Turk­ish Prime Min­is­ter Recep Tayipp Erdo­gan recently raised eye­brows when he deep-sixed Israeli diplo­mats from Turkey. But it was his later remarks broad­cast on Al Jazeera tele­vi­sion that Turk­ish war­ships would accom­pany Turk­ish aid ves­sels to Pales­tini­ans in the Gaza Strip that dropped jaws. War­ships? Why would Turk­ish war­ships need to escort Turk­ish flotil­las aim­ing to break Israel’s legal counter-terrorism naval block­ade? This alone might lead some to believe Turkey has been first in line to aid Pales­tini­ans in Gaza. Not so fast. United Nations records show Turkey is not just con­ser­v­a­tive when it comes to aid­ing Gazans but rather stingy.

Sim­i­lar to the US and the EU (inci­den­tally UNRWA’s biggest donors), Erdo­gan would either have to remove his choke­hold on his check­book, go through offi­cial Israeli entry points or coor­di­nate efforts directly with the Red Cross or UNRWA  (United Nations Relief and Works Agency) if he had a gen­uine inter­est in aid­ing Pales­tini­ans in the Gaza Strip. But don’t count on it. Erdogan’s actions of late go as far as to slap the UN in the face. Even UN chief Ban Ki Moon stressed that flotil­las attempt­ing to bring aid are coun­ter­pro­duc­tive, and the UN sup­ported that stance. What do other coun­tries think? The US, Canada, Britain, EU pub­licly dis­cour­aged flotil­las too.

This brings up the real ques­tion: what’s really going on with Gaza? UN offi­cials repeat­edly con­firm there is no human­i­tar­ian cri­sis in Gaza. Human­i­tar­ian goods enter Gaza daily. Besides, it wasn’t that long ago (2004 to be exact) that the Econ­o­mist mag­a­zine ranked Gazan men as the 3^rd high­est in the world for obe­sity and Gazan women as 8^th high­est. And poverty? That answer remains any­where but Gaza: Sub-Saharan Africa is the poor­est region in the world, fol­lowed by South Asia, accord­ing to a new Mul­ti­di­men­sional Poverty Index or MIP devel­oped by Oxford Uni­ver­sity with sup­port from the UN. For Gaza and the West Bank? Read on.

Erdo­gan could ben­e­fit from eye­balling this chart show­ing coun­tries with poverty-stricken civil­ians that only make $1.25 a day and inhal­ing the last MIP and the upcom­ing one due in Octo­ber. Oxford Poverty Human OPHI (Oxford Poverty Human Devel­op­ment Ini­tia­tive) already released the top 10 poor­est coun­tries in the world (1 is the poorest):

1. Niger
2. Ethiopia
3. Mali
4. Burkino Faso
5. Burundi
6. Soma­lia
7. Cen­tral African Republic
8. Liberia
9. Guinea
10. Sierra Leone
    

After review­ing the 2010 report which lists Gaza in the often mis­la­beled “Occu­pied Pales­tin­ian ter­ri­to­ries”, it’s clear that there is a wel­ter of coun­tries expe­ri­enc­ing a human­i­tar­ian cri­sis but Pales­tini­ans resid­ing in the Gaza Strip and West Bank sim­ply do not come close. Some of the coun­tries listed expe­ri­enc­ing greater poverty than Pales­tini­ans in Gaza and the West Bank include:

Hun­gary, Russ­ian Fed­er­a­tion, Thai­land, Jor­dan, Argentina, Mex­ico, Syr­ian Arab Repub­lic, Egypt, Turkey, Brazil, and China.

The word “Turkey” was no typo. Turkey is listed as hav­ing High poverty while the “Occu­pied” Pales­tin­ian Ter­ri­to­ries is listed as hav­ing Medium poverty. None of this is good news for Erdo­gan, and his feck­less PR cam­paign to use Gazans as pawns while bul­ly­ing Israel. Speak­ing of bul­ly­ing, Erdo­gan tacked on another base­less accu­sa­tion to his ear­lier state­ment on Al Jazeera when he stated that his war­ships would keep Israel from exploit­ing nat­ural resources. Besides this egre­gious remark that had greed drip­ping on all sides of it, Erdo­gan is sound­ing off more for war than welfare.

Could Turkey’s ties to the IHH, the Turkish-based orga­ni­za­tion that launched the knife-wielding Mavi Mar­mara be what’s prompt­ing Erdogan’s new­found altru­ism? Likely. In 2010, the US gov­ern­ment con­firmed the IHH has sig­nif­i­cant ties to Hamas. Erdogan’s tight­fisted past when aid­ing Pales­tini­ans in Gaza along with his inces­sant inter­est in break­ing Israel’s counter-terrorism naval block­ade read­ily shows his inter­est goes far beyond aid. Is the Arab Spring (sum­mer and fall) Erdogan’s oppor­tu­nity to reclaim the Ottoman Empire? Only time will tell. But what is becom­ing clear is if Turkey aims to “erad­i­cate pover­ty” its bet­ter off aid­ing Niger. Oth­er­wise, it might just need to tackle an even more rad­i­cal idea: tak­ing care of its own.