Category: Israel

Our World: Turkey’s house of cards

By CAROLINE B. GLICK
10/03/2011 23:39

The only thing Israel really needs to be concerned about is the US’s continued insistence that Turkey is a model ally in the Islamic world.

To the naked eye, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan seems to be moving from strength to strength.

Erdogan was welcomed as a hero on his recent trip to Egypt, Tunisia and Libya. The Arabs embraced him as the new face of the war against Israel.

The Obama administration celebrates Turkey as a paragon of Islamic democracy.

The Obama administration cannot thank Erdogan enough for his recent decision to permit NATO to station the US X-Band missile shield on its territory.

The US is following Turkey’s lead in contending with Syrian President Bashar Assad’s massacre of his people.

And according to Erdogan, the Obama administration is looking into ways to leave its Predator and Reaper UAVs with the Turkish military when US forces depart Iraq in the coming months.

Turkey requires the drones to facilitate its war against the Kurds in Iraq and eastern Anatolia. The Obama administration also just agreed to provide Turkey with three Super Cobra attack helicopters.

Despite its apparent abandonment of Iran’s Syrian client Assad, Turkey’s onslaught against the Kurds has enabled it to maintain its strategic alliance with Iran. Last month Erdogan announced that the Turkish and Iranian militaries are cooperating in intelligence sharing and gearing up to escalate their joint operations against the Kurds in Iraq.

Erdogan is probably the only world leader that conducted prolonged friendly meetings with both Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and US President Barak Obama at the UN last month.

Then there are the Balkans. After winning his third national election in June, Erdogan dispatched his Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu to Kosovo, Bosnia and Romania to conduct what the Turks referred to as “mosque diplomacy.”

Erdogan’s government has been lavishing aid on Bosnia for several years and is promoting itself as a neo-Ottoman guardian of the former Ottoman possessions.

EVEN ERDOGAN’S threats of war seem to be paying off. His attacks on Israel have won him respect and admiration throughout the Arab world. His threats against Cyprus’s exploration of offshore natural gas fields caused Cypriot President Demetris Christofias to announce at the UN that Cyprus will share the revenues generated by its natural gas with Turkish occupied northern Cyprus.

Christofias said Cyprus would do so even in the absence of a unification agreement with its illegally occupied Turkish north. Moreover, due to Turkish pressure, Cyprus has agreed to intensify reunification talks with the Turkish puppet government in the northern half of the island. Those talks were set to begin in Nicosia last Tuesday.

Then there is the Turkish economy.

On the face of it, it seems that Turkey’s assertive foreign policy is facilitated by its impressive economic growth.

According to Turkey’s statistics agency, the Turkish economy grew by 8.8 percent in the second quarter of the year – far outperforming expectations. Last year the Turkish economy grew by 9 percent. With this impressive data, Erdogan is able to make a seemingly credible case to the likes of Egypt that it can expect to be enriched by a strategic partnership with Turkey.

For Israelis, these achievements are a cause for uneasiness. With Turkey building itself into a regional powerhouse largely on the back of its outspoken belligerency towards Israel, many observers argue Israel must do everything it can to mend fences with Turkey. Israel simply cannot afford to have Turkey angry at it, they claim.

If Turkey’s position was as strong as the conventional wisdom claims, then maybe these commentators and politicians would have a point. But Turkey’s actual situation is very different from its surface image.

Turkey’s aggressive, peripatetic foreign policy is earning Ankara few friends.

Erdogan’s threat to freeze Turkish-EU relations if the EU goes ahead as planned and transfers its rotating presidency to Cyprus next July has backfired.

European leaders wasted no time in angrily dismissing and rejecting Erdogan’s threat. So too, Germany and France have been loudly critical of Turkey’s belligerence towards Israel.

Then there is Cyprus. Turkey’s ever escalating threats to attack Cyprus’s natural gas project have angered both the EU and Russia. The EU is angry because as an EU member state, Cypriot gas will eventually benefit consumers throughout the EU, who are currently beholden to Russian suppliers and Turkish pipelines.

Russia itself has announced it will defend Cyprus against Turkish threats.

Russia is annoyed by Turkish courtship of the Balkan states. It sees no reason to allow Turkey to throw its weight around in Cyprus. Doing so successfully will only strengthen Ankara’s appeal in the Balkans and among the Turkic minorities in Russia.

