Turkish Forum

Tag: Hamas

  • Gaza’s Future

    Gaza’s Future

    Henry Siegman

    Henry Siegman, director of the US Middle East Project in New York, is a visiting research professor at SOAS, University of London. He is a former national director of the American Jewish Congress and of the Synagogue Council of America.


    ATTENTION: ARTICLE IS WRITTEN ONE YEAR AGO

    Gaza’s Future

    Henry Siegman 7 February 2008

    The breaching of the barrier between Gaza and Egypt by Gaza’s imprisoned population dramatised two fundamental realities about which Israeli and US policymakers have been in complete denial. First, that sooner or later Gazans would seek to break out of their open-air jail. That they have done so should be applauded not condemned. It would have been a sad comment on the human spirit had Gaza’s citizens surrendered to their fate.

    Israel’s claim that the strangulation of Gaza was intended to provoke its population into overthrowing Hamas is absurd – and offensive. It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that the draconian restrictions imposed by Israel on Gaza’s civilian residents redirected against their Israeli tormentors what anger existed among them towards Hamas for its ideological rigidity and its refusal to halt rocket assaults on Israel. As recent opinion polls have found, the suffering caused by the Gaza closures produced greater solidarity not greater divisiveness. It even moved Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad to public displays of anger (however disingenuous) against Ehud Olmert’s government.

    Olmert’s statement, made shortly before the breakout, that Gaza’s residents could not expect to lead normal lives while missiles from Gaza were hitting Israel would have been perfectly reasonable if Gazan residents had indeed been allowed to live ‘normal’ lives before the most recent tightening of the noose and if it were the case that Gaza’s civilian residents had any control at all over the firing of the missiles.

    As Olmert knows, neither is the case. The siege of Gaza was imposed by Israel because Israel’s government and the US administration intended to undo the results of Hamas’s victory in the elections of 2006. Initially, they thought they could achieve this by arming Fatah’s security forces and encouraging them to promote anarchy in Gaza in a way that would discredit Hamas. When Hamas ousted Fatah security forces, Israel blockaded Gaza in the hope that its population would overthrow Hamas. The Qassam rockets were the consequence, not the cause of these misguided Israeli and US manoeuvres.

    It is not even true that the siege of Gaza and the boycott of Hamas were necessary to get a peace process with Abbas and his Fatah party underway, as Bush and Olmert claimed when they met in Washington in June 2007. Hamas had announced its willingness to submit to a popular referendum any agreement that resulted from permanent status talks between Fatah and Israel. Israel boycotted Hamas because it did not want Hamas to play any role in a peace process, fearing that this would exact a far greater price than negotiations with Fatah from which Hamas was excluded.

    Ironically, Abbas probably has far less flexibility in negotiations with Israel when he is in an adversarial relationship with Hamas. As long as Fatah and Hamas are at war, Hamas will condemn any compromise as Abbas’s collaboration with the enemy. In the best of circumstances it would be hard to conceive of the terms of a peace accord acceptable to both sides: they are entirely out of reach so long as Fatah and Hamas remain unreconciled.

    Certainly the peace process the US and Israel have promoted following the break between Fatah and Hamas has not produced anything other than empty rhetoric and emptier promises. On the ground, absolutely nothing has changed: not in anticipation of the Annapolis conference; not at the conference itself; not following the conference’s conclusion; and not following Bush’s visit to Jerusalem and Ramallah. For all the pomp and ceremony of that occasion and the uplifting talk of adherence to Road Map obligations, not a single so-called illegal outpost has been removed, and the checkpoints that Israel solemnly promised to reduce have in fact been increased. (Whether the intention to deny all new construction in East Jerusalem and in the settlements announced by Olmert’s office as I write these lines will suffer a similar fate remains to be seen.)

    Yet Abbas and Fayyad have pretended that they are engaged in a significant peace process with Israel that could produce, in Bush’s words, ‘a viable, contiguous, sovereign and independent’ Palestinian state by the end of this year. Presumably they know better. If not, the big difference between Fatah and Hamas is not so much that one is committed to a political process and the other to violence, or that one is secular and the other Islamic, but rather that the former lives in a world of fantasy and the other does not.

