Tag: Turkey-Israel

  • Turkey Denies U.S. Complained Over Comments Against Israel

    Turkey Denies U.S. Complained Over Comments Against Israel

    Turkey denies that the United States expressed concerns over remarks made by the country’s officials about alleged Israeli raid in Syria.

    By Elad Benari

    First Publish: 2/8/2013, 3:15 AM

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    Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan

    AFP/File

    Turkey denied on Thursday that the United States expressed concerns to Turkish authorities over remarks made by the country’s officials about an alleged Israeli raid on a military convoy and a research center near Damascus last week.

    Diplomatic sources told the Turkish daily Today’s Zaman that the U.S. embassy did not convey any concerns to the Turkish side over the remarks.

    “There has been no initiative or a meeting in Ankara [between Turkish and US officials]. We couldn’t understand what they were referring to,” the sources told the newspaper.

    On Saturday, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu criticized the Syrian government for failing to respond to the alleged Israel airstrike, suggesting that the Syrian stance raises suspicions that there is a secret deal between the two countries.

    “Why has the Syrian army, which has been attacking its own people with warplanes and tanks for 22 months, not responded to this Israeli operation?” Davutoglu asked.

    “Why doesn’t [Bashar al-Assad] throw a stone at the Israeli planes while they fly over his palace and insult his nation’s honor? Why doesn’t he do anything against Israel while he drops bombs on the innocent people of his country? Is there a secret agreement between Israel and Assad?” he added.

    A day later, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan accused Israel of waging “state terrorism” as he condemned the alleged air strike as an unacceptable violation of international law.

    “Those who have been treating Israel like a spoilt child should expect anything from them, at any time,” Erdogan said.

    “As I say time and again, Israel has a mentality of waging state terrorism. Right now, there is no telling what it might do and where it might do it,” he told reporters.

    “We cannot regard a violation of air space as acceptable. What Israel does is completely against international law… it is beyond condemnation,” Erdogan said.

    Responding to the comments, State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland called them “inflammatory” and said they are “obviously very troubling to us.”

    Nuland told reported that the U.S. had “conveyed our concerns on this matter with senior Turkish officials.” She added that the U.S. administration had expressed these concerns to Turkish authorities via the U.S. Embassy in Ankara.

    The U.S. embassy in Ankara declined to comment on the matter and said it is impossible to provide more information than what Nuland said.

    Tags: Syria ,Turkey ,Recep Tayyip Erdogan ,Ahmet Davutoglu ,Victoria Nuland ,Turkey-Israel relations ,IAF-Syria

    via Turkey Denies U.S. Complained – Middle East – News – Israel National News.

  • Can Israel’s New Coalition Fix Relations with Turkey?

    By Steven A. Cook

    Tensions between Jerusalem and Ankara run too deeply for a single election to make much difference.

    Nir Elias/ReutersSince Yair Lapid and his Yesh Atid party’s surprise showing last week in Israel’s elections, there has been an outpouring of commentary about a new dawn in Israeli domestic and foreign policies. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose Likud, in conjunction with Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beitenu party lost a combined elevenseats in the Knesset, will have to form a broader government that includes centrists like Lapid. As a result, a conventional wisdom has developed that this new coalition will lead Israel out of its international isolation. Typically, observers have been asking what the Lapid phenomenon means for the “peace process” — as if that is something that exists. Yet a handful of commentators have also zeroed in on Turkey-Israel ties as ripe for rapprochement under a new, allegedly more conciliatory, Israeli government. It is a nice idea, but so are rainbows and unicorns. The reality is that, despite Lapid’s rise, nothing has or will likely change to convince Israeli and Turkish leaders that mending ties is in their political interests.

    To be fair, the Turks themselves have led foreign observers to believe that a change in Turkey-Israel relations was possible. For the better part of the last four years, Turkish officials have indicated that Israel itself was not the problem, but “this Israeli government,” meaning, of course, Netanyahu’s outgoing coalition of right-of-center parties. It is true that it is difficult to work with Prime Minister Netanyahu and that Foreign Minister Lieberman had, contrary to his job description, a knack for aggravating relations with other countries. Still, with the exception of the Mavi Marmara incident, the biggest problems in the Turkey-Israel relationship — the blockade of the Gaza Strip and Operation Cast Lead — predate Netanyahu’s tenure. Indeed, the idea that a new broader and allegedly more moderate Israeli coalition will lead to reconciliation between Jerusalem and Ankara badly misreads the dynamics of Israel’s left-right politics, the profound unpopularity of Israel in Turkey, and the centrality of the Middle East to the architects of Turkish foreign policy.

