It
feels impossible to sit and write amidst the constant grief and urgency demanded in this ongoing genocide. Yet we feel compelled to write—compelled to document and archive the mobilisations that have emerged during this moment, in an effort to inscribe collective memories and pass on the knowledge(s) gained. To account for the successes, failures and learnings that we must carry forth and build on for our next phase of resistance.
One emerging tactic has been the disruption of imperial energy circuits feeding the Zionist project. Insurgencies targeting energy have erupted globally, but this article seeks to chronicle a particular disruptive nodal point in Turkey, documenting the tactics used, learnings taken and the investigative research that has informed them. Energy in all its forms – coal, crude oil, jet fuel and natural gas – play an active role in fueling the illegal occupation of historic Palestine. Indeed, the Israeli military cannot run without a steady influx of imported fuels, whether it is crude oil fuelling military tankers, jet fuel powering fighter jets or coal electrifying weapons factories. Energy is inseparable from Israel’s ability to perform genocide.
Turkey is the critical conduit and infrastructural node for one of these energy supply chains: Azerbaijani crude oil to Israel. Its Ceyhan port is where oil tankers are loaded and shipped to the Zionist entity, and Turkey also controls the majority of the BTC pipeline which runs through vast swathes of its territory. This crude oil accounts for more than 60% of the Zionist state’s fuel imports, forming a key part of its energy strategy. In 2024, Israel became the preferred destination for Azerbaijani oil, generating over $297million in revenue for the Azeri imperialist regime currently enacting its own genocidal and settler project on Armenian lands. In Israel the use of crude oil is also critical to performing its own genocide, as it is the raw material needed to fuel military tankers and domestically produce jet fuel, the resource that powers the aerial warcraft bombarding Gaza. As such, the explicit violence of crude oil is undeniable as is Turkey’s explicit role in fuelling the flames in Gaza.
The transport route of this oil is equally important, as it connects the Palestinian, Armenian and Kurdish struggles through the commodity flows. The oil is supplied from extracted resources in the Caspian sea near the city of Baku—where COP29 will be hosted—travelling via the Baku Tbilisi Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline (partly owned and solely operated by British Petroleum) before finally arriving at the Ceyhan port terminal in Turkey. The majority of the pipeline passes through Turkish territory which in addition to its operation of Ceyhan port, makes Turkish authorities the essential controlling force in the flow of oil to Israel.
So, why is Turkey not enacting an oil embargo? Despite several calls to halt the flow of oil by civil society groups, the Turkish regime remains silent. Erdogan’s government has deployed a plethora of performative solidarity acts such restricting jet fuel and steel exports to Israel, but none have halted or decreased the loading of oil tankers bound for Haifa. This is because the BTC pipeline has its own political importance for the region’s imperial powers. In its early construction stages the newly inaugurated Azeri ruler stated he would use the pipeline’s oil revenues to increase military power and threaten ‘war’ with Armenia. A materialised reality we witness today. Similarly, the infrastructure goes through the edges of the Kurdish region occupied by Turkey and, like other state infrastructures, has been used to police and displace Kurdish villages. Indeed, the pipeline is guarded by the notorious Gendarmerie, the military force associated with the displacement, destruction and torture of Kurdish villages and people. As such the flows of oil to Israel through this pipeline are critical to Turkey maintaining its imperial control over these populations and lands, facilitating the use of carceral force to do so through justifications of ‘securing infrastructure’. Turkey, therefore, is clearly unmotivated to stem the flow of oil or the use of this pipeline.
As we see, in tracing energy extraction and consumption we are following the entrails of imperialism’s bloody footprints. It is ethnic cleansing, the devastation of traditional societies and incarceration of populations that is the necessary component to exploit natural resources, and it is the use of that resource that powers military genocides in Palestine, Armenia and beyond. In spite of this, insurgent cartographies across time and space have transformed these energy sites into sites of contestation. Through strikes, blockades and protests organised by workers and activists, popular movements have sought to dismantle these flows of energy and their colonial apparatuses, including from within genocidal states like Turkey.
During the ongoing genocide in Palestine, one particular group of note has emerged: Filistin İçin Bin Genç (One Thousand Youths for Palestine), coming together to “amplify the voice of the Palestinian intifada” and establish an anti-imperialist front in Turkey that exposes it as a “collaborator sustain(ing) Zionism”. Members of the group tell us that their main objective is to expose Turkish corporations and state apparatuses that “feed Israel” behind closed doors through continued diplomatic and commercial relations. It is an imperative, they add, to “cut all relations with Israel, including…the suspension of oil shipments from Ceyhan Port”, a critical node of complicity that pushed the group to disrupt SOCAR, the Azeri state-owned oil company that is the second-largest shareholder in the BTC pipeline and therefore operates and profits from the extraction and delivery of oil to the Zionist state.
Filistin İçin Bin Genç’s insurgencies have provided a map on the breadth of Turkish complicity that also spans beyond this port and pipeline. Indeed their actions on the ground resisted and counteracted the performative solidarity displayed by the Turkish regime, instead organising material support to Palestinians through the disruptions of trade routes and energy circuits.
The group began their cartography of insurrection by targeting Zorlu Holdings, a Turkish conglomerate based in Istanbul. The corporation has significant investments in Israeli power plants that generate 1,000MW of electricity annually, amounting to 7% of Israel’s annual needs. Upon uncovering this link, Filistin İçin Bin Genç launched the group and organised their first protests in January 2024 at the company headquarters, calling on the multinational to ‘shut down the plants and cut the electricity’. This was followed by successive protests at shopping malls also owned by Zorlu Holdings, creating new methods to simultaneously target the corporation’s complicity, weaken its public image and increase public awareness on Turkey’s role in fueling the genocide.
