Category: Israel

  • In Turkey former Blues star Trevor tells of sabotage by Israeli Mossad

    In Turkey former Blues star Trevor tells of sabotage by Israeli Mossad

    By Cormac Murphy

    Thursday June 30 2011

    2906 Trevor Hogan H 934591tA FORMER Leinster star and an ex-TD were among 20 Irish people who could have drowned after their aid ship to Gaza was sabotaged overnight.

    Members of the team have blamed Israeli secret agents for the sophisticated attack by divers.

    Only the action of the quick-thinking crew saved lives from being lost on the MV Saoirse, which is docked in Turkey.

    It was due to take part in a flotilla to the besieged Middle East zone but was “sabotaged” and will not now travel.

    Rugby player Trevor Hogan said the realisation of what happened has left crew members “devastated”.

    He said the boat would have been “well out to sea” before the effects of the attack were felt.

    “There would have been a loss of life on the boat. It’s pretty devastating. We’re all coming to terms with it at the moment,” the 31-year-old former Leinster and Munster star said.

    “It was definitely sabotage. It was a clear attempt to sink the boat and it would have been a gradual sinking.”

    The Israeli spy agency Mossad is being blamed for the sabotage.

    Former TD Chris Andrews told the Herald today: “The boat would almost certainly have sank.

    “We don’t know the precise way they did it but they cut a shaft so that we would have got out of the port but then it would have snapped.”

    Divers used an angle grinder to cut the shaft while it was at berth in the Turkish coastal town Gocek.

    Trevor said: “You don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to work out who is responsible for this. Israel is the only one who is interested in stopping this flotilla and they’re using every means possible. It’s pretty worrying.”

    He wants the Irish Government to “stand up behind us and protect us” and called for Foreign Affairs Minister Eamon Gilmore to condemn the attack.

    Six of the 20 crew and passengers who had been due to travel on the Saoirse will now join the flotilla on an Italian vessel.

    “They’re not going to intimidate any of us. Our resolve is stronger than ever,” Mr Hogan said.

    The Israeli Embassy in Dublin did not provide a response to the Herald regarding the allegations at the time of writing.

    The Saoirse had been at berth in Turkey for the past few weeks. The damage was discovered when skipper Shane Dillon noticed something amiss and carried out an inspection.

    The boat was put on land at a local shipyard and the extent of the sabotage was immediately visible.

    “The propeller shaft had been weakened by saboteurs who cut, gouged or filed a piece off the shaft. This had weakened the integrity of the shaft, causing it to bend badly when put in use,” said a press statement.

    Dr Fintan Lane, national coordinator of Irish Ship To Gaza, which owns the vessel, said: “This is an appalling attack and should be condemned by all right-thinking people.”

    comurphy@herald.ie

    – Cormac Murphy

    via In Turkey former Blues star Trevor tells of sabotage by Israeli Mossad – National News, Frontpage – Herald.ie.

  • Syria: CIA, M16, French, Mossad, Saudi Involvement Unreported In Imperialist Media

    Syria: CIA, M16, French, Mossad, Saudi Involvement Unreported In Imperialist Media

    DisinformationBy Jay Janson

    27 June, 2011
    Countercurrents.org

    What is unfolding in Syria is an armed insurrection supported covertly by foreign powers including the US, Turkey and Israel. Armed insurgents belonging to Islamist organizations have crossed the border from Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan. The US State Department has confirmed that it is supporting the insurgency. A monolithic unified slant media cartel restricts reports to indiscriminate killing of civilian protesters by Syrian government

    Now that the West’s war on Gaddafi is going well, American news commentators can in rare moments proudly admit that the CIA is heavily involved. No so, when if comes to Syria. It’s too early. The public has not been yet been properly taught to hate Syria’s President Assad sufficiently.

    The imperialist media cartel that controls what news is selected and how and with what intention it shall be broadcasted has done its best to demonize Assad. How? Simple! They just keep repeating day in day out that Syrian government forces are shooting and massacring protesters, period. They don’t say anything else. That’s it. There is nothing else happening. When it is necessary to admit that police and soldiers are being ambushed and killed, a cover story comes with it, like, ‘it is suspected that they were killed by defecting police and military.’

    This amazing great cartel of Pentagon/CIA fed media conglomerates, which seems to have the great majority of the basically indifferent population of the West in tow, is effortlessly running its usual cascade of disinformation, half-truths and propaganda preparing justification for military intervention as previously in the cases of Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan and Iran.