    A handful of commentators have also zeroed in on Turkey-Israel ties as ripe for rapprochement under a new, allegedly more conciliatory, Israeli government. It is a nice idea, but so are rainbows and unicorns.

    Turks have often pointed to Israeli policy in the Gaza Strip, especially the blockade of the area, as a prime example of its problems with Netanyahu’s previous government and the primary obstacle to better relations. This is a principled position, but Ankara seems to have its chronology incorrect. Israel’s land closure of Gaza dates to June 2007and the naval blockade was implemented in January 2009 — both under the premiership of Ehud Olmert, who after leaving Likud to join Ariel Sharon in his breakaway Kadima Party has developed a reputation as a centrist. There was no way that Netanyahu was going to reverse Olmert’s policies and there is a slim chance that that he would do so now even with Yair Lapid — who is not actually all that to the left on foreign policy — in his government.

    Even if Israelis had given a resurgent Labor Party the most Knesset seats and its leader, Shelly Yachimovich, was tapped to form a government, Israel’s land and sea blockade of the Gaza Strip would remain firmly in place. A left-of-center government simply could not be perceived as being soft on security and Gaza. The cliché “only Labor can make war and only Likud can make peace” was coined a long time ago, but it still holds today. Over the last two decades, Israeli prime ministers have consistently been brought down from the right often over some issue related to the country’s security. Politics aside, there really is not much disagreement among the country’s major political parties that Gaza poses a threat to Israel’s security. If the Turkish demand that Israel must lift its closure of Gaza is serious, and there is little reason to believe that it is not, ties between Ankara and Jerusalem are likely to remain strained.

    It is not just the Israeli politics of the Gaza blockade or the actual threat from Gaza that is the problem in Turkey-Israel relations. Those who see an opportunity to restore good ties with the emergence of a new Israeli government or who become positively giddy at every leak of high-level contact between Turkish and Israeli officials — which the Turks invariably deny — are not paying close enough attention to Turkish politics. Israel is not popular in Turkey and never really was despite the blossoming of strategic relations between Jerusalem and Ankara in 1996. Those ties served the Turkish General Staff’s specific national security and, importantly, domestic political interests at a time when the officers’ power was at its height. That was during an era before the rise of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) when public opinion mattered very little in Turkish foreign policy.

    Prime Minister Erdogan, who is an astonishingly talented politician and has a keen sense of what makes average Turks tick, understands the political benefits that are derived from strained relations with Israel. To be sure, it took Erdogan some time before putting the bilateral relationship on ice. He visited Jerusalem in May of 2005 and invited his then counterpart, Ariel Sharon, to visit Ankara; but as he and the AKP grew more confident at home, relations with the United States improved, and Turkey became a player in the Middle East and wider Islamic world, it became easy to jettison ties with Israel with the approval of many Turks. Israel’s only constituency in Turkey includes parts of the business community, but even as Turkish-Israeli trade has continued and even increased, there are few voices who want a resumption of the alignment of the 1990s. Turkey’s opposition rebukes Erdogan and the AKP mercilessly on a wide-range of issues, but not on the quality of Ankara’s relations with Jerusalem.

    The fact that the prime minister has been able to leverage the Palestine issue to great political effect without penalty suggests that the Turkish public’s now manifest solidarity with Palestinians was not just manufactured in 2002 when the AKP came to power. Still, outright enmity toward Israel was generally confined to Turkey’s hard core Islamists even if the broader public remained wary of Ankara’s relations with Jerusalem and critical of the Israel Defense Force’s policies in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

    This changed during the early days of Operation Iraqi Freedom when unsubstantiated stories of Israeli support for Kurdish independence in northern Iraq surfaced in The New Yorker and Turkey’s less well-regarded dailies. Then the way in which Erdogan exploited Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in late 2008 and early 2009 and, of course, the Mavi Marmara incident in May 2010, transformed solidarity with Palestinians into hostility toward Israel, which has become political gold for Erdogan. The U.S. government believes that in Turkey’s last elections (June 2011), which Erdogan won with almost 50 percent of the vote, Turks voted on two “p’s” — their pocketbooks and Palestine. Under these circumstances, Erdogan, who plans to be Turkey’s president one day and who believes that the AKP will be dominant for at least another decade, is unlikely to be receptive to a substantial improvement in Ankara’s ties with Jerusalem.

