Netanyahu hits back at Erdoğan after he compared Israel’s nation-state law to Nazi legislation.
By: Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attacked Turkish President Tayyip Erdoğan after he compared a recently passed Israeli law to Nazi legislation.
“Erdogan is massacring Syrians and Kurds and has jailed tens of thousands of his citizens,” Netanyahu said. “The fact that the great ‘dictator’ Erdogan is attacking the nation-state law is the greatest compliment for this law. Turkey, under Erdogan’s rule, is becoming a dark dictatorship whereas Israel scrupulously maintains equal rights for all its citizens, both before and after the law.”
According to AFP, Erdoğan criticized the nation-state law passed last week by the Knesset, telling his parliamentarians, “This measure has shown without leaving the slightest room for doubt that Israel is the world’s most Zionist, fascist and racist state.”
Erdoğan said there was “no difference between Hitler’s obsession with the Aryan race and Israel’s understanding that these ancient lands are meant only for Jews.”
The 14th quasi-constitutional Basic Law enshrines the status of the State of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people, saying “they have an exclusive right to national self-determination in it,” while honoring the equal rights of all its citizens.
Erdoğan’s scorching words went even further than the accusations in the tweets sent out by his spokesman Ibrahim Kalin following the law’s passing last week. Then, it had been deemed an “injustice,” “a racist move that amounts to erasing the Palestinian people from their homeland physically and legally,” and an effort “to form an apartheid state.”
The president also repeated his oft-stated charge that Israel is a “terror state” because it attacked Palestinians with tanks and artillery, ignoring the fact that Israeli actions at the Gaza border come in reaction to terrorist acts on the part of Hamas activists.
Education Minister Naftali Bennett backed the prime minister’s statement, saying, “The State of Israel will not accept morality lectures from a dictator who hunts down and murders members of the Kurdish minority in his country and elsewhere.”