    Does the situation in Gaza justify the relentless missile and mortar assaults that continue to target Israeli civilians in Sderot? To argue, as Hamas’s leaders do, that these primitive Qassam rockets have resulted in no more than two or three Israeli deaths over the years, while Israeli retaliations cause the daily killing not only of militants but of innocent men, women and children, is not a justification for Hamas’s targeting of Israeli civilians. That Qassam rockets have not fallen on a kindergarten full of children in Sderot is not the result of skilful humanitarian targeting on the part of Islamic Jihad and Hamas militants. It is simply extraordinary luck.

    On the other hand, the immorality of Hamas’s assaults on Israeli civilians is not a licence to bring Gaza’s civilian population to a state of near starvation. The insensitivity that prevents Israelis from seeing that their behaviour towards Palestinian civilians – whether in Gaza or in the West Bank – is not very different from the Palestinians’ targeting of Israeli civilians could not have found more unfortunate expression than in Olmert’s assurance that while Israel ‘will provide the population [in Gaza] with everything needed to prevent a crisis, we will not supply luxuries that would make their life more comfortable.’ What UNRWA’s commissioner-general Karen Abu Zayd sees as a people ‘intentionally reduced to a state of abject destitution’ is seen by Olmert as a people deprived of ‘luxuries’.

    In the face of such criticism, Israelis angrily respond that instead of condemning Israel’s policy towards Gaza, their critics would be better advised to demand that Gaza’s citizens remove their Hamas-led government. The absurdity of such a suggestion aside, one has to wonder how Israelis would respond if they were told by Palestinians that instead of condemning Hamas’s terrorist assaults on Israeli citizens, they should remove their own government for failing to end the occupation.

    That said, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the breach in the barrier between Gaza and Egypt has created a new strategic situation. Of course, the barrier separating Gaza from Egypt will be closed again, but it is highly unlikely that the status quo ante can be restored and the absolute closure on Gaza’s population reimposed. As Ha’aretz suggested in an editorial of 24 January, the crisis in Rafah is an opportunity to pursue policies that are ‘more creative than assassinations and starvation’.

    Which brings me to the second of the fundamental realities. The current goal of isolating Hamas and negotiating a peace agreement with Fatah is based on the fantasy that such an agreement can be implemented despite Hamas’s opposition. Hamas is a movement with deep roots and a significant role in Palestinian politics that opposition from Israel and the US can only strengthen. New border arrangements to prevent a serious breakdown between Israel and Egypt cannot be implemented without somehow involving Hamas. And for domestic reasons, it is inconceivable that either Abbas or the Egyptian government would consent to the creation of a new cross-border regime that aims at the continued strangulation of Gaza’s population.

    The inevitability of four-party discussions between Israel, Egypt, the Palestinian Authority and Hamas presents the US with an opportunity to change course and to encourage Israel to engage Hamas in talks aiming at a ceasefire, the only way to end the Qassam assaults. The talks could then address the question of the acceptance by Hamas of the Arab peace initiative. Of course, there can be no certainty that Hamas would agree: what is certain is that it will never agree while Israel and the US seek its overthrow, and without negotiations that deal with both sides’ grievances.

    Equally important, the issue of Hamas’s recognition of Israel should not be expanded by Israel beyond normal international practice. Israel’s requirement that this recognition include a pronouncement on the Jewish state’s legitimacy, or on its ethnic and religious character, is gratuitous and inappropriate. A simple statement of recognition of Israel’s statehood should suffice. No US government has ever asked anyone to affirm the legitimacy of the dispossession of America’s Indians as a condition for the establishing of normal relations.

    If the Bush administration were to take advantage of the new situation in Gaza to promote internal Palestinian reconciliation it might yet lay the groundwork for an agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. If it maintains its current posture, it will remain essentially irrelevant, with far-reaching implications for all the parties to the conflict – not to mention the rest of the world.

    25 January

    Henry Siegman, director of the US Middle East Project in New York, is a visiting research professor at SOAS, University of London. He is a former national director of the American Jewish Congress and of the Synagogue Council of America.

  • Israel’s Lies

    Israel’s Lies

    Henry Siegman

    Henry Siegman, director of the US Middle East Project in New York, is a visiting research professor at SOAS, University of London. He is a former national director of the American Jewish Congress and of the Synagogue Council of America.

    Israel’s Lies

    Henry Siegman

    Western governments and most of the Western media have accepted a number of Israeli claims justifying the military assault on Gaza: that Hamas consistently violated the six-month truce that Israel observed and then refused to extend it; that Israel therefore had no choice but to destroy Hamas’s capacity to launch missiles into Israeli towns; that Hamas is a terrorist organisation, part of a global jihadi network; and that Israel has acted not only in its own defence but on behalf of an international struggle by Western democracies against this network.