    However, “The plan to destabilize Syria is not working all that well. It succeeded in persuading public opinion that the country is in the grips of a brutal dictatorship, but it also welded the vast majority of the Syrian population firmly behind its government. Ultimately, the plan could backfire on those who masterminded it, notably Tel Aviv” surmises Thierry Meyssan in “The Plan to Destabilize Syria”, Voltaire Network, Lebanon, 6/13/11.

    A few scholarly sites on the Internet always manage to fill in what is intentionally blacked out in Pentagon counseled and fed commercial mass media of the Western pseudo-democracies. Here, Michael Chossudovsky, consultant with a half-dozen UN agencies and publisher of Global Research out of Canada tell us:

    “What is unfolding in Syria is an armed insurrection supported covertly by foreign powers including the US, Turkey and Israel. Armed insurgents belonging to Islamist organizations have crossed the border from Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan. The US State Department has confirmed that it is supporting the insurgency.
    This was stated by U.S. State Department official Victoria Nuland. “We started to expand contacts with the Syrians, those who are calling for change, both inside and outside the country,” she said.

    Action against Syria is part of a “military roadmap”, a sequencing of military operations. According to former NATO Commander General Wesley Clark–the Pentagon had clearly identified Iraq, Libya, Syria and Lebanon as target countries of a US-NATO intervention:
    ‘[The] Five-year campaign plan [included]… a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia and Sudan’ (Pentagon official quoted by General Wesley Clark) In Winning Modern Wars (page 130) General Wesley Clark states the following:

    ‘The objective is to destabilize the Syrian State and implement “regime change” through the covert support of an armed insurgency, integrated by Islamist militia.
    The reports on civilian deaths are used to provide a pretext and a justification for humanitarian intervention under the principle “Responsibility to Protect”.’

    Media Disinformation

    What is mentioned profusely is that the armed forces and the police are involved in the indiscriminate killing of civilian protesters. Press reports confirm, however, from the outset of the protest movement an exchange of gunfire between armed insurgents and the police, with casualties reported on both sides.

    The insurrection started in mid March in the border city of Daraa, which is 10 km from the Jordanian border. The Daraa “protest movement” on March 18 had all the appearances of a staged event involving, in all likelihood, covert support to Islamic terrorists by Mossad and/or Western intelligence. Government sources point to the role of radical Salafist groups (supported by Israel)
    Other reports have pointed to the role of Saudi Arabia in financing the protest movement.

    What has unfolded in Daraa in the weeks following the initial violent clashes on 17-18 March, is the confrontation between the police and the armed forces on the one hand and armed units of terrorists and snipers on the other which have infiltrated the protest movement” The Destabilization of Syria and the Broader Middle East War, By Michael Chossudovsky

    One would be naive to believe that the century of brutal occupation of the Arab lands of Syria, Lebanon, Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco by France and those of Iraq, Jordan, Palestine, Egypt, Sudan, Somaliland, Aden, and Yemen by the British, with both occupying Libya after W.W.II, that British M16 and and the French Secret Service would not be indispensable for the johnny-come-lately America empire and its CIA. But one would have to be even more naive to believe the excellent secret service of Israel, Mossad, at war with the Arab world since 1948 was not playing a key role in Syria and Libya, two adamant adversaries of the State of Israel. Here below is some background.

    Experts Fear Israeli Design to Balkanize Arab States By Adam Morrow and Khaled Moussa al-Omrani, 6/19/11
    https://www.voltairenet.org/The-plan-to-destabilize-Syria

    “A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s, in 1982, ” Written by Oded Yinon, then a senior advisor for Israel’s foreign ministry, the essay explicitly calls for breaking up the Arab states of the region along ethnic and sectarian lines. The dissolution of Syria and Iraq later on into ethnically or religiously unique areas… is Israel’s primary target on the eastern front in the long run.”

    “In Iraq, a division into provinces along ethnic/religious lines… is possible,” he writes. “So, three states will exist around the three major cities: Basra, Baghdad and Mosul, and Shiite areas in the south will separate from the Sunni and Kurdish north.”

    As for Egypt, Yinon calls for breaking the country up into “distinct geographical regions.” The establishment of an independent Coptic-Christian state in Upper Egypt, he writes, “alongside a number of weak states with very localized power and without a centralized government…seems inevitable in the long run.”