Quickly the group next targeted İÇDAŞ, revealing another corporate node on the map of Turkish abetment. İÇDAŞ is a Turkish corporation that works in construction, concrete production, energy and mining services – particularly iron and steel. To this day, İÇDAŞ still provides 25% of Israel’s steel, an important material in the literal construction and expansion of the Zionist project – including pipelines. As part of the Independent Industrialists and Businessmen Association (MUSIAD), İÇDAŞ is bound by government decisions, including the trade ban on steel and iron earlier this year imposed by the Ministry of Trade. The continued supply of steel to Israel, despite the ban, further exemplifies the performativity of this legislation and Erdogan’s commitment to his commercial and trade relationship with the Zionist state. In order to expose this, Filistin İçin Bin Genç held a press conference outside the MUSIAD headquarters entitled ‘Cut off Trade instead of Organising Congresses’. This was met with heavy insults and threats from the MUSIAD management who eventually called the Turkish police.
Moving towards another site of complicity, Filistin İçin Bin Genç escalated their tactics by targeting a third company, Limak Holding. This corporation is considered within Erdogan’s ‘close circle’, a gang of five corporations who collectively won nearly all large tenders during Erdogan’s time in office. All these companies have differentially supported continued trade with Israel during this genocide, with Limak Holdings specifically providing unfettered use of its port for the daily shipments of crude oil, steel, iron and fuel to Israel. To counter this collusion, Filistin İçin Bin Genç targeted the companies headquarters and galvanised the protestors throughout police violence by delivering a powerful speech that spurred on the collective revolt.
Their biggest direct action was yet to come: an occupation of the SOCAR offices in Istanbul. SOCAR is—the fully state-owned national oil and gas company of Azerbaijan—headquartered in Baku (where the BTC pipeline commences) yet holds several offices in Turkey. As the direct link to the corporate-state supplier of crude oil to Israel, and a majority stakeholder in the BTC pipeline, this was the group’s biggest opponent yet. Initially, on April 6th 2024 the youth movement protested on Istiklal Avenue, one of the most famous streets in Istanbul, to publicly amplify their call for the cutting of all commercial and diplomatic ties with Israel. Despite unprecedented police violence—including the torture and detention of several Filistin İçin Bin Genç members who were denied access to lawyers for extended periods—the group continued to protest. Galvanised by their rising public image and appearing on several news channels, members chanted ‘Killer Israel, Erdogan Collaborator’ in Taksim Square on Labour Day and five were arrested. The activists were held in custody for 25 days and questioned about the actions on April 6th in Istiklal Avenue.
Regardless, the youth group continued to provide one of a few oppositions to Erodogan’s lacklustre solidarity with Palestine. On May 31st the movement gathered outside SOCAR’s offices, graffitiing the doors before finally occupying the residence for several hours. Described as the ‘peak of their organising’ this target represented the pinnacle of their direct actions, targeting the central figure in Turkish complicity and flows of oil to Israel. But such resistance was suppressed with strong state action. At the time of writing, two Palestinian members of Filistin İçin Bin Genç were incarcerated and at risk of deportation on charges of insulting the President who remained steadfast in his logistical and trade support for the Zionist entity. In response, the group released a fiery statement denouncing these arrests and reiterating “the guilty ones are those who continue to collaborate with the Zionists” and tagging the Ministry of Interior.
A wave of solidarity ensued, with both local and global groups staging sit-ins outside Turkish embassies and the Istanbul AKP Provincial headquarters where their Palestinian friends were being held. Coordinating this transnational network of active comradeship put significant pressure on the Turkish regime who finally released the Palestinian activists. At this moment, the group’s actions had not only mapped Turkey’s complicity in genocide but had curated a counter-map of solidarity, counterposing the capitalist networks of violence that bind us with webs of solidarity that resulted in emancipation.
The bravery and resilience of Filistin İçin Bin Genç in the face of such violence and personal cost cannot be underestimated. Their commitment to exposing imperial power and raising public awareness is a critical learning for future movements, as well as their acute understanding of how the circulations of energy and capital sustain the settler state. Their singular focus on Palestine allowed the movement to unite groups from across the political spectrum, avoiding classical leftist divisions to ensure an effective and united front in service of liberation. In organising interruptions, a diversity of tactics and targets was likewise essential, generating a multilayered strategy that at once disrupted and exposed the variety of corporate and political actors benefiting from the energy matrix supplying Israel. From the producer of Israeli electricity, to the suppliers of steel, to the shipping companies used to export oil and the corporate operator itself—the totality of the energy circuit was revealed and challenged through their organising. They created not only a counter-map of global solidarity but a counter-map of national resistance to Turkish complicity.
Moving forward, other resistance groups must remember the violent realities of energy imperialism beyond Palestine, connecting the Armenian, Kurdish and Palestinian struggles bound by these oil flows. Whether it is the destruction of traditional societies in the Gulf states poignantly captured by Abdel Rahman Munif in the novel ‘Cities of Salt’ or the ethnic cleansing of indigenous populations living in the oil rich region Artsakh (also known as the Armenian Republic) the entanglement of energy and genocide is a fierce reality. Therefore, we must envisage infrastructures of energy extraction and transport, not as neutral operations but as sites of imperial violence. Whilst more work must be done to ultimately break these chains of violence, the Turkish youth movement has provided us with a template for what material solidarity that at once unveils energy imperialism and fights for a free Palestine, can and must look like.