Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is a “sworn enemy of Israel and the West, a jihadist in a suit,” Amichai Chikli, the Jewish state’s minister of diaspora affairs and combating antisemitism, charged on Monday. The Jewish state “will not tolerate a Turkish presence” on its southern border with the Gaza Strip or northern frontier with Syria, Chikli tweeted, slamming Ankara’s potential involvement in U.S. President Donald Trump’s recently-launched peace plan for the Middle East.
“‘May Allah, for the sake of His name … destroy and devastate Zionist Israel.’ This sentence was not uttered by a Hamas or Hezbollah leader, it was said in a public prayer on March 30, 2025, by the President of Turkey,” the Israeli Cabinet minister noted in his post on X.
Erdoğan “is consistently trying to undermine the Jewish people’s eternal bond with their capital,” according to Chikli, who said that the Muslim leader “likely never opened the Quran nor heard of King David and Solomon, both praised in Surah Al-Anbiya and other chapters.”
“We remind the ignorant dictator Erdoğan of one simple truth,” Chikli wrote. “Jerusalem has been the capital of Israel since the days of King David 1,500 years before the birth of Muhammad, and 2,500 years before the imperial-colonial Ottoman occupation.”
Erdoğan’s remarks were “not slips of the tongue. They are the words of a dangerous enemy,” he concluded. (Read More)
