Türkiye-Filistin İlişkilerinin Uluslararası Anlaşmalar Çerçevesinde İncelenmesi: Eğitim İşbirliği Üzerinden Nicel Bir Analiz
Review of Türkiye-Palestine Relations within the Framework of International Agreements: A Quantitative Analysis on Education Cooperation

Summary/Abstract: The Palestine issue is one of the leading issues on the world agenda as of October 2023. In Türkiye, in addition to its humanitarian aspect, the issue causes a special sensitivity due to the fact that there are places in the region that are considered holy for Islam. As a natural result of this situation, the Palestine issue becomes one of the important topics of the domestic political agenda and can be seen as an element of consolidation by political actors. Many political developments during and after the 2024 local government elections point to the place of the Palestine issue in Turkish political life. The study is aimed to reveal the agreements signed between Türkiye and Palestine and the effects of these agreements. In this regard, document analysis (legislative documents and international agreement texts) were preferred in the qualitative analysis process, and descriptive statistics (frequency distribution) methods were preferred in the quantitative analysis process. Essentially, although economic parameters give more accurate results in such studies, economic data were considered far from providing meaningful results in terms of the study, since Palestine's customs processes proceed through Israel. In this context, the field of education cooperation was preferred in the quantitative analysis to determine the reflection of the agreements in practice. In this study, after providing brief information on the place of international agreements in Turkish law, an analysis of the agreements signed between Türkiye and Palestine is aimed. The main source of data for this analysis is the international agreements published in the Official Gazette and publicly available. In addition, the minutes of the General Assembly of the Grand National Assembly of Türkiye (TBMM) and the minutes of the TBMM Foreign Affairs Committee, which are among the main data sources of constitutional and parliamentary law, were analyzed. From these minutes, it was aimed to obtain some data on the opposition parties' perspective on the Palestinian issue. When the data on police training cooperation is examined, it is seen that Palestinian students constitute the largest group numerically and proportionally among foreign students studying at the Police Academy. When general higher education data are evaluated, the fact that Palestine is the country with the fourth highest number of students in proportion to the population in the Turkish higher education system, indicates the active and target-oriented Palestine policy of the Republic of Türkiye. Data showing that the agreements signed between Türkiye and Palestine were accepted almost unanimously in the Turkish Grand National Assembly can also be interpreted as indicating that the issue has begun to be seen as a non-partisan issue.

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