THIS BRINGS us to the Muslim world. Despite Erdogan’s professions of friendship with Iran, it is far from clear that their alliance is as smooth as he presents it. The Iranians are concerned about Turkish ascendance in the Middle East and angry at Turkey for threatening Syria.

In truth if Assad is able to ride out the current storm and remain in power, he will owe his survival in no small measure to Turkey. Since the riots broke out in the spring, Turkey has restrained Washington from taking any concerted steps to overthrow the Syrian dictator.

Had it not been for Erdogan’s success in containing the US, it is possible the US and Europe might have acted swiftly to support the opposition.

But whether he stays in power or is overthrown, it is doubtful that Assad will feel any gratitude towards Erdogan.

Rather, Assad will likely blame Erdogan for betraying him. And if Assad is toppled, the Kurds of Syria could easily forge alliances with their brethren in Turkey, Iraq and Iran, to Turkey’s strategic detriment.

Since former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak was overthrown in February, Turkey has been making a concerted effort to build an alliance with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.

Ankara has reportedly transferred millions of dollars in aid to the Islamic group, and of course continues to support Hamas as well as Hizbullah.

Yet for all of his efforts on the Muslim Brotherhood’s behalf, the Brotherhood issued a sharp rebuke of Erdogan during his visit to Egypt. Brotherhood leader Essam el-Arian rejected Erdogan’s call for Egypt to adopt the Turkish model of Islamic democracy as too secular for Egypt.

As for the Turkish economy, a closer analysis of its financial data indicates that Turkey’s expansive growth is the result of a credit bubble that is about to burst. According to a Citicorp analyst quoted in The Wall Street Journal, domestic demand accounts for all of Turkey’s economic growth.

This domestic demand in turn owes to essentially free loans the government showered on the public in the lead-up to the June elections. The loans are financed by government borrowing abroad.

Turkey’s current accounts deficit stands at nearly 9 percent of GDP.

Greece is engulfed in a debt crisis with a current accounts deficit of 10 percent.

Analysts project that Turkey’s deficit will eclipse Greece’s within the year. And whereas the EU may end up bailing Greece out of its debt crisis, Turkey has no one to bail it out of its own debt crisis.

Consequently, Turkey’s entire economic house of cards is likely to come crashing down very rapidly.

It is hard to understand why Erdogan is acting as he is given the poor hand he is holding. It is possible that he is crazy.

It is possible that he is so insulated from criticism that he is unaware of Turkey’s economic realities or of the consequences of his aggressive behavior. And it is possible that he is hoping to combine a foreign policy crisis with Turkey’s oncoming economic crisis in order to blame the latter on the former. And it is possible that he believes that US backing gives him immunity to the consequences of his actions.

No matter what stands behind Turkey’s actions, it is clear Ankara has overplayed its hand. Its threats against Israel and Cyprus are hollow. Its hopes to be a regional power are faltering.

The only thing Israel really needs to be concerned about is the US’s continued insistence that Turkey is a model ally in the Islamic world. More than anything else, it is US support for Turkey that makes Erdogan a threat to the Jewish state and to the region.

caroline@carolineglick.com

https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Our-World-Turkeys-house-of-cards

October 4, 2011
NATO Leader Worried by Turkey’s Rifts With Cyprus and Israel

By STEVEN ERLANGER and STEPHEN CASTLE

BRUSSELS — NATO’s secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, expressed disquiet on Friday about Turkey’s more assertive foreign policy in the Mediterranean, saying that tensions over natural-gas exploration between Turkey and Cyprus as well as relations with Israel were “a matter of concern.”

Mr. Rasmussen said he did not foresee the tension turning into conflict in the Mediterranean, and he praised Turkey as a indispensable member of NATO that could help serve “as a bridge” between the West and the Arab countries now engaged in revolts and revolutions.

“Obviously the tensions between Turkey and Israel are a matter of concern,” he said in an interview here. “It’s a bilateral issue, NATO is not going to interfere with that,” he added, “but it is the interest of the alliance to see these tensions eased, because Turkey is a key ally and Israel is a valuable partner for the alliance.” Turkey has become increasingly outspoken in support of the Palestinians and in its animosity toward Israel, once an important ally.

Mr. Rasmussen emphasized that NATO, as an alliance that works by consensus, would not become involved in bilateral matters or the domestic politics of member countries.

Asked about Turkey’s warning that it might send military ships toward Cyprus, which is exploring for natural gas in the Mediterranean, as is Israel, Mr. Rasmussen said that “NATO as an organization is not going to interfere with these disputes,” while adding, “I do not envisage armed conflict in the eastern part of the Mediterranean.”

