TURKEY & ISRAEL: FRIENDS AND ALLIES
By Elif Aydýn

The Muslim News
Jan 30 2009
UK

Anomalous isn’t it that the one Muslim country that has strong
and cordial ties with Israel has been the one to speak out most
vociferously against the latter’s heinous assaults on Gaza?

It has surprised Turks themselves that among Muslim majority countries
observing the horrors, it has been Turkey that has been foremost
in its utter condemnation of Israel’s conduct. The Chairman of the
Turkish Assembly’s Foreign Relations Committee, Murat Mercan, quit
the assembly’s Turkish-Israel Friendship Group in protest at the
latter’s actions in Gaza.

Turkey’s Foreign Minister, Ali Babacan, accused governments and
international organisations of recklessly and irresponsibly engaging
in a ‘wait and see’ politics. He criticised these same governments
and international organisations for drawing distinctive reactions to
events in Georgia and those in Gaza.

The Turkish Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, spoke of Israel’s
actions as constituting "a crime against humanity" which would be
judged by history. And facing calls at home, similar to elsewhere, to
break off diplomatic ties with Israel and at the very least to expel
the Israeli Ambassador from Turkey, he replied, in his characteristic
vernacular style "We are running the Turkish Republic, not a grocery
store."

Indeed, which is why he dispatched his Foreign Minister and Chief
Foreign Policy Adviser, Prof Ahmet Davutoglu, to Cairo to lend Turkey’s
support to the Franco-Egyptian sponsored ceasefire negotiations.

It has been the AKP Government’s willingness to take tentative and
difficult steps, and withstand the emotive reactions of its detractors
that has helped it develop its policy of making friends and not enemies
in its neighbourhood. Its relations with Greece, Russia and Armenia
have all benefited from Davutoglu’s wisdom and Erdogan’s charisma.

Turkey boldly invited Head of Hamas Political Bureau, Khalid Mish’al,
after Hamas’ victory in the Palestinian elections, a move furiously
protested against by the Israeli Government at the time. It meant
that Mish’al’s visit had to be demoted from an official engagement
to a meeting with party’s officials and no audience granted with
Erdogan himself.

And from strong Syrian-Turkish animosity in the late 1990s, when the
PKK Leader, Abdullah Ocalan, was taking refuge in Syria, Turkey has
moved to a situation where it is able to confidently mediate in peace
talks between Syria and Israel. The question now faced by Turks is
whether the AKP has succeeded at all in using her relationship with
Israel to lean on an ally, using her own example of courageous first
steps, to help the peace process along and normalise relations between
Israel and the Arab regimes.

There are those who have argued that Turkey, better than others, should
appreciate Israel’s behaviour given that Turkey herself had crossed
into northern Iraq to conduct operations against PKK terrorists that
threatened Turkey’s own security. Turkey’s actions then, similarly,
merited muted responses from the Bush administration given her
importance to the US Government and the reconstruction effort in Iraq.

Perhaps the analogy is more revealing in it what it tells us of
the crimes that can be committed if the devil being resisted is
terrorism. And the term itself indiscriminately employed in the
same way the ‘war on terror’ phrase was and is deployed to quell and
silence legitimate opposition to a government’s excesses.

Of concern to those that have trusted in Turkey’s goodwill in
mediating for peace is the prospect, given prime ministerial and
ministerial statements, of impartiality on the part of Turkey in
future talks. While Turkish-Israeli relations are unlikely to remain
sour or strained for long, particularly given the close co-operation
and regular joint exercises between their respective militaries,
the statements made by Erdogan and others in his Government will be
exploited by neo-cons in the US and Israel that work to undermine the
AKP’s orientation by throwing at it a pejorative rendering of the term
‘Islamist’.

The critical voices of AKP ministers and deputies will be seized upon
as examples of a leopard not having changed its spots.

There are those also that will see in Turkey’s manoeuvres a tactical
move in service of aggrandising her role as a powerful and important
regional actor. And with domestic troubles like the Ergenekon case
continuing to uncover further plots and personalities that are accused
of supporting an anti AKP coup, rallying the support of Turks who are
outraged over Gaza seems a useful decoy in deflecting attention from
events closer to home.

Cool relations with Europe also offers Erdogan’s Government the
opportunity to impress on Europe one of Turkey’s most frequently
cited arguments in support of her membership bid – that Europe needs
Turkey to realise its aspiration of being a strong and credible actor
in international politics.

And there is no doubt that the "new way forward, based on mutual
interest and mutual respect," that US President Barak Obama hopes
for in his forging of a new era in relations between the US and the
Muslim world, will require a considerable presence from Turkey.

The hope that Turkey does hold out, as her response to the Gaza crisis
demonstrates, is her willingness to be the kind of critical friend
to Israel that former Prime Minister, Tony Blair, failed to be to the
ex-President George Bush. And if President Obama is true to his word of
wanting to enhance mutual interest and mutual respect in US relations
with the Muslim world, there are lessons in friendship that Turkey can
teach him far better than almost all the other Muslim majority states.

Elif Aydýn is a Researcher.

USE AS QUOTE: The hope that Turkey does hold out, as her response
to the Gaza crisis demonstrates, is her willingness to be the kind
of critical friend to Israel that former Prime Minister, Tony Blair,
failed to be to the ex-President George Bush.

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