Regarding “The revolution’s missing peace” (Views, April 22): President Abdullah Gul of Turkey presents a curious proposal regarding his country’s potential role as a peacemaker in the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
While urging the United States “to act as an impartial and effective mediator between Israel and the Palestinians,” he views his own country as able to play a similar role, even as he qualifies Israel as an “apartheid island” and conditions Turkey’s possible peacemaking efforts on proof of Israel’s readiness to pursue peace with its neighbors.
One cannot but wonder how Turkey’s role in the incident involving a Turkish ship that tried to breach the blockade of Gaza last May and the announced plans for another similar “humanitarian” effort in coming months fits the author’s commitment on behalf of his country to act as an impartial mediator.
Klaus Netter, Collonge-Bellerive, Switzerland
I am amazed at the attempt by President Abdullah Gul of Turkey to draw the Israel-Palestine issue into the events of the Arab Spring. These uprisings are the direct result of years of neglect and persecution by Arab governments of Arab peoples, deprived of the most basic fundamentals of life — jobs, housing, freedom from persecution — and true democracy. The unrest and has nothing to do with the Israel-Palestine impasse.
Yasmin Levy is performing in Turkey. Hürriyet photo
Yasmin Levy is performing in Turkey. Hürriyet photo
An award-winning Israeli singer and songwriter, who will perform concerts in İzmir and Istanbul, said she would perform in Palestine if she were invited.
Speaking to the Anatolia news agency, Judaeo-Latino music artist, Yasmin Levy said violence and death in the Middle East could no way be justified and she would willingly go to Palestine for a concert if she were invited there.
She knew wars would end one day but that the situation would not change easily. Despite the ongoing dispute between her country and Palestine, she would be happy to perform there, she said.
The lyrics she would sing for the two countries would be, “I am extending my hand my brother, and you extend yours too, and we touch each other, we need this,” the musician said.
Levy said there was a song with these lyrics on her new album, and she wished she could go to Palestine to sing it but regretted that politicians were making it difficult.
Levy, is an Israeli singer-songwriter of Judaeo-Spanish music whose father was also a composer and cantor.
With her distinctive and emotive style, Levy brought a new interpretation to the medieval Ladino/Judeo-Spanish style by incorporating more “modern” sounds of Andalusian Flamenco and Persian, as well as combining instruments like the darbuka, oud, violin, cello, and piano.
Levy’s work earned her the Anna Lindh Euro-Mediterranean Foundation Award for promoting cross-cultural dialogue between musicians from three cultures.
Levy will take the stage Wednesday night in İzmir’s Ahmet Adnan Saygun Art Center and Thursday night in Istanbul’s Türker İnanoğlu Maslak Show Center. Tickets are available at Biletix.
via Israeli musician performs in Turkey – Hurriyet Daily News and Economic Review.
ISTANBUL – Israeli singer and songwriter Yasmin Levy
said on Friday that she would go to Palestine for a concert if she was
invited.In an exclusive interview with AA, Levy said violence and deaths in the Middle East could no way be justified.
Levy said she would willingly go to Palestine for a concert if the Palestinians invited her.The Israeli musician is actually in Istanbul to give concerts in Turkey.Levy said she knew that wars would end one day, however things would not change so easily. She said there had been an ongoing dispute between her country and Palestine, and he could go to a concert in Palestine if she was invited.The musician said the lyrics of a song she would sing for the two countries would be, “I am extending my hand my brother, and you extend yours too, and we touch each other, we need this.”Levy said there would be a song in such lyrics in her new album, and she wished she could go to Palestine but regretted that politicians were making such a thing difficult.
An Israeli singer-songwriter of Judaeo-Spanish music, Yasmin Levy’s father was also a composer and cantor.With her distinctive and emotive style, Yasmin has brought a new interpretation to the medieval Ladino/Judeo-Spanish song by incorporating more “modern” sounds of Andalusian Flamenco and Persian, as well as combining instruments like the darbuka, oud, violin, cello, and piano.Yasmin’s work earned her the Anna Lindh Euro-Mediterranean Foundation Award for promoting cross-cultural dialogue between musicians from three cultures.
