Mourning for Gaza victims

Since the start of the Israeli aerial pounding of the Gaza Strip, Turkish leaders have been deploring the indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks: demanding an immediate ceasefire, calling for the opening of border crossings between Israel and the Gaza and urging Israel allow international assistance reach to the Palestinian people. The same appeals were made as well in an "unbinding" Security Council resolution.

President Abdullah Gül, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Foreign Minister Ali Babacan have been in contact with world leaders. Erdoğan has called on the U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and demanded the United Nations play an active role in providing urgent and immediate humanitarian assistance to the desperate people of the Gaza Strip.

Israel, however, has been reiterating that Hamas is a terrorist organization; has fired many missiles on Israeli territories over the past weeks and that Israeli action was one in self defense, and Israel was determined to continue exercising its "action of self defense" as long as the security objective of Israelis required. Every country, of course, has the right to self defense. As a country which has suffered so much over the past decades from terrorism, Turkey knows far better than anyone else the value and capability of being able to engage in acts of self defense. It is, at least for this writer, beyond any doubt that Hamas is a terrorist organization. However, there is the other side of the coin as well.

Self defense and right to live
Is it possible to accept pounding of civilian residential Palestinian settlements by Israeli planes with the pretext of hunting Hamas militants firing rockets on Israeli territory? Israel has been stressing that anyone hosting in his home Palestinian militants were terrorists as well and thus the Jewish state has the right to attack. Is this mentality different at all with the Nazi mentality which was punishing the Germans trying to hide Jewish people and thus save their lives?

Furthermore, can anyone deny any people the right to resist occupation and continued applications of state terrorism on a people under occupation. Israel may say it ended its occupation of some Palestinian lands. Right, but what is the difference between occupation and blockading a territory and depriving an entire population from basic needs?

Can the world community accept total annihilation of the right to live Ñ the most sacred one of the human rights Ñ of the Palestinian people because a terrorist organization is resisting to Israeli occupation, blockade or gross violation of the rights of the Palestinian people for the sake of providing security of the Israelis? This is very much like a chicken and egg problem. Is Hamas a product of the Israeli state aggression on the peoples of the Palestinian territories or are the Israelis engaged in a legitimate right of self defense because of the terrorist attacks waged from the Palestinian territories on the Israeli territory?

Whichever way it is, civilian Israelis and Palestinians are being victimized of either Hamas terrorism or Israel’s state terrorism.

The vicious cycle of violence affecting the lives of both the Israeli and Palestinian people must be brought to an end. The humanitarian needs of the people of Gaza must be urgently addressed. Even this latest flare-up of violence must be taken as a demonstration of the urgency of the Israeli and the Palestinian leadership to concentrate more vigilantly to a compromise settlement of this perennial problem which must provide a two-state resolution: An Israeli state and a Palestinian state living side by side with a secure Israel.

Israel must understand that it will have to accept all the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people including their right to have their own state with the old city part of Jerusalem as its capital while Palestinians must accommodate themselves to the reality of the Israeli state.