    I am not aware of a single major American newspaper, radio station or TV channel whose coverage of the assault on Gaza questions this version of events. Criticism of Israel’s actions, if any (and there has been none from the Bush administration), has focused instead on whether the IDF’s carnage is proportional to the threat it sought to counter, and whether it is taking adequate measures to prevent civilian casualties.

    Middle East peacemaking has been smothered in deceptive euphemisms, so let me state bluntly that each of these claims is a lie. Israel, not Hamas, violated the truce: Hamas undertook to stop firing rockets into Israel; in return, Israel was to ease its throttlehold on Gaza. In fact, during the truce, it tightened it further. This was confirmed not only by every neutral international observer and NGO on the scene but by Brigadier General (Res.) Shmuel Zakai, a former commander of the IDF’s Gaza Division. In an interview in Ha’aretz on 22 December, he accused Israel’s government of having made a ‘central error’ during the tahdiyeh, the six-month period of relative truce, by failing ‘to take advantage of the calm to improve, rather than markedly worsen, the economic plight of the Palestinians of the Strip . . . When you create a tahdiyeh, and the economic pressure on the Strip continues,’ General Zakai said, ‘it is obvious that Hamas will try to reach an improved tahdiyeh, and that their way to achieve this is resumed Qassam fire . . . You cannot just land blows, leave the Palestinians in Gaza in the economic distress they’re in, and expect that Hamas will just sit around and do nothing.’

    The truce, which began in June last year and was due for renewal in December, required both parties to refrain from violent action against the other. Hamas had to cease its rocket assaults and prevent the firing of rockets by other groups such as Islamic Jihad (even Israel’s intelligence agencies acknowledged this had been implemented with surprising effectiveness), and Israel had to put a stop to its targeted assassinations and military incursions. This understanding was seriously violated on 4 November, when the IDF entered Gaza and killed six members of Hamas. Hamas responded by launching Qassam rockets and Grad missiles. Even so, it offered to extend the truce, but only on condition that Israel ended its blockade. Israel refused. It could have met its obligation to protect its citizens by agreeing to ease the blockade, but it didn’t even try. It cannot be said that Israel launched its assault to protect its citizens from rockets. It did so to protect its right to continue the strangulation of Gaza’s population.

    Everyone seems to have forgotten that Hamas declared an end to suicide bombings and rocket fire when it decided to join the Palestinian political process, and largely stuck to it for more than a year. Bush publicly welcomed that decision, citing it as an example of the success of his campaign for democracy in the Middle East. (He had no other success to point to.) When Hamas unexpectedly won the election, Israel and the US immediately sought to delegitimise the result and embraced Mahmoud Abbas, the head of Fatah, who until then had been dismissed by Israel’s leaders as a ‘plucked chicken’. They armed and trained his security forces to overthrow Hamas; and when Hamas – brutally, to be sure – pre-empted this violent attempt to reverse the result of the first honest democratic election in the modern Middle East, Israel and the Bush administration imposed the blockade.

    Israel seeks to counter these indisputable facts by maintaining that in withdrawing Israeli settlements from Gaza in 2005, Ariel Sharon gave Hamas the chance to set out on the path to statehood, a chance it refused to take; instead, it transformed Gaza into a launching-pad for firing missiles at Israel’s civilian population. The charge is a lie twice over. First, for all its failings, Hamas brought to Gaza a level of law and order unknown in recent years, and did so without the large sums of money that donors showered on the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority. It eliminated the violent gangs and warlords who terrorised Gaza under Fatah’s rule. Non-observant Muslims, Christians and other minorities have more religious freedom under Hamas rule than they would have in Saudi Arabia, for example, or under many other Arab regimes.

    The greater lie is that Sharon’s withdrawal from Gaza was intended as a prelude to further withdrawals and a peace agreement. This is how Sharon’s senior adviser Dov Weisglass, who was also his chief negotiator with the Americans, described the withdrawal from Gaza, in an interview with Ha’aretz in August 2004:

    What I effectively agreed to with the Americans was that part of the settlements [i.e. the major settlement blocks on the West Bank] would not be dealt with at all, and the rest will not be dealt with until the Palestinians turn into Finns . . . The significance [of the agreement with the US] is the freezing of the political process. And when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state and you prevent a discussion about the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package that is called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed from our agenda indefinitely. And all this with [President Bush’s] authority and permission . . . and the ratification of both houses of Congress.