Relations with Turkey have to be managed carefully as it asserts a growing role on the global stage, he suggested. “I think Turkey can play a stabilizing role in the region and serve as a role model for countries in the region that are currently transforming from dictatorship into democracy,” he said.

Mr. Rasmussen, a former prime minister of Denmark who is now two years into his NATO post, also praised Turkey’s decision to participate in a new missile-defense system for NATO. He said it was evidence of the commitment of Turkey to the trans-Atlantic alliance and a signal that its was not turning away from its Western orientation. The government in Ankara has agreed to host on its territory a sophisticated American radar system that will form part of the missile shield.

About Russia and the decision of President Dmitri A. Medvedev to make way for Vladimir V. Putin, he said: “We’ll see what I would call continuity in the Kremlin. I don’t expect major changes there in Russian foreign and security policy.” He said he thought Russia remained committed to working with NATO on missile defense, a main aim of Mr. Rasmussen’s tenure.

Another central objective for the NATO secretary general is to persuade European allies to coordinate defense spending and cooperate on procurement to try to ensure that military capabilities improve, despite the expenditure cuts being pushed through by many national governments.

Mr. Rasmussen criticized a proposal from the foreign ministers of France, Germany, Italy, Poland and Spain to set up a defense-planning headquarters for the European Union based in Brussels. The plan is opposed by Britain, which sees the move as a duplication of NATO facilities and a waste of money — a view echoed by Mr. Rasmussen.

“Honestly speaking, what we need is investment in military hardware and not in new bureaucracies and headquarters,” he said. “I don’t think we need more headquarters. What we need is more investment in critical military capabilities.”

“I’m neither naïve nor unrealistic,” added Mr. Rasmussen. “I know very well, as a politician, that during a period of economic austerity you cannot expect increases in defense budgets.” That fact, he said, indicated that the alliance countries “need to make more effective use of our resources through more multinational cooperation — what I call smart defense.”

Mr. Rasmussen rejected suggestions that the United States was reducing its commitment to NATO because it took a secondary role in the operations against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in Libya. “The American commitment to NATO remains as strong as ever,” he said. “The U.S. was strongly engaged in this operation, and we could not have carried out this operation successfully without the unique and essential U.S. assets.” In particular, he mentioned intelligence, drone aircraft and air-to-air refueling, all areas in which European members should invest more, he said.

“The positive story, he said, “is that Europeans took the lead and that was actually a clear response to an American request for more European engagement, a call on Europeans to take more responsibility, and the Europeans stepped up to the plate.”

He said that there was “a division of labor which makes it possible for our alliance, in a flexible way, to conduct several operations at the same time,” with the Americans leading in Afghanistan, several European nations in the forefront in Libya and the Germans taking charge in Kosovo.

via NATO Leader Worried by Turkey’s Rifts With Cyprus and Israel – NYTimes.com.

September 30, 2011
Hiker’s family hid Israeli link during captivity

A German Jew and a Kurdish Jew

By KATHY MATHESON

ELKINS PARK, Pennsylvania — For the 26 months that Josh Fattal was held captive in Iran, his mother and brother were ever-present voices calling for his release. But his father, Jacob Fattal, never said a word.

It’s now clear why: The family feared that their Jewish faith — and Jacob Fattal’s ties to Israel — could make Josh’s unbearable situation worse because of Iran’s hard line against Israel.

Jacob Fattal is an Iraqi-born Jew who lived in Israel before moving to the United States and raising a family, according to reports in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz and the Philadelphia-based Jewish Exponent.

In 2009, his son Josh Fattal was hiking with friends Shane Bauer and Sarah Shourd in Iraq’s relatively peaceful Kurdish region when they were detained by Iranian authorities. The trio says they got lost and accidentally crossed into Iran, but authorities in Tehran charged them with spying.

Shourd was released about a year later. Fattal and Bauer, both 29, spent more than two years in Evin prison before being freed last week under a $1 million bail deal.

“We’re very happy; it’s the greatest gift we could have dreamed of receiving for Rosh Hashanah,” Jacob Fattal told Haaretz on Monday, a few days ahead of the Jewish New Year. “The problem was their being American, not Jewish. The Iranians used them as a political weapon for two years.”

