World Bulletin / News Desk

The Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC) denounces the rapprochement agreement signed in June by the Turkish government with Israel and ratified by Turkey last month. This inevitably led to the normalising of relations between the two countries, undermining  internationally sanctioned Palestinian rights and aspirations.

The BNC, the broadest coalition in Palestinian civil society that leads the global boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement, calls upon the Turkish government to refrain from collaborating with the Israeli regime of oppression in its violations of Palestinian human rights.

The BNC also calls upon Turkish oil and gas companies not to be complicit in the Israeli energy sector’s pillage of Palestinian and Syrian natural resources and its illegal denial of the right of Palestinians and Syrians to access these resources.

The Palestinian people have expressed deep gratitude for Turkish solidarity  the BNC condemned the Turkish government’s decision to deepen relations with Israel.

Two years after Israel’s summer of 2014 massacre of Palestinians in Gaza, Turkey abandoned a range of measures against Israel it had imposed following the bloody attack on the Freedom Flotilla in 2010 in which nine humanitarian activists were killed by Israeli commandos and a 10th fatally wounded.

These measures included a suspension in military relations with Israel.

Now Turkey has moved to normalize diplomatic relations with Israel without achieving the main condition that it had set for normalizing relations, namely an end to Israel’s criminal siege on nearly 1.9 million Palestinian residents of the Gaza Strip.

Claiming Lebanese gas reserves their own

The agreement opens up the possibility of Israel to export natural gas to Turkey as this has been a main aim for the country for main years. In addition, the discovery of large oil fields in the Mediterranean has been a source of dispute between Lebanon and Turkey with Lebanon making effort to prevent Lebanon extracting oil despite the fact that it is in Lebanon's territorial waters. The effort if successful, could allow Israel to expand its influence in the region by becoming a major energy exporter.

The BNC calls upon the people of Turkey, with their long history of supporting the struggle for Palestinian rights, to escalate BDS campaigns against Israel’s regime and corporations that enable its violations of international law and to oppose any public or private involvement by Turkey in Israel’s illegal plunder of Palestinian natural resources.

Source: Electronic Intifada