    Do the Israelis and Americans think that Palestinians don’t read the Israeli papers, or that when they saw what was happening on the West Bank they couldn’t figure out for themselves what Sharon was up to?

    Israel’s government would like the world to believe that Hamas launched its Qassam rockets because that is what terrorists do and Hamas is a generic terrorist group. In fact, Hamas is no more a ‘terror organisation’ (Israel’s preferred term) than the Zionist movement was during its struggle for a Jewish homeland. In the late 1930s and 1940s, parties within the Zionist movement resorted to terrorist activities for strategic reasons. According to Benny Morris, it was the Irgun that first targeted civilians. He writes in Righteous Victims that an upsurge of Arab terrorism in 1937 ‘triggered a wave of Irgun bombings against Arab crowds and buses, introducing a new dimension to the conflict’. He also documents atrocities committed during the 1948-49 war by the IDF, admitting in a 2004 interview, published in Ha’aretz, that material released by Israel’s Ministry of Defence showed that ‘there were far more Israeli acts of massacre than I had previously thought . . . In the months of April-May 1948, units of the Haganah were given operational orders that stated explicitly that they were to uproot the villagers, expel them, and destroy the villages themselves.’ In a number of Palestinian villages and towns the IDF carried out organised executions of civilians. Asked by Ha’aretz whether he condemned the ethnic cleansing, Morris replied that he did not:

    A Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them. There was no choice but to expel that population. It was necessary to cleanse the hinterland and cleanse the border areas and cleanse the main roads. It was necessary to cleanse the villages from which our convoys and our settlements were fired on.

    In other words, when Jews target and kill innocent civilians to advance their national struggle, they are patriots. When their adversaries do so, they are terrorists.

    It is too easy to describe Hamas simply as a ‘terror organisation’. It is a religious nationalist movement that resorts to terrorism, as the Zionist movement did during its struggle for statehood, in the mistaken belief that it is the only way to end an oppressive occupation and bring about a Palestinian state. While Hamas’s ideology formally calls for that state to be established on the ruins of the state of Israel, this doesn’t determine Hamas’s actual policies today any more than the same declaration in the PLO charter determined Fatah’s actions.

    These are not the conclusions of an apologist for Hamas but the opinions of the former head of Mossad and Sharon’s national security adviser, Ephraim Halevy. The Hamas leadership has undergone a change ‘right under our very noses’, Halevy wrote recently in Yedioth Ahronoth, by recognising that ‘its ideological goal is not attainable and will not be in the foreseeable future.’ It is now ready and willing to see the establishment of a Palestinian state within the temporary borders of 1967. Halevy noted that while Hamas has not said how ‘temporary’ those borders would be, ‘they know that the moment a Palestinian state is established with their co-operation, they will be obligated to change the rules of the game: they will have to adopt a path that could lead them far from their original ideological goals.’ In an earlier article, Halevy also pointed out the absurdity of linking Hamas to al-Qaida.

    In the eyes of al-Qaida, the members of Hamas are perceived as heretics due to their stated desire to participate, even indirectly, in processes of any understandings or agreements with Israel. [The Hamas political bureau chief, Khaled] Mashal’s declaration diametrically contradicts al-Qaida’s approach, and provides Israel with an opportunity, perhaps a historic one, to leverage it for the better.

    Why then are Israel’s leaders so determined to destroy Hamas? Because they believe that its leadership, unlike that of Fatah, cannot be intimidated into accepting a peace accord that establishes a Palestinian ‘state’ made up of territorially disconnected entities over which Israel would be able to retain permanent control. Control of the West Bank has been the unwavering objective of Israel’s military, intelligence and political elites since the end of the Six-Day War.[*] They believe that Hamas would not permit such a cantonisation of Palestinian territory, no matter how long the occupation continues. They may be wrong about Abbas and his superannuated cohorts, but they are entirely right about Hamas.

    Middle East observers wonder whether Israel’s assault on Hamas will succeed in destroying the organisation or expelling it from Gaza. This is an irrelevant question. If Israel plans to keep control over any future Palestinian entity, it will never find a Palestinian partner, and even if it succeeds in dismantling Hamas, the movement will in time be replaced by a far more radical Palestinian opposition.

