Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan addressing a pro-Hamas rally in Istanbul, Oct. 23, 2023. Photo: Reuters/Umit Turhan Coskun

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Wednesday delivered one of the most viscerally hostile speeches against Israel during a long career of demonizing the Jewish state and insulting its leaders.

Speaking at a science awards ceremony in Ankara, Erdogan accused Israel of operating “Nazi” concentration camps and compared his Israeli counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu with Adolf Hitler.

“We’ve seen the Nazi camps of Israel. How does this happen? They used to talk about Hitler, but how are you any different than Hitler?” Erdogan ranted, encountering a round of loud applause as he added, “This is even worse than Hitler. What Netanyahu is doing is worse than what Hitler did.”

Erdogan went on to observe that “Netanyahu is richer than Hitler. He takes support from the West, he receives all kinds of support from the US, and with all that support, 20,000 Gazans have been killed.”

Erdogan also addressed the impact of the war in Gaza internationally, leaping to the defense of US university presidents under fire for allegedly ignoring or downplaying a wave of antisemitism since the Oct. 7 Hamas pogrom in southern Israel, and criticizing Germany for its support of Israel.

“Can you imagine that university presidents are being questioned and held accountable in [the US] Congress just because they advocate for the rights of children, women, and civilians?” he asked, referring to the controversial appearances of the presidents of Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) before a congressional committee earlier this month.

Turning his attention to Germany, Erdogan asserted that guilt over the Nazi Holocaust was effectively censoring German criticism of Israel’s military response.

“That’s why Germany remains silent,” he said, “but we don’t owe anyone. We have no debts, it is the West that owes. Because of its debt, it cannot speak up.”

Reacting to Erdogan’s speech, Netanyahu told the Turkish leader to hold his lectures in no uncertain terms.

“Erdogan, who commits genocide against the Kurds, who holds a world record for imprisoning journalists who oppose his rule, is the last one who can preach morality to us,” Netanyahu posted on X/Twitter.

Erdogan has made the comparison between Israel and the Nazis before. During the 2014 war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, he drew an exact equivalence between Israel and the Nazi regime. “I don’t approve of what Hitler did, and neither do I approve of what Israel has done,” he said. “When it’s a question of so many people dying, it’s inappropriate to ask who was the more barbarous.”

As well as attacking Israel in the weeks since the Oct. 7 atrocities, effectively destroying a tentative detente between Ankara and Jerusalem over the past two years, Erdogan has lauded the Hamas terror group as “an organization of liberation, of mujahedeen, who fight to protect their land and citizens.”