No one answered the door Tuesday at the Fattals’ home in Elkins Park, a heavily Jewish suburb of Philadelphia where Josh and his brother Alex grew up. A message left for Jacob Fattal at his office was not immediately returned.

Aviva Daniel and Yael Nis, Josh Fattal’s aunts in Israel, told Israel’s Channel 2 on Tuesday that they only told a few people in Israel about Fattal’s Israeli connection — and swore them to secrecy.

“I believe the (Israeli) media knew, and cooperated, and kept it a secret,” said Nis. “We are really thankful for that.”

Nis asked various synagogues in Israel to include Fattal’s name in their regular prayers on behalf of people needing health and safety — without saying why.

“We prayed and our prayers were answered,” said Nis. “It is a miracle from God.”

Daniel said Fattal had visited Israel “a few times” over the past few years for family occasions. He speaks only a few words of Hebrew, Daniel added.

Ian Lustick, a political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert in Middle East politics, said it’s likely that both the Fattal family and the Iranians downplayed Fattal’s faith throughout the detention in order to leave the door open for a possible resolution.

While the family clearly made attempts to keep his faith out of the public eye, Lustick said, the Iranians probably knew that at least one of the detained hikers was Jewish but kept it quiet. If the family had trumpeted the fact that Fattal was Jewish, he said, it would been much more difficult to resolve the standoff.

“There was a kind of objective alliance between people in this country who didn’t talk about it publicly … and the Iranians also downplayed it,” Lustick said. “Really what happened was there was a general desire to find a way out.”

He added, “If you didn’t have officials in Iran who had always been keeping that information out of the news, then pretending to keep the secret in the United States wouldn’t have worked.”

Elliot Holin, rabbi of Congregation Kol Ami around the corner from the Fattals’ home, said Tuesday that the extended Jewish community in the Philadelphia area was aware of the delicate faith issue.

Though the Fattals belonged to another synagogue, Holin said, the hikers’ names were mentioned each week in Kol Ami’s Sabbath prayers for the past two years. When news of their release came, a member of the synagogue blew the horn known as the shofar during last Friday’s services.

Worshippers clearly felt an “incredible sense of relief and gratitude,” said Holin.

“You could see tears in people’s eyes,” he said.

Shourd has been living in Oakland, California, since her release. Bauer, who grew up in Onamia, Minnesota, proposed marriage to her while they were in prison.

___

Associated Press writers Daniel Estrin in Jerusalem and Patrick Walters in Philadelphia contributed to this story.

www.msnbc.msn.com, 27.09.2011

September 29, 2011
New research says that Jews and Palestinians have close genetic links

Judaica

By John Thomas Didymus

A researcher at the Hebrew University has published results of genetic research studies which show that Palestinians and Jews have a common ancestry in the Kurdish population of Iraq and Turkey.

Ariella Oppenheim, Ph.D. researcher at Hebrew University, who conducted the DNA studies, said that the results show also that the Ashkenazi Jews of Central Europe are more genetically related to the Palestinians than to the Jewish population of the Middle East.

Oppenheim’s study also included a study of the chromosome of the Kohen priests traced by geneticists to a hypothetical “Y-chromosomal Aaron.” Oppenheim’s study showed that many Palestinians also carry the Kohen chromosome and thus may be considered of the Kohen genetic line.

According to a documentary in which Oppenheim featured, the Palestinian city of Yatta, south of Hebron in the West Bank, which has a population of about 50,000 people, has 90% of its people with Jewish ancestry. According to a report by Mark Ellis of God Reports,

In some of the dry and dusty Palestinian and Bedouin villages they still circumcise their boys after the seventh day. Hidden away in some Palestinian homes are Jewish mezuzahs and tefillin. Some older residents an recall lighting candles on the Sabbath.

A report by Steve Hageman of the Turkish World Outreach, according to Mark, says,

Many of the Palestinians know it [that they have Jewish roots], but it’s not politically correct to acknowledge this publicly among Muslims…There are two houses of Israel in the Holy Land: one aligned with the West and primarily secular or Jewish and the other aligned with the East and primarily Islam.

A Jewish Rabbi Dov Stein explains Oppenheim’s startling revelation,

It becomes clear that a significant part of the Arabs in the land of Israel are actually descendants of Jews who were forced to convert to Islam over the centuries. There are studies which indicate that 85% of this group is of Jewish origin.

