After months of increasingly shrill rhetoric from Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan with regard to Israel and Hamas, Israel’s foreign minister has drawn equivalency between Hamas and the PKK, a Turkish (and Iraqi Kurdistan)-based terrorist group which has been fighting to carve out a state in Anatolia for decades. Turkey is upset, saying there is no comparison between the two. But Turkey is wrong: When democracies legitimize terrorist groups, the precedent can be damning.
To be clear, I disagree with Avigdor Lieberman: Israel should stay on the moral high ground and not legitimize terrorism the way Turkey’s current government has. But, as Turkey pursues a realist agenda, it certainly shouldn’t be surprised when a realist agenda is applied to it.