    Yinon goes on to mention Sudan in similar terms, describing it as “the most torn-apart state in the Arab-Muslim world today…built upon four groups hostile to each other: an Arab-Muslim Sunni minority which rules over a majority of non-Arab Africans, pagans and Christians.”

    According to Mazloum, political maneuvering in recent years by Israel and the western powers – both overt and covert – appears to conform to this strategy of balkanization.

    “Israel and the U.S. have both helped break up Iraq by encouraging the emergence of an independent Kurdish state and fostering Sunni-Shiite division,” he said. “And in Sudan, Earlier this month, Mohamed Abbas, a leading member of Egypt’s Revolutionary Coalition Council (RCC), likewise warned of an ongoing “conspiracy” aimed at breaking Egypt into three petty states.

    “The Zionist plan to politically fragment the Arab Middle East so as to keep Arab states in a perpetual state of instability and weakness has been well known for the last three decades,” Gamal Mazloum, retired Egyptian major-general and expert on defense issues, told IPS.

    “The western campaign against Libya … was launched with the aim of breaking Libya; Libya could be split in two, with Gaddafi staying on in the west of the country and a revolutionary government loyal to the western powers in control of the east, Mohamed al-Sakhawi, leading member of Egypt’s as-yet-unlicensed Arabic Unity Party, told IPS.”

    The satellite generated media conglomerate cartel’s unified single angle presentation of world events is really difficult for progressive alternate media to dare challenge as slanted. Its deceptions become truths to everyone except the skeptical. Most progressive magazines and Internet sites and newsletters depend on keeping their less politically educated liberal readership.

    What this writer suggests is that progressives at least identify Network news and conglomerate owned print media in some manner as to warn their liberal readership to be wary of giant major media’s ownership and agenda. Warn that what is being projected in between commercials is the very same agenda of our now well understood, Military Industrial Financial Complex and the three branches of government it firmly controls.

    Notice how the general term media appears, even in the scholarly investigative journalism quoted in this article. Would it not carry more awareness to the reader if it was more carefully defined as ‘imperialist media.’ For what is referred to by peoples historian journalists in fighting deception and war mongering is not media per se, which must include all media, including more inclusive foreign media and U.S. alternate media containing investigative reporting in historical context without a war justifying agenda.

    Someone surely can come up with something besides ‘imperialist media’ to describe the monolithic output of all the media conglomerates of an increasingly moronic U.S. media cartel with overseas linkage.

    Are we never to hear of the mass homicidal crimes of the CIA until files are forced open by law decades too late? Progressives have to move on this, or lose credibility among Socialists and anti-capitalists.

    Jay Janson, 80, is an archival research peoples historian activist, musician and writer, who has lived and worked on all the continents and whose articles on media have been published in China, Italy, England, India and the US, and now resides in New York City. Howard Zinn lent his name to various projects of his. GlobalReserch, InformationClearingHouse, CounterCurrents, DissidentVoice, HistoryNewsNetwork, are among those who have republished his articles.

    www.countercurrents.org, 27 June 2011

  • Israel is paying internet workers to manipulate online content

    Israel is paying internet workers to manipulate online content

    As many of you may have suspected, Israel is paying and training internet bloggers to delete, rewrite, and revise internet content to shape public opinion to Israel’s benefit. Video of the Israeli-sponsored training programs have been leaked to the web (like the video here).

    Additionally, investigative reporters that infiltrated these groups have reported that Israelis are being trained to spread disinformation and to try to create conflicts among different religious, racial, and ethnic groups if it would benefit Israel. Some of the seminars also encouraged the workers to spread disinformation on the internet and to attempt to recruit free (unpaid) labor. For example, many of these bloggers have been trained to attempt to make friends with you by pretending that they share an interest in your favorite sports team or movie, or that they went to the same school, but they will ultimately try to recruit you to attack other groups or individuals that Israel thinks is against its national interests (e.g., ‘Muslims,’ ‘Russians,’ ‘Germans,’ ‘Latinos,’ ‘United Nations representatives’ and ‘human rights groups’). Others have been trained to personally attack, stalk, and harass anyone personally that does not agree with Israel. Not only is this type of behavior a terrible injustice to the accuracy of content (it’s actually state-sponsored propaganda), it is also damaging to the public trust because people are being misguided into working as unpaid servants of a government through false pretenses. People really should speak out about this.