A documentary by Jewish filmmaker Nissim Mossek captured on camera a Palestinian home where the Jewish mezuzah (a parchment of scripture placed on the doorposts by pious Jews) is kept away from sight under a shelf and the tefillin (or phylacteries) hidden in a dresser. Palestinians who recognize their Jewish ancestry practice their religious way of life in secret.

Another line of explanation of the genetic links between Palestinians and Jews comes from Ancient History and explains that the genetic kinship between the Jews and the Kurds of Iran and Turkey may have it origins in deportation of the population of the Northern Kingdom of Israel to the Euphrates-Tigris region of Mesopotamia by the Assyrians in the eighth century BC

www.goddiscussion.com, September 19, 2011

September 29, 2011
Reflections of Israeli Crisis in Caucasus

The recent tension between Turkey and Israel has over the last year affected the fronts of alliances in the region, leading to pursuits for new forms of alliances subsequent to the current crisis. (more…)

September 28, 2011
Israel approves new settler homes in East Jerusalem

Hillary Clinton condemns expansion and EU calls for reversal of controversial plan to add 1,100 new homes to Gilou settlement

Harriet Sherwood in Jerusalem

A new construction site in the East Jerusalem settlement site of Gilo, where 1,100 new homes are to be built. Photograph: Menahem Kahana/AFP/Getty Images

The US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, joined a wave of condemnation of Israel‘s approval of the construction of 1,100 homes in an East Jerusalem settlement on Tuesday, which puts at risk international efforts to persuade Israeli and Palestinian negotiators to return to talks.

The move was “counter-productive to our efforts to resume direct negotiations between the parties”, Clinton said. “As you know, we have long urged both sides to avoid any kind of action which could undermine trust, including, and perhaps most particularly, in Jerusalem, any action that could be viewed as provocative by either side.”

Lady Ashton, the EU’s foreign policy chief, called for the plan to be reversed, saying settlement expansion “threatens the viability of an agreed two-state solution”.

The expansion of Gilo, a settlement built across the Green Line, was authorised by a Jerusalem planning committee and would be subject to public consultation before final approval.

The Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat called the move a “slap in the face to all international efforts to protect the fading prospects of peace in the region”. Referring to criticism of its “unilateral” act in seeking recognition of its state, the Palestinian Authority (PA) said “there could be nothing more unilateral than a huge, new round of settlement building on Palestinian land”.

Following the PA’s submission of its request to be admitted to the UN as a full member state, the Middle East Quartet – the US, UN, Russia and the EU – called for both parties to return to the negotiating table. In a statement setting out a timetable for talks, the quartet urged the parties “to refrain from provocative actions”, which was interpreted as a coded call for Israel to hold back from settlement expansion. Neither party has formally responded to the quartet’s statement, but the Palestinians have made clear they want a further settlement freeze before more talks.

The UN announced it was concerned about the decision to build further in Gilo. “Today’s decision … ignores the quartet’s appeal of last Friday to the parties to refrain from provocative actions,” said a spokesman for Robert Serry, the UN special co-ordinator for the Middle East peace process. “This sends the wrong signal at this sensitive time. Settlement activity is contrary to the road map and to international law, and undermines the prospect of resuming negotiations and reaching a two-state solution to the conflict.”

The expansion of Gilo, a huge settlement built on land between Jerusalem and Bethlehem that was captured by Israel in 1967 and later annexed, has been on the table for more than two years. The settlement is illegal under international law. The Israeli government asserts it has the right to build Jewish settlements anywhere in the city.

The approval came as the chairmen of several rightwing parties in Israel wrote to Netanyahu to urge him to annex all West Bank settlements and accelerate settlement construction in response to the Palestinian bid for statehood. They also called for financial sanctions and curbs on Palestinian construction in areas of the West Bank controlled by Israel.

Tensions in the West Bank between settlers and Palestinians have risen sharply this September with the demand for Palestinian statehood at the UN.

An Israeli police investigation concluded that a settler and his infant son, who were killed when their car overturned last Friday, had been struck by a rock thrown by Palestinians. At their funeral on Sunday night, a rabbi called for “collective punishment” of Palestinians, saying “there are no innocents in a war”.

The Israeli security service, Shin Bet, confirmed it had urged the education ministry to halt funding to a religious school in the settlement of Yitzhar. According to a report in the news service Haaretz, security services said senior rabbis were inciting students to attack Palestinian villagers.

A Palestinian man was shot dead by Israeli soldiers during a protest last Friday against settlers in the West Bank village of Qusra.

www.guardian.co.uk , 27 September 2011

September 28, 2011