As Turkey and Israel prepare for the final rounds of discussion before a U.N. panel concludes its inquiry into a deadly raid last year, hopes are dim that the panel’s report will provide a diplomatic breakthrough.
The once-close allies have been estranged since Israeli Defense Forces staged a deadly attack May 31, 2010, on an aid flotilla attempting to break the blockade of the Gaza Strip, killing eight Turks and one American of Turkish descent.
The U.N. panel, set up by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in August 2010 to investigate the incident, is not expected to force Israel to apologize and pay compensation to the victims’ families, two conditions set by the Turkish government to normalize ties.
Turkey’s conviction that Israel is using every possible means behind the scenes to affect the outcome of the panel was reinforced recently when the head of a separate probe on Israel’s 2008-2009 military offensive in Gaza backed away from a report published last September.
The report, issued by a commission headed by Judge Richard Goldstone, concluded that both Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, sides committed potential war crimes and possible crimes against humanity. It accused Israel of using disproportionate force, deliberately targeting civilians and destroying civilian infrastructure, and using people as human shields.
The four-member panel on the flotilla raid is set to resume work next week. Led by former New Zealand Prime Minister Geoffrey Palmer, it includes an Israeli and a Turkish expert. Representatives of both governments will also be present during the workings of the panel. The panel will meet for a final time in May and the Turkish side hopes it will give its report to the U.N. secretary-general no later than May 31, the first anniversary of the deadly incident.
While Turkey seems confident about the strength of its arguments, the behind-the-scenes weight of the Israeli lobby on the possible outcome of the U.N. probe cannot be underestimated. It has been extremely difficult to convince Israel to cooperate with the U.N. probe and the lengthy negotiations have seriously restricted the mandate of the panel.
The panel is tasked with looking at the circumstances of the raid and reviewing the results of the Turkish and Israeli investigations into the incident, as well as considering ways to avoid similar incidents in the future. Israel is extremely sensitive about any U.N. inquiries. It has been working to cancel the Goldstone commission’s report after the judge said earlier this month regret that the report may have been inaccurate.
“If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone report would have been a very different document,” he said in a newspaper article
In the era of awakenings, upheavals and revolutions: watch Turkey.
It has become a hugely ambitious country, bristling with self-belief. In a turbulent Middle East it believes it is the democratic role model. It eyes the role as spokesman for the region as a whole. When disputes need to be settled, it offers itself as the mediator. The State Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Cemil Cicek summed it up: “Everybody has to see Turkey’s power.”
Over Libya it is the country that the West watches more carefully than any other. For the moment, Turkey is supporting Nato’s campaign whilst refraining from joining in any attacks on Gaddafi’s ground forces. It is holding itself back, ready to step forward as the indispensable locator when the hour of negotiation approaches.
On the Libyan conflict it has flipped and flopped however. Early on, the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan denounced any Western intervention as “absurd”. He raised fears of a “second Iraq”. Turkish officials seemed to lash out at what they portrayed as an oil grab by the West. They picked a fight with the French interior minister Claude Gueant who unwisely said the French President was leading a “crusade” to stop Gaddafi’s barbarism. He didn’t mean it of course in the historical sense but Turkish officials pounced on the tongue-slip.
That was then. Now Turkey is committing five or six vessels to police the arms embargo and is running Benghazi airport to co-ordinate humanitarian assistance.
Turkey wanted to disguise its hand, to see which way the battle flowed. Twenty thousand of its citizens work in Libya and it has lucrative contracts there. Commercial self-interest made it cautious.
The u-turn was driven by the realisation that the international community, including the Arab League, was determined that the killing of civilians had to stop.
Turkey had two positions. Firstly, it would not attack Gaddafi’s forces directly. Secondly, it was fiercely opposed to a coalition, led by France, setting the agenda.