  • Terra Incognita: The Turkish enigma

    Terra Incognita: The Turkish enigma

    By SETH J. FRANTZMAN
    06/28/2011 22:31

    The cancellation of the participation of the ‘Mavi Marmara’ in the Gaza flotilla and the mystery of what Turkey’s political elite is thinking.

    Photo by: Reuters/Emrah Dalkaya
    Photo by: Reuters/Emrah Dalkaya

    Sometime this week, some 1,000 activists on one or two large Turkish ships accompanied by 15 other craft were to be making their way to Gaza. But they are nowhere on the horizon, although Israel has been preparing to prevent their breaking the blockade.

    So what happened? Just a month ago, various “Free Gaza” blogs were ablaze with hopes for the latest flotilla. Gaza TV News and Freedomflotilla.eu both reported that the Turks were going to send not only the Mavi Marmara( the ship Israel boarded on May 31, 2010), but also another “1,000-ton-capacity aid ship.”

    This phantom ship was supposed to set sail on May 31, 2011 to commemorate the fate of the first flotilla, in which nine Turkish activists were killed. Accompanying photos of the ghost ship showed a type of freighter. Alas, it seems the story was smoke and mirrors; if there was a ship, it never sailed.

    One man who posted on a freedom flotilla blog noted: “We hope that the Turkish people who have always extended their helping hand to Gazans will also help the loading of this ship with their donations.”

    Reliance on the Turks to provide the shipping capacity and spearhead the aid convoy has become a failing portion of the overall architecture of the Free Gaza Movement.

    Specifically, it is the reliance on the financial muscle and political influence of Insani Yardim Vakfi (Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief-IHH).

    The IHH, founded in 1995 to support Bosnian Muslims, is an Islamic (probably Islamist) charity. In 2010 it purchased the Mavi Marmara and loaded it with 600 activists to sail to Gaza. The motives for its sudden interest in Gaza were never entirely clear. Its connections to the governing party of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, were never entirely understood either. What is clear is that Ergodan reacted with extreme anger when nine activists died aboard the Marmara. In a June 2, 2010 speech before the Turkish parliament he raged “in an absolutely illegal way did they [Israel] attack, spilling the blood of innocent humans.”

    Later he reportedly referred to the dead as martyrs, and seemed to infer that the flotilla’s actions had the consent of the Turkish government.

    The IHH talked tough in the waning days of 2010 and through May 2011. Then it revealed that it would postpone sending any ships until after Turkey’s June 12 elections.

    This intimated that it needed the approval of the ruling party, and also feared that sending its ships before the election could create a provocation that would harm Erdogan.

    The decision to not send the ships came after two interesting occurrences on June 7.

    First it was reported that Kemal Kılıçdarolu, leader of the opposition Republican People’s Party, had criticized the government for not thinking of the consequences of the Gaza flotilla’s actions. Then Ahmet Davutoglu, Turkey’s foreign minister (who was also standing for election), said: “The aid flotilla should wait to see what happens with the Rafah border crossing being opened, and to see how Israel perceives the new [Palestinian unity] government.”

    Erdogan’s party handily won the June elections.

    Then on June 17 the IHH’s leader, Fehmi Bulent Yildirim, noted that the flotilla would not depart because of technical difficulties; “the exact reason has nothing to do with the government or the state… the Israelis, unbelievably, damaged our vessel.”

    Really? The ship was released by Israel and returned to Turkey in August 2010. Presumably if it had technical difficulties, the IHH would not have claimed so often that it would be sailing. When the IHH was asked why a smaller freighter it had purchased was not going to be joining the other freedom-flotilla craft, Yildirim claimed that this smaller ship had to accompany the Marmara, as if they were one package.

    Indeed they are one Turkish package. The pathetic little fleet of sloops, yawls, dinghys, ketches and catboats that Western pro-Gaza groupies have arranged has neither the muscle, capacity nor headline-generating images needed to break the blockade or create any sort of international incidents. It is as if Admiral Nelson had been forced to bring only rowboats to Trafalgar to face French ships of the line.

    But the real question remains: how to decipher this Turkish enigma? Already commentators have come to understand that the IHH’s actions are closely linked to the governing party, because the two organizations share a similar, Islamic-inspired political ideology.

