapons, there would be no one in Turkey, Iran or any other country in the region advocating the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction. If the United States and the European Union (the world’s 5th largest arms dealer) did not provide Israel with nearly 12 billion dollars in cash aid every year and did not allocate aid and investment budgets to Israel in violation of the interests of their partners, neither Turkey nor other countries in the region would be looking for new expansion opportunities within BRICS. If the US and the EU had not continued to openly provide political and military support to Israel’s genocidal occupation and extermination operations against the Palestinians, Turkey and 8 other countries, all pro-US until recently, would not have sought new formations in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
(…) If Turkey is looking for investment-development support in an organization like BRICS, which does not even have a proper name, the US administrations are responsible for this, as much as Ursula von der Leyen, the President of the European Commission, who still says “EU membership is a merit-based process” even though she has kept Turkey waiting for 40 years, 5 months and 5 days for full membership, but who declares that she sees no harm in being a partner in Israel’s war crimes with the words “Our unconditional support for Israel will continue”. It is the US that is publicly pushing its European partners to admit Ukraine into the EU, a country whose territorial integrity has not even been restored.
When Israel is so damaging to the national interests of the US and European countries, when its moral and humanitarian values make it so clearly necessary to support the Palestinians and not Israel, how can we trust these countries to be friends, and to do so when they need to protect Turkey’s interests? How can we trust the wisdom of an ally that so blatantly disregards its own interests?”