    If Barack Obama picks a seasoned Middle East envoy who clings to the idea that outsiders should not present their own proposals for a just and sustainable peace agreement, much less press the parties to accept it, but instead leave them to work out their differences, he will assure a future Palestinian resistance far more extreme than Hamas – one likely to be allied with al-Qaida. For the US, Europe and most of the rest of the world, this would be the worst possible outcome. Perhaps some Israelis, including the settler leadership, believe it would serve their purposes, since it would provide the government with a compelling pretext to hold on to all of Palestine. But this is a delusion that would bring about the end of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.

    Anthony Cordesman, one of the most reliable military analysts of the Middle East, and a friend of Israel, argued in a 9 January report for the Center for Strategic and International Studies that the tactical advantages of continuing the operation in Gaza were outweighed by the strategic cost – and were probably no greater than any gains Israel may have made early in the war in selective strikes on key Hamas facilities. ‘Has Israel somehow blundered into a steadily escalating war without a clear strategic goal, or at least one it can credibly achieve?’ he asks. ‘Will Israel end in empowering an enemy in political terms that it defeated in tactical terms? Will Israel’s actions seriously damage the US position in the region, any hope of peace, as well as moderate Arab regimes and voices in the process? To be blunt, the answer so far seems to be yes.’ Cordesman concludes that ‘any leader can take a tough stand and claim that tactical gains are a meaningful victory. If this is all that Olmert, Livni and Barak have for an answer, then they have disgraced themselves and damaged their country and their friends.’

    15 January

    Note

    [*] See my piece in the LRB, 16 August 2007.

    Henry Siegman, director of the US Middle East Project in New York, is a visiting research professor at SOAS, University of London. He is a former national director of the American Jewish Congress and of the Synagogue Council of America.

  • Drama in Davos: A reading of the bizarre incident

    Drama in Davos: A reading of the bizarre incident

    By Ferruh Demirmen

     

    Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s walkout from the Gaza panel in Davos last week created quite a stir on the international scene. The walkout strained the Israeli-Turkish relations, and the direction the Turkish foreign policy is headed became a subject of debate.

     

    The occasion was a panel discussion on the Gaza crisis where two of the four panelists were Erdogan and Israeli President Shimon Peres. During his talk Erdogan blamed Israel for the Gaza violence, and Peres passionately defended his country’s policy. The tempers became inflamed when the moderator refused to allow Erdogan sufficient time to reply to Peres. This brought the panel discussion to a breaking point, and the PM walked off.

     

    The prevailing sentiment in Turkey is that Erdogan was justified in his action. Upon return from Davos, the PM was welcomed as a courageous leader by his supporters in Istanbul. The Arab world, in particular Hamas, lauded Erdogan’s action. There were alarm signals from the American Jewish lobby and the Israeli media, the former warning that Turkey’s image was damaged and making a sarcastic reference to PKK. In the rest of the world, the reaction was one of bemusement,

     

    The substance

     

    In substance, it is difficult to disagree with Erdogan on his criticism of Israel on the Gaza crisis. While the Jewish state deserved sympathy for the plight of its citizens that came under rocket attack from Hamas militants, its response was grossly disproportionate. Israel’s assault on the Gaza Strip created a humanitarian crisis in an area that was already reeling under a military lockdown. Some 1300 Palestinians lost their lives, as opposed to 13 on the Israeli side. Gaza’s industry was destroyed, and even schools, mosques, hospitals and a UN compound came under attack.

     

    The notion that a vastly superior military firepower was turned on a nearly defenseless population under siege, with graphic images of Palestinian civilians suffering and dying, was too much to bear for the world at large, in particular the Islamic world. Erdogan verbalized these sentiments.

     

    What made the Israeli action particularly offensive was that the military campaign appeared to be planned months in advance, and that Israel was timing its military campaign according to presidential turnover at the White House. Israel’s banning of journalists from the war zone also exacerbated anti-Israeli sentiments.

     

    The style

     

    Putting substance aside, the manner in which Erdogan handled himself in Davos was both right and wrong. To make sense of conflicting reports of the incident, this writer viewed the official webcast of the panel discussion. It is clear from the webcast that Erdogan was justified in protesting to the moderator.