    It has also transpired that there are deep divisions in Turkish political circles over how wise it is to harm relations with Israel, particularly the secular opposition and the nationalist (i.e non-Islamist) daily Hurriyet have shown a willingness to challenge the Erdogan narrative. Davutoglu, who has always gained accolades for his deft handling of Turkish foreign policy, has revealed himself to be very pragmatic on the Gaza issue, realizing that the opening of Rafah negates the flotilla’s raison d’etre. But if all this pragmatism has suddenly come to the surface, what sort of judgment prevailed a year ago that allowed a cruise ship full of radical activists to depart for Gaza? What were the activists going to do if they actually got to Gaza? Rumors abound that Turkey wishes to be the mature leader of an Arab democratic awakening, and sees the Gaza issue as a side-show. Others speak of secret backroom talks between Israel and Turkey.

    Nuh Yilmaz and Kilic Bugra, ham-handedly writing in Foreign Policy on June 21, claim “Turkey will continue to extend and deepen its ties with different political actors and the people of the Middle East.”

    Such insight.

    What’s going on in Turkey is a mystery, and that enigma should raise many eyebrows in Israel.

    The writer has a PhD from Hebrew University, and is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies.

  • Apologizing to Turkey is in Israel’s interest

    Apologizing to Turkey is in Israel’s interest

    The Middle Eastern kaleidoscope has once again made a 180-degree turn, revealing a new picture. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s letter to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan congratulating him for his party’s sweeping victory in the elections is only one aspect.

    In the past year, and with greater intensity in recent weeks, people of goodwill from Israel and Turkey have been trying to rehabilitate relations between the two countries. The events in Syria have helped them out, significantly cooling relations between Turkey and Syria and sparking a reappraisal in the Turkish Foreign Ministry and Erdogan’s office of Turkey’s policy in the region.

    Turkey took another significant step when it “recommended” to the IHH, the Turkish humanitarian relief organization, that it cancel its participation in the new aid flotilla to Gaza, mainly to prevent the flotilla from diverting attention from events in Syria. Erdogan has stopped calling Syrian President Bashar Assad “my good friend,” and he describes the brutal suppression of demonstrators in Syria as “barbarity.” And even if he is not demanding Assad’s ouster, he believes that the Syrian regime is finished. “Syria is turning into a threat not only against Turkey,” a senior Turkish official told Haaretz. “If Syria decides to attack the Kurdish minority too, we might have a serious problem.”

    Iran, which has developed extensive economic ties with Turkey in the past two years, is also described in the Turkish media as an active partner in the killing of Syrians, and Turkey is quickly discovering that its desire to implement a policy of “zero problems” with its neighbors has failed. If Turkey wanted to establish a strategic axis with Iran, Iraq and Syria, an axis that could promote a new Middle Eastern policy, it is discovering that these partners are a disappointment. The Iraqi government is on the verge of disintegrating, a political battle in Iran is being waged between the president and his opponents, including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Syria has crudely rejected Erdogan’s attempts to end the crisis, and on Thursday the Turkish flag was lowered on the Syrian side of the border, from which Syrian citizens are fleeing to Turkey.

    All Ankara has left of the great plans for a better Middle East is a bit of the internal Palestinian conflict. On Wednesday Turkey hosted Hamas leader Khaled Meshal and the next day Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, but there is no certainty Turkey will bridge the gap between the groups and help establish a new Palestinian government. Plenty of people in the Israeli Foreign Ministry and Prime Minister’s Office are rubbing their hands with glee in light of Turkey’s situation. I heard a senior Foreign Ministry official say that “Erdogan may have won the elections, but he has crashed in the world.” A real reason for rejoicing.

    But Turkey is not a burst bubble. If conducting foreign policy is a test of success, then its failure is no greater than that of the United States, which has been unable to solve crises in the Middle East and is now about to leave chaos behind in Afghanistan as well. Israel, which is being battered against one rock after another on the slope of its deteriorating global status, is certainly the last to judge other countries on how they conduct foreign policy. Turkey at least takes initiatives.

    And if not for Israel’s unsuccessful policy in Gaza, and its tragic handling of the last flotilla to Gaza, Israel could at least have boasted of good relations with Turkey, even when Turkey is conducting relations with Iran. Turkey, it should be recalled, did not let any country pressure it to sever its relations with Israel. Even now it knows how to read the kaleidoscope and is placing itself on the right side.