    Even as Erdogan plans his path to the Cankaya Palace, he is currently content to be “King of the Arab Street.” The Turkish prime minister is consistently ranked the most popular world leader in polls of the Arab world. Erdogan’s standing is primarily a function of his position on Gaza, but also his early call for Hosni Mubarak to leave office during the Egyptian uprising, and Turkey’s harboring of tens of thousands of Syrian refugees fleeing Bashar al Assad’s brutality. These policies are emblematic of a broader Turkish engagement and activism in the Middle East that distinguishes Erdogan and the AKP from previous Turkish governments. The architects of Turkish foreign policy — Erdogan, President Abdullah Gul, who served as prime minister and foreign minister, and Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu — believe that Turkey is the natural leader of a region that the Ottomans once dominated as imperial overlords.

    The combination of Turkey’s economic might, diplomatic clout, and cultural affinity to Arabs and Muslims is central to the prosperity and political development of the region. Some have called this “neo-Ottomanism” to a fair amount of controversy, but whatever it is called, Ankara could not truly be a regional leader, trouble shooter, “inspiration,” and economic engine, as well as the many other designations and appellations Turkey has picked up over the last decade, while simultaneously nurturing close ties with Israel.

    The Turks were already suspect in the Arab world given the legacies of Ottoman colonialism, the Jacobin secularism of Mustafa Kemal, and Ankara’s institutional ties to the West through NATO and its efforts to join the European Union. These deficits ultimately proved to be surmountable, but at the cost of Turkey’s ties with Israel. Nothing about the way Turkey’s leaders view the world, the Middle East, and the Turkish role in it has changed now that Benjamin Netanyahu is poised to make Yair Lapid his junior coalition partner.

    It has been 16 years since General Cevik Bir, then Turkey’s deputy chief-of-staff, revealed to an audience in Washington, DC that Ankara and Jerusalem had upgraded their ties to a strategic relationship that included a robust security component. For some it was a golden age — and even if that level of cooperation and coordination is an artifact of the past, it is worth salvaging Turkey-Israel relations. There has been every effort to do just this over the course of the last four years to no avail. This is unfortunate, but the disincentives for both Turkish and Israeli politicians to improve relations are great.

  • Does Turkey Benefit From Cold War With Israel?

    Does Turkey Benefit From Cold War With Israel?

    Last week we learned Turkey has partially lifted its vetoes against Israel within NATO. Turkey now partially agrees to the participation of Israel in NATO activities outside of military exercises.

    About This Article

    Summary :

    Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan believes that Turkey may benefit from a cold war with Israel, writes Kadri Gursel.

    Author: Kadri Gursel
    posted on: Thu, Jan 3, 2013

    Categories : Turkey   Originals Security
    Supporters of the Saadet (Felicity) Party burn an Israeli flag as they shout anti-Israel slogans during a protest in Istanbul, Dec. 2, 2012. (photo by REUTERS/Osman Orsal)
    Read more: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2013/01/cold-war-turkey-israel.html#ixzz2H00muPOa

    During Israel’s assault on the Mavi Marmara, the ship that was heading to Gaza in May 2010 to penetrate Israel’s blockade, nine activists were killed. Since then, Turkey-Israel relations have been reminiscent of the Cold War. To normalize relations with Israel, Turkey has demanded a formal apology, compensation to the relatives of the victims and the lifting of Israel’s Gaza blockade. Israel has not fulfilled any of these conditions.

    NATO is another instrument Turkey has been using to exert pressure on Israel and punish it. Israel is a participant in the “Mediterranean Dialogue,” which is NATO’s program for security and stability in the Mediterranean. Until last week, Turkey had blocked Israel’s participation in this program.

    Now that Turkey has eased its position, Israel will be able to participate in seminars and programs, but not joint military exercises within the framework of the Mediterranean Dialogue.

    What does Turkey’s partial lifting of its vetoes against Israel in NATO signify?

    Is this is a sign of a general warming of Turkey to Israel? The answer is simple: No, at least for the time being. According to NATO sources, Turkey’s easing off is the result of a coalition against Turkey within the alliance.

    Egypt and Tunisia, the two countries Turkey has deepening ties with, are also included in the Mediterranean Dialogue. There have been reports, which have not been denied, that some NATO members had vetoed the participation of these two Maghreb countries in the Mediterranean Dialogue to persuade Turkey to lift its veto on Israel.

    Then there is the matter of deploying NATO Patriot missiles in Turkey against a possible Syrian ballistic-missile threat. It is no wonder that many quarters find a connection between Turkeys’s mellowing of its anti-Israel veto in NATO and the alliance’s agreement to respond positively to Turkey’s request for Patriots.

    In a nutshell, what led Turkey to soften its attitude against Israel is the balance of power created within the alliance by vetoing of Turkey’s interests.

