It’s not good to sit in one of Turkey’s 663 Starbucks cafes these days. For several weeks, the American brand, which has not yet been identified in the boycott campaigns of associations close to the Palestinian cause, has been particularly targeted by Turkish Islamist groups for its supposed support for the Israeli offensive in the Gaza Strip. . In the conservative town of Gaziantep on the Syrian border, the youth wing of the ruling AKP party staged a sit-in at one of its establishments. Social networks are full of videos of more or less aggressive activists who burst onto the terraces of the brand, to lecture customers or, like in the city of Izmit, neighbor of Istanbul, order them to leave the premises and throw their drinks on the ground. In another café of the brand, it is a single woman, who came to challenge consumers: “So you are not Muslim?”, she takes them to task. “No, this is a secular country,” the customers rebuke. “Go and fight in Gaza!” another table retorts before she leaves.
“Until now, boycott campaigns attacked products or stores, now it is the customers who are targeted, identified as accomplices: we hear about the ‘Zionists among us’,” explains political scientist Sezin Öney . In a desire to demonstrate force, Islamist parties, groups and associations quickly took the lead in demonstrations against Israel, to the point of eclipsing the Turkish left-wing parties and unions, which formed the historic heart of support for the Palestinian cause. .
Beyond a very hypothetical support for Israel, the Starbucks franchise in Turkey being owned by a Kuwaiti group, it is also, and perhaps above all, a way of life perceived as “Western” and secular which seems targeted by activists. Small groups also take advantage of this to display their presence and try to recruit, like Hizb ut-Tahrir, an Islamist group which calls in particular for the restoration of the caliphate and whose black banners are present at each gathering.
For Erdogan, Hamas members are “mujahidin”
Some experts see the hand of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in this. “The government subcontracts the most spectacular and radical actions to groups allied to it,” says political scientist Sezin Öney. During a demonstration called by the Islamist association IHH in front of an American military base in the south of the country, demonstrators attempted to enter the perimeter before being pushed back by the police. . On November 12, it was Hüda-Par, a Kurdish Islamist party allied with Erdogan during the last elections, which organized a meeting in its stronghold in the city of Batman, where its president Zekeriya Yapicioğlu took the stage. supervised by men in uniforms Hamas special forces.
President Erdogan himself, in his speeches, is much more the defender of Hamas, whose members he describes as “resistance fighters” but above all “mujahideen” (fighters for the faith), than of the Palestinian cause in general. And through his virulent speeches, it is as much the West deemed “support” and “accomplice” as Israel which is targeted. As he did again on November 15 in front of his party’s deputies, the Islamo-nationalist leader now, throughout his interventions, places the subject within the framework of a “fight between the cross and the crescent”.
Risk for Western investments in Türkiye
Ankara recalled its ambassador to Israel without, as some allies of power demand, imposing economic sanctions and interrupting commercial ties with Israel. “Let Israel be destroyed, buried under the rubble!” thunders Ibrahim Güler, unsuccessful AKP candidate for mayor of Antakya, even though the cargo ships he owns through his logistics firm are among the 259 Turkish commercial ships have supplied Israel since October 7, ironically observes the left-wing opposition daily Birgün.
Diplomatic tensions between Ankara and Tel Aviv will inevitably call into question the project to transport Israeli gas through Turkey, a project dear to Ankara which hopes to become an energy hub for Europe. “These tensions with Israel but also with the Europeans and the Americans arise while the government was trying to convince Western investors to reinvest in the country to try to emerge from the crisis. This could compromise these efforts,” underlines Sezin Öney.
In 2010, the incident of the Mavi Maramara, a boat chartered by the Islamist NGO IHH and boarded off the coast of Gaza by the Israeli army, causing the death of nine Turkish activists, had lastingly damaged relations between the two countries. Initiated a few years ago and recorded in 2022 with President Herzog’s visit to Turkey, the bilateral rapprochement reached its peak at the end of last September during a warm meeting in New York between Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Benjamin Netanyahu. This new rise in tensions between the two countries is likely to last or even get worse.
And the Mavi Marmara should return to service. Its associative platform announced on November 16 that new ships loaded with humanitarian aid should soon set sail to try to break the blockade of the Gaza Strip.
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