     

    A cardinal rule in panel discussions is that the participants are allowed equal time. In this case, Peres was allowed to speak considerably longer than Erdogan.

     

    It is also a standard practice in panel discussions to allow a second chance to the speakers to respond to each other. There was no such provision in the panel discussion. Erdogan wrestled to get additional time to respond to Peres, the last speaker, but when the moderator cut him off after two minutes, the PM became visibly agitated. Turning red-faced, he stormed out.

     

    Because the other two panelists had talked shorter than both Erdogan and Peres, the moderator could have allowed Erdogan more time to respond, thereby preventing a diplomatic crisis.

     

    On the other hand, the PM could have chosen to remain calm, letting the audience judge the unfairness of the situation. His parting remark to the moderator, “For me, Davos is finished,” was unnecessary, and his rhetoric aimed at Peres, “You are older than me. Your voice is coming strong, this has to do with a guilty conscience.” … ”You know well how to kill,” were quite inappropriate. He had lost his temper.

     

    In diplomacy, there is no substitute for composure.

     

    In Ankara, retired Turkish diplomats who criticized Erdogan’s behavior in Davos also drew the PM’s ire, who called them “monsieurs” – a thinly disguised pejorative term.

     

    Some commentators in Turkish media compared the PM’s action to the bluster of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev when he, in a fury, took his shoe off and banged it at the table at a United Nations conference in 1960. The comparison, however, was off the mark.

     

    The motive

     

    Erdogan’s action raised some basic questions. What was the PM trying to accomplish by becoming the spokesman for Hamas when the Arab world is almost indifferent to the plight of Palestinians on the Gaza Strip?

     

    And if the PM was sincere in his humanitarian concerns over the Gaza crisis, why did he not raise similar objections to the killing fields in Darfur, and, for that matter, next-door Iraq?

     

    Erdogan twice welcomed in Ankara Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir – a radical Islamist – who has been accused of war crimes in Darfur by the International Criminal Court. These are questions only the PM can answer.

     

    But there is little doubt that Erdogan’s stance in Davos was driven at least in part by domestic politics. Local elections are scheduled for March, and by embracing the staunchly Islamic-oriented Hamas, the PM calculated that he could boost his popularity with his Islamist base at home. His popularity, in fact, did receive a boost, at least temporarily.

     

    The rallying welcome the PM received at the Istanbul airport in the early hours of the morning just after leaving the panel discussion was obviously planned in advance.

     

    Israeli-Turkish relations

     

    The larger issue with the Davos incident is whether it heralded a major shift in Turkey’s foreign policy vis-à-vis Israel. In press releases, both sides tried to downplay the significance of the event, claiming that the relations between the countries remained fundamentally strong.

     

    There is considerable truth in that assessment, as the two countries have long had close bilateral ties, from tourism to commerce to defense. The two countries also have shared common strategic interests, a point verbalized by Peres during his talk at the Turkish Parliament in November 2007. Both countries will want to continue the alliance.

     

    The alliance, however, will face challenges. Hamas is widely recognized as a terrorist organization, and unless the organization becomes more moderate, a serious rift in the Israeli-Turkish alliance will be inevitable. Turkey’s relationship with the US and the EU will also be affected.

     

    There is also the concern, raised by the American Jewish lobby, but also by the Turkish Jewish community, that Erdogan’s pro-Hamas stance may stoke anti-Semitism in Turkey. The PM tried to allay this concern by stating that his quarrel is with the Israeli administration, not Jewish people.

     

    The problem with this argument is that his constituents in the Islamic camp may not make such distinction.

     

    Any rise in anti-Semitism in Turkey would be very unfortunate. Since the Ottomans welcomed Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain in the 15th century, Turks and Jews have lived in peaceful coexistence. The secular republic established by Kemal Atatürk bestowed full citizenship rights on Jews, as it did on other religious and ethnic groups.

     

    Conclusion

     

    In summary, a badly administered panel discussion was at the root of a bizarre incident in Davos. Although there will be challenges, Turkey and Israel should put the bizarre incident behind and move on. The Jewish state should use the Davos incident as a wakeup call from a friend for resolution of the long-festering Israeli-Palestinian conflict. On Turkey’s part, it should weigh carefully its association with Hamas. A lasting peace in the Middle East is far too important to let an emotionally charged panel discussion to be a distraction. On Erdogan’s part, he should learn how to control his anger in conflict situations.

     

    ferruh@demirmen.com