    This is exactly the right time to initiate a move – not put out feelers – vis-a-vis Turkey, and to pick up the shards. It would not be disastrous for Israel to apologize for killing Turkish citizens. An apology is not an admission of blame – all the more so when even in Israel there are differences of opinion on the wisdom of that military operation.

    In about two weeks the joint UN commission for investigating the events of the Mavi Marmara flotilla will publish its report. Turkish representative Ozdem Sanberk and Israeli Yosef Ciechanover are making every effort to put out a fair and flexible report that will enable the two countries to reconnect. It’s not necessary to wait for that report. It’s possible and advisable to anticipate it with a public Israeli declaration. The blame can be discussed later.

    via Apologizing to Turkey is in Israel’s interest – Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News.

  • Ayalon to Turkey: I never intended to humiliate your ambassador

    Ayalon to Turkey: I never intended to humiliate your ambassador

    Deputy FM Ayalon tells Turkish journalists it is time to restore ties with Israel, urges Turkey to ‘get together and speak about everything we need to speak about.’

    4158933078Nearly two years after Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon publicly humiliated Turkey’s ambassador to Israel by seating him in a lower chair than his during a televised meeting, Ayalon on Thursday sat with a group of seven Turkish journalists in an attempt to explain the incident, which marked a climax in the diplomatic tear between the two countries.

    The Turkish Journalists told Ayalon that he has come to be known in their country as “the man with the low chair,” but Ayalon insisted that the incident was a joke that was blown out of proportion.

    Danny Ayalon Turkey

    Deputy Foreign Minister Daniel Ayalon heightens already tense ties with Turkey by seating Ankara’s ambassador on a ‘lower chair’ during talks in Tel Aviv.

    Photo by: Olivier Fitoussi

    Ayalon explained that nothing in the meeting, which provoked harsh criticism from the Turkish government, was planned in advance. He added that he had sent a letter of apology to the ambassador after the incident in which he explained that he had no intention to humiliate him.

    A journalist for the Turkish daily Hurriyet was not satisfied with the deputy FM’s explanation and asked him to sit in a low chair as he posed for a picture with her.

    Ayalon agreed.

    Following the meeting, the Turkish reporter wrote in her article which adorned the paper’s front page on Friday, “I pulled the Turkish ambassador trick on Ayalon.”

    Ayalon also stressed during the press conference that this was an instrumental time to restore Israel’s relations with Turkey, praising the humanitarian aid group IHH’s announcement that they will not be sending a ship to join the aid flotilla planned to set sail for Gaza later this month.

    “The fact that the Mavi Marmara will not be coming [to Gaza for a second time] is also a good opportunity for us to renew our ties. We should get together and speak about everything we need to speak about,” Ayalon said.

    He also urged the Turks to condemn Hamas’ terror attacks on Israel and recognize Israel.

    “Turkey has the right to form its own foreign policy. We respect that. We have no right to tell them not to make contact with different factions. But this must not be a game where everyone loses. Israel must not be sacrificed to develop their relations. If an announcement declaring unity was made today regarding the meeting over Hamas with Abu Mazen [Mahmoud Abbas], then we would be happy. Palestinian unity is in our interests; that way we will know who to engage with [in talks.] We would kiss the hands of each and every Turk if Hamas said they accept the Oslo [Treaty], condemn terror and recognize Israel,” Turkish daily Hurriyet quoted Ayalon.

    “I believe what we have lost over the past few years is trust. Now we need to let go of this mutual blame game as to why this trust was lost. Political tensions in Turkey have been left behind following the [general] elections,” Ayalon said.

    He added that Israel would welcome a Turkish role in the region as a mediator under the right circumstances.

    “If Turkey wants to bring together Palestinian groups, this presents no problem for us. We respect that. Turkey is a regional power and has a historical role, and it might be able to influence the process,” he said.

    Earlier this week Haaretz reported that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appointed Vice Prime Minister Moshe Ya’alon to serve as an envoy to work for Israel’s reconciliation with Turkey.

    This revelation came days after another report that Israeli and Turkish officials have been holding secret direct talks to try to solve the diplomatic crisis between the two countries.

    A source in the Turkish Foreign Ministry and a U.S. official confirmed that talks are being held, though in Israel the prime minister and foreign minister’s aides declined to comment.

    The Israeli official said that Israel is maintaining its position of refusing to apologize to Turkey over the deadly raid, but is ready to express regret over the incident.

    via Ayalon to Turkey: I never intended to humiliate your ambassador – Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News.