Its problem with France is simple. President Sarkozy is against Turkey joining the EU as a full member. Ankara feels insulted and it is easy to meet Turkish officials with a mouthful of rage against the French president.
So Turkey wanted the operation run under Nato, where it has a role in decision-making and drafting the rules of engagement. Its position is hard-headed. “We are one of the very few countries that is speaking to both sides,” said one official. It waits for that moment when the mediator is summoned on to the field of play.
On the turmoil in the Arab world, Turkey has sold itself as the role-model. Early on it urged Hosni Mubarak to stand down. Many of the Egyptian demonstrators wanted Egypt to be like Turkey; secular yet certain of its Muslim identity but with free elections.
When the killings started in Syria, Prime Minister Erdogan was immediately on the phone. “I have made two calls to President Assad in the last three days and I have sent top intelligence official to Syria. I have called for a reformist approach.”
It is all skilfully balanced; on the side of reform but keeping a hand in with the man in power.
Sometimes it seems Turkish officials are everywhere. Such as when the prime minister shows up in Baghdad. It is Turkish goods and companies that so far have conquered Iraq’s markets. With the prime minister were 200 businessmen.
President Ahmadinejad of Iran may be isolated, but not with Turkey. Ankara has again positioned itself as the deal-maker. There is also the not-so-small matter of $10 billion in trade with Tehran.
Turkey has also helped shine its credentials in the Middle East with a major row with Israel over the interception of a boat heading for Gaza. Turkish citizens died in the incident.
So Turkey’s sphere of influence widens but, even so, there are the problems.
Since 2005 it has been engaged in accession talks with the EU. For the moment they are going nowhere. President Sarkozy and Chancellor Merkel favour instead of membership “a privileged partnership”. Turkey wants none of it and seethes with resentment.
Some – but not all – in the EU are wary. There are 24 million without work in Europe and the appetite for enlargement has dimmed. Not everyone is convinced that a Muslim country should be in the EU. It would be difficult to have Turkey join without its people being consulted.
Turkey knows this and asks the searching question: “Is the EU a Christian Club or is it the address of a community of civilisations? The current picture shows the EU is a Christian Club. This must be overcome.” It touches a raw nerve. But plenty in Europe ask whether Turkey would accept becoming a community of civilisations.
You could sense the strains and tensions when recently Prime Minister Erdogan went to Germany, where two million people of Turkish origin live. He caused huge offence when he told an audience in Dusseldorf: “Our children must learn German but they must learn Turkish first.” It was an open challenge to the German government which had been insisting that those who live in Germany must speak the language and integrate. The German chancellor opined that multiculturalism had failed because it led to separation.
There is, too, friction over Cyprus, and the disturbing detentions of reporters and writers. It forced the European Commission to warn Turkey over its democratic credibility.
And then there are the doubts as to how committed the ruling party is to secularism. Recently Ayse Sucu, who headed a woman’s group, was squeezed out after suggesting women themselves should decide whether to cover their hair.
There is an ongoing struggle within Turkey which will demonstrate its commitment to tolerance. That, more than anything, will determine whether it is indeed a role model.
But Turkey is on a roll. Sometimes – irritated at being rebuffed – it contemplates abandoning its pursuit of EU membership. It survived the economic downturn and its growth is an enviable 5%. It may prefer to go it alone and, like the Ottomans, revel in newfound influence.
But when it comes to Libya, Turkey demands to be listened to. And the West needs Turkey on side.
I’m Gavin Hewitt, the BBC’s Europe editor and this blog is where you and I can talk about the stories I’m covering in Europe.
bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/gavinhewitt/2011/03/turkey_the_growing_power.html, 30 March 2011
Popular uprisings and internecine hostilities will lead to the redrawing of regional maps, which will be a far cry from those underlying the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement and other accords
By Aluf Benn
The struggles for survival of Libyan Col. Muammar Gadhafi, Syrian President Bashar Assad and their counterparts elsewhere herald the last days of the Sykes-Picot agreement from World War I, which in effect divided the region of the Middle East into separate states. Now it is apparent that maps drawn in the coming years will show new or renewed independent states such as South Sudan; Kurdistan; Palestine; maybe also Cyrenaica in eastern Libya; the Western Sahara, which will no longer be in Moroccan hands; reconstructed Southern Yemen; and Gulf states that will separate from the United Arab Emirates. It’s even possible that there will be a split in Saudi Arabia between “the state of the holy sites” in the Hejaz and the petroleum powers in the east, and of Syria into Sunni, Alaouite and Druze states. The basis for these divisions will be implementation of the principle of self-definition of nations and tribes, which until now unwillingly and without any alternative have been wrapped up together in the same national package with their foes.
The foreign policy of Israel, even before statehood, has always been built upon the rivalries of Arab and Muslim neighbors. Furthermore, pan-Arab and pan-Islamic unity has relied to a great extent on hostility toward Israel, which for its part has preferred the separatism and nationalism of its neighbors. The more states there are in the region in the future, the easier it will be for Israel to maneuver among them.
Libyan rebels in Ajdabiya, eastern Libya. The West will not try to thwart the process of fission in the region. Photo by: AP
The borders in the Middle East were determined between 1916 and 1922 in negotiations involving the European powers, conducted in majestic palaces by officials wearing suits and ties. Those borders are being redrawn in the 21st century by force, by wars and by popular uprisings. This began with America’s invasion of Iraq eight years ago, which crushed the central regime and created de facto ethnic enclaves. It continued with the Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, which led to the establishment of a de facto state controlled by Hamas, and later with the referendum on the partitioning of Sudan at the end of a long and cruel internecine war there. The process has been accelerated with the recent revolutions in the Arab countries, which are still in their early stages and have already led to a war in Libya.
In his new book “How to Run the World” (Random House ), which was published just before the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, Parag Khanna, a researcher at the New America Foundation, predicts a world comprising 300 independent, sovereign nations in the next few decades, as compared to about 200 today. At the basis of this fission is what Khanna has called “post-colonial entropy”: Many states have developed from former colonies, he observes, and since their independence have “experienced unmanageable population growth, predatory and corrupt dictatorship, crumbling infrastructure and institutions, and ethnic or sectarian polarization.” Exactly the same reasons can be used to explain the current vicissitudes in the Arab countries.
In many cases, writes Khanna, current borders are the cause of internal strife – for example, in failed states like Yemen, Pakistan and the Democratic Republic of Congo. In his view, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are not “America’s wars,” but rather “unexploded ordinance left over from old European wars, with their fuses lit on slow release.”
America is not to blame for the Congress of Berlin in 1884, which divided up Africa without taking its inhabitants into account, or for the British partition of Pakistan and Afghanistan. But America – together with the other powers – can and must help today with solving the resultant problems. Nor only by drawing up new borders or in votes at the United Nations, but also by building infrastructures that will provide sound economic foundations to the new countries, and will free them from dependence on powerful neighbors like Turkey and Israel.
In the early 20th century, the Western powers controlled Asia and Africa and identified a wealth of assets in the Middle East. In 1916, Sir Mark Sykes and Francois Georges-Picot – a British official and a French diplomat, respectively – drew up an agreement on behalf of their governments describing a tentative division of the Ottoman Empire, which was fighting alongside Germany against the Allies. The document and map they came up with were theoretical and the chances they would be implemented seemed slight: The Turks were still far from defeat and the Western armies were bleeding along Europe’s western front. In essence, Sykes’ and Picot’s governments coveted Syria and most of Palestine for France, and what was later to become Iraq for Britain.
In his fascinating book “A Peace to End All Peace” (1989 ), American historian David Fromkin describes how the great powers shaped the map of the Middle East in World War I and thereafter. According to Fromkin, the anti-Semitic view that the Jews had the ability to influence those powers and foment conspiracies underlay the diplomacy of the Western countries, which hoped to harness Jewish might on their behalf.