    But when the issue is the bilateral Turkey-Israel relations, the key concept is not balance, but the lack of it. Asymmetry has defined the nature of Israel’s relations with Turkey since the establishment of the Jewish state.

    The unchangeable principle that has regulated the bilateral relations of the two countries and is not likely to change easily is that “Israel needs Turkey more than Turkey needs Israel.” Therefore, Turkey is more important for Israel than the other way around.

    Another feature of the bilateral relations in the 1999-2010 period was Turkey’s capacity to inflict more damage on Israel than vice versa.

    In the period that started Israel’s 2008-2009 Gaza operation, followed by the Davos confrontation between Erdogan and Israeli President Peres that ended with the flotilla affair, neo-Islamist Turkish elite made a national pastime of Israel bashing. Justice and Development Party (AKP) elite owed this privilege to this asymmetry. It was because of this asymmetry they were able to win massive sympathy in the Arab street for Erdogan and the AKP.

    But it is interesting to note that Turkey did not apply sanctions in bilateral trade relations where no such asymmetry exists. Despite the atmosphere of a cold war, trade relations continued to develop with their own dynamics.

    Going to back to asymmetry, it can be claimed that the AKP’s foreign-policy wizards exaggerated the advantages of this unbalance and stepped up their disproportionate actions. To this end, Prime Minister Erdogan took a risky step in July 2011. To Turkey’s two conditions for normalization — apology and compensation — Turkey’s prime minister added as a third official condition the lifting of the Israel blockade of Gaza. By doing so, he removed the normalization of relations from a bilateral context and made it part of a multilateral Hamas-Israel question.

    Unless Turkey rescinds this decision, the fate of Turkey-Israel relations will not be decided at bilateral level but in the complexity of a multidimensional equation that includes Hamas, Egypt, Fatah, Iran, some actors from outside the region and, naturally, Israel’s security imperatives.

    Israel is not likely to lift the blockade as long as the security issue with Hamas is not resolved. That also means that even if Israel agrees to apologize and pay compensation, relations with Turkey won’t be normalized.

    Of course, even if the blockade is lifted, Turkey will want to benefit from it.

    All this means that Turkey’s foreign-policy designers think that Israel is not an important Middle East country for them — to the contrary, Turkey could benefit more from a cold war with Israel.

    Then could the civil war in Syria favor Israel in the Turkey-Israel asymmetry? Not likely. If there were ever an expectation that the Syrian crisis could bring Israel and Turkey closer, this will not easily happen and hasn’t yet.

    Israel might think that there could be exceptional cooperation and coordination with Turkey over Syria and that this could change the whole picture.

    Israelis might even be thinking that should Turkey normalize its attitude to Israel, the Sunni rebels of Syria might be positively influenced and should they one day take over Damascus, they will be less hostile to Israel.

    For Israel’s own interests, the most positive Syria scenario would be an undivided Syria that still maintains its state structure and in which not Iran, but Turkey plays the leading role.

    But Israel cannot offer any inducement to Turkey to realize this scenario. Even rumors of a Turkish cooperation with Israel in the Syrian crisis will result in Turkey’s loss of legitimacy in the region.

    In Syria, Israel needs Turkey, but Turkey doesn’t need Israel — for the time being.

    As the asymmetry (and Prime Minister Erdogan, who makes use of it) are not going change anytime soon, the change has to come from Israel. For that, we have to wait for the results of the elections.

    Kadri Gürsel is a contributing writer for Al-Monitor’s Turkey Pulse, and has written a column for the Turkish daily Milliyet since 2007. He focuses primarily on Turkish foreign policy, international affairs and Turkey’s Kurdish question, as well as Turkey’s evolving political Islam. He is also chairman of the Turkish National Committee of the International Press Institute.

    Read more: https://www.al-monitor.com/originals/2013/01/cold-war-turkey-israel.html#ixzz2H00LtNzf
  • Turkey confirms negotiations are taking place with Israel

    Turkey confirms negotiations are taking place with Israel

    Though he holds firm that Israel must meet Turkish demands, the Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu has confirmed there are talks taking place with Israel on the matter of reconciliation and normalization of ties between the two nations.

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    He also acknowledged that Turkey was actively involved in brokering the Gaza ceasefire, along with Egypt and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. It was reported during Israel’s Operation Pillar of Defense that Israel had reached out to Turkey in reference to Gaza through ‘intelligence back channels’. Turkey’s head of intelligence was present in Cairo and assisted in discussions with Hamas.

