Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Tuesday met with members of the anti-Zionist Neturei Karta organization in London following Israel’s violent response to Palestinians protesting the opening ceremony of the US Embassy in Jerusalem on Monday, which caused more than 60 deaths, according to the Hürriyet Daily News.
EU Affairs Minister Ömer Çelik and presidential spokesperson İbrahim Kalın were also present at the meeting, which lasted for about half an hour.
“We have to realize and understand that helping the state of Israel is not in favor of Jewish people,” Elahanan Beck, the chief rabbi of Neturei Karta, said.
Erdoğan tweeted on May 15 that “Netanyahu is the PM of an apartheid state that has occupied a defenseless people’s lands for 60+ years in violation of UN resolutions.”
He also called Israel a “terror state” in a meeting with Turkish students in London same day.
Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also responded from Twitter, accusing Turkey of invasions in Cyprus and Syria and murdering Kurdish citizens.
On May 14 thousands of Palestinians demonstrated on the Gaza Strip’s eastern border to commemorate the “Nakba,” or catastrophe, the day Israel was formally recognized as a state, on May 15, 1948. Protests had begun March 30, and since then more than 100 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli gunfire.