After reaching the agreement with Picot, Sykes was about to set out for Saint Petersburg, the capital of the czarist empire, to present the details to the Russians – who had always wanted to gain control of Istanbul and have access to the Mediterranean Sea. En route, Sykes met Capt. William Reginald Hall, head of Royal Naval Intelligence, in London and showed him his map. Hall told him Britain should send its forces to Palestine and only then would the Arabs switch to its side in the war. “Force is the best Arab propaganda” to use when dealing with the Arabs, the intelligence officer explained to the diplomat. (Or translated into our present-day Israeli lingo: “The only thing the Arabs understand is force.” )
Sykes was convinced the agreement he had concocted with the French would satisfy Sharif Hussein of the Hejaz, the progenitor of the Hashemite dynasty, who sought independence for his people from the Ottoman Empire in exchange for support of the British. And then Hall surprised his British interlocutor by introducing a new factor into the power equation: The Jews, he said, had “a strong material, and a very strong political, interest in the future of the country.” Sykes was dumbstruck. He had never heard of Zionism before then. He rushed to a meeting with the Jewish minister in the British war cabinet, Herbert Samuel, for an explanation.
This was the start of the process that would lead later to the Balfour Declaration, the conquest of Palestine, the establishment of the British Mandate, and the appointment of Samuel as its first high commissioner. At this point were sown the seeds of Arab anger at the Western powers, which had dismantled and then reassembled nations and states in the Middle East and promised Palestine to the Zionists.
The final borders in the Middle East were set by then-Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill at the Cairo Conference in 1922, which separated Transjordan from the boundaries of the Palestine Mandate. The Israeli right mourns that “tearing apart” to this very day.
With the end of colonialism, maintenance of those borders constituted the basis of political order in the region, even though it left many peoples unsatisfied – for example, the Kurds, who were split up among Iraq, Turkey, Syria and Iran. The reaction to colonialism was Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser’s pan-Arabism, which reached its peak in the union of Syria and Egypt (the United Arab Republic ) at the end of the 1950s, though it did not last long. Now, nearly 100 years after the talks between Sykes and Picot, the United States’ withdrawal from Iraq will afford the Kurds a chance for independence, despite Turkey’s opposition. For their part, the Palestinians are working on international recognition for their country by this coming summer, despite Israel’s objections.
Other “artificial states” like Libya, which was made up of three former Italian colonies, as well as Yemen, Syria, Jordan, Bahrain, Oman and Saudi Arabia, could all disintegrate. In all of them there is serious internal tension among tribes and groups or a minority government imposed on the majority. Yemen was divided in the past and could once again split into north and south. In Saudi Arabia, distances are vast. But how is it possible to partition Jordan, where the Bedouin and the Palestinians are mingled? The redrawing of borders is not a panacea.
Meanwhile, the war in Libya is splitting it de facto between Cyrenaica, the bastion of the rebels in the east, and Tripolitania, under Gadhafi’s control. The Western powers’ entry into the war on the side of the rebels shows they want to create a protectorate under their influence adjacent to the border with Egypt, which is at risk of becoming an Islamic republic hostile to the West. It is hard to find any other strategic rationale for the decision to become involved in Libya.
The battles between the British forces and Rommel’s in World War II were fought exactly in those same places and had the same aim: protecting the eastern flank of Egypt and the Suez Canal. Rommel and Montgomery fought there well before oil was discovered in Libya.
The West, like Israel, prefers a fragmented and squabbling Middle East and is fighting on several fronts against pan-Arabism and pan-Islamism led by Osama bin Laden (and, in different ways, also by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan ). Therefore, it is possible to assess that the West will not try to thwart the process of fission in the countries of the region, but rather will contribute to it.
Israel is directly involved in the struggle over the establishment of an independent Palestine and the shaping of its borders, and would be significantly affected by the disintegration of its neighboring states, chiefly Jordan, Syria and Saudi Arabia. A smart Israeli policy, which correctly identifies the opportunities inherent in the emergence of new states and knows how to take advantage of these opportunities, will be able to leverage the inevitable process to reinforce Israel’s power and influence in the region.
I’m 