A series of announcements and moves out of Turkey – ranging from skepticism expressed by the country’s Turkish President Abdullah Gul to new developments in an anti-Israel show trial – have observers worrying that Ankara is backsliding on U.S.-driven efforts to achieve diplomatic rapprochement between Israel and Turkey.
Israeli-Turkish relations have been in a diplomatic deep freeze since 2010. Turkey had already spent months distancing itself from the Jewish state, with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip famously storming off a stage he was sharing with Israeli President Shimon Peres in 2009. In 2010 members members of the Turkish Humanitarian Relief Foundation (IHH) – group designated as a terror organization by the Netherlands and Germany – participated in an effort to break Israel’s blockade of the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. They attacked Israeli commandos who boarded their ship, the MV Mavi Marmara, and nine died in the ensuing fighting. A U.N. investigation into the incident later determined that the Israeli blockade was legal, echoing expert legal consensus. Turkey used the incident to all but totally break off diplomatic relations with Israel.
A trilateral March 2013 phone call facilitated by President Barack Obama, and involving Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Erdogan was supposed to put Ankara and Jerusalem on the path to restoring ties. The agreement, however, saw Erdogan being maneuvered into accepting terms that the Israelis had already been offering for months, and The Tower suggested at the time that the deal could “complicate [his] domestic position.” Amid hardliner pressure and a broad decline in Turkey’s regional influence, Erdogan subsequently imposed new conditions for the reconciliation, reached out to Hamas over U.S. objections, and just generally indulged in repeated anti-semitic diatribes.
The moves heightened skepticism that Turkey was committed to reconciliation, and this week Gul told an Israeli newspaper that Turkey still isn’t satisfied:.
Gül, responding to a question by the Yedioth Ahronoth daily after a meeting of the Istanbul Forum last week, said: “In order to end this conflict and the difference of opinion between us, we had certain expectations of Israel. Israel responded to part of our expectations when it apologized. But this step was taken at a late stage; Israel apologized too late. Some of our expectations have not yet been met,” the daily reported Gül as saying.
Turkey has also in recent days doubled down on a derided “show trial” of senior IDF figures being tried in absentia over the Marmara incident. When the trial was launched in 2012, prosecutors asked for 18,000 years in jail for the four officers involved. Erdogan had agreed to drop the trial as part of the reconciliation agreement hammered out by Obama.
The most recent development in the trial has seen anti-Israel activist Kenneth O’Keefe assert that IDF commandos fired down on the boat from the air. The claim contradicts the results of an Israeli investigation and reporting at the time done by journalist Sefik Dinc, who was sympathetic to efforts to break Israel’s blockade.
[Photo:randam / Wiki Commons]