    Israel and Turkey had enjoyed a relatively close relationship for several decades. Tourism and trade flowed both ways between the two countries. Turkey though Muslim, never participated in any of the Arab-Israeli wars since Israel’s independence. The two nations had also developed close military ties with cross training and military industry deals between the two nations. It is widely believed in and out of military and intelligence circles that in 2007 Turkey allowed the over flight of Israeli warplanes which bombed and destroyed Syria’s one fledgling nuclear weapons facility near Deir Alzour in Syria’s northeast region.

    However relations between Israel and Turkey deteriorated dramatically after the May 2010 incident at sea where a Turkish flagged relief ship bound for Gaza was stormed by Israeli forces and 9 civilians were killed in the ensuing fight including Turkish citizens. Turkey has insisted ever since on a formal apology from Israel, monetary compensation for the families and the total lifting of all restrictions in place by the Israeli land and naval blockade of Gaza.

    Whether there had been an approach made by Israel or Turkey prior to Israel’s air strikes on Gaza is unknown. But, Israel’s bold and punishing air campaign against Hamas in Gaza and the now known imminence of an Israeli invasion and occupation of Gaza on the eve of the ceasefire, no doubt has played a role in the decision by Turkey to at least entertain discussions with Israel.

    Had normal relations existed, Turkey may have been able to broker a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas earlier on in the fight and without the ‘political baggage’ brought to the table by Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood in the form of President Morsi.

    Another factor for Turkey is Iran. There is currently a growing adversarial situation between Turkey and Iran, primarily involving the two nations backing of opposite sides in the Syrian Civil War. But, there is also a similar pattern developing involving both nations and Iraq.

    These situations have driven an even deeper wedge between Ankara and Tehran than previously existed. Iran and Turkey share a border, though it is an extremely mountainous border region inhospitable to a regular battle between two armies.

    However, Iran does have missiles and is of course, known to be working on a nuclear program. Iranian intelligence agents have been caught and arrested by Turkish military authorities assisting the Kurdish insurgent group known in Turkey as the Kurdistan Workers Party, (PKK).

    But, it is the Iranian missiles and nuclear program that no doubt has Turkey’s government worried the most and it may well be why they are now holding discussions with Israel. The day may come when the benefits of a rapprochement with Israel outweighs any Turkish heartburn over the assault and seizure of a relief ship carrying aid to a terrorist group in Gaza supported primarily by Iran.

    via Turkey confirms negotiations are taking place with Israel – Arlington Foreign Policy | Examiner.com.

  • Turkey, Israel resume reconciliation talks

    Turkey, Israel resume reconciliation talks

    JERUSALEM (JTA) — Israel and Turkey resumed informal reconciliation talks.

    Turkey’s foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, confirmed to CNN on Sunday reports that the two countries were discussing how to repair the relationship between the governments that broke down over Israel’s raid on the Mavi Marmara ship.

    Nine Turkish citizens died when Israeli Navy commandoes boarded the Mavi Marmara, which claimed to be carrying humanitarian aid, on May 31, 2010 after warning the ship not to sail into waters near the Gaza Strip in circumvention of Israel’s naval blockade of the coastal strip.

    Turkey has demanded that Israel apologize for the raid, compensate the families of those killed and halt its blockade of Gaza. Israel has offered to fulfill the first two of the requests.

    A Turkish court earlier this month began a trial in absentia of four Israeli military commanders responsible for the raid, including former Chief of Staff Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi. The Israelis could be sentenced in absentia to life in prison.

    Israel’s government-appointed Turkel Commission found in its investigation that the government and the military behaved appropriately, and that the blockade of Gaza was legal. The United Nations’ Palmer Committee also found the blockade to be legal but said Israel used excessive force while boarding the vessel.

    Turkey’s inquiry deemed the Gaza blockade and the Israeli raid to be illegal.

    via Turkey, Israel resume reconciliation talks | JTA – Jewish & Israel News.

  • Israel and Turkey resume talks to end diplomatic crisis

    Israel and Turkey resume talks to end diplomatic crisis

    Israel and Turkey resume talks to end diplomatic crisis

    3flag israel turkey

    Senior Israeli officials say Netanyahu’s envoy, Yosef Chiechanover, met with Turkish envoy Feridun Sinirlioglu to discuss reconciliation after the crisis that broke out following the 2010 Gaza flotilla.

    By Barak Ravid | 20:13 23.11.12 | 40

    Israel and Turkey have resumed talks on ending the crisis in relations between the two countries, two senior Israeli officials said on Friday.

    via Israel and Turkey resume talks to end diplomatic crisis – Israel News | Haaretz Daily Newspaper.