GAZA WAR CREATED RIFT BETWEEN ISRAEL AND TURKEY
By Sabrina Tavernise And Ethan Bronner

New York Times
pe/05turkey.html?ref=world
Feb 5 2009
NY

ISTANBUL — The four daily flights to Tel Aviv are still running. The
defense contract signed in December has not been scrapped. But since
Israel’s war in Gaza, relations with Turkey, Israel’s closest Muslim
ally, have become strained.

Israel’s Arab allies stood behind it in the war, but Turkey, a NATO
member whose mediating efforts last year brought Israel into indirect
talks with Syria, protested every step of the way in a month of angry
remarks capped when Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan stalked off
the stage during a debate in Davos, Switzerland, on Jan. 29.

In the week since, both sides have taken pains to mend fences, with
officials in Israel and Turkey making conciliatory statements.

"Turkey and Israel attribute a special importance to their bilateral
relations," Turkey’s deputy prime minister, Cemil Cicek, said this
week. "We want to protect our relations with this country."

But both sides acknowledge that some damage has been done, and while
the full implications for the relationship are still unknown, many
political analysts say they sense a shift.

"It’s not a business-as-usual relationship anymore," said Cengiz
Candar, a columnist for Radikal, a Turkish daily. "It’s a very uneasy
sort of cohabitation in this region now."

Turkey is unique in the Middle East for its robust relations with
Israel. It was the first Muslim country to recognize Israel as a state,
and it has built up more than $3 billion in annual trade with Israel,
far more than for any other Middle Eastern country.

Mr. Erdogan encouraged the relationship, visiting Israel in 2005
with a group of Turkish businessmen and becoming the first Turkish
prime minister to visit the office of Turkey’s chief rabbi after a
synagogue was bombed in 2003.

But when it comes to Hamas, which controls Gaza, they disagree. Israel
views it as a terrorist group and focuses on its doctrinal commitment
to destroy the Zionist state. Mr. Erdogan sees other aspects: Hamas
began as a grass-roots Islamic movement, and like his own Justice and
Development party, also Islamic-inspired, was democratically elected
against overwhelming odds.

"They identified with some parts of the Hamas story," said Femi Koru,
a columnist for Today’s Zaman, a Turkish newspaper. "They were also
outcasts who were not allowed to join national politics."

Turkish officials argue that Mr. Erdogan’s stance against the war was
simply healthy criticism — words of warning from a close friend who
sincerely believed that Israel had gone too far.

"Turkey has lost its patience with the status quo in the Mideast,"
said a senior Turkish official, who requested anonymity because he
was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter. "Gaza is the
bankruptcy of the military solution."

The official added, "Israel is there to stay, and Palestinians are
there to stay, and they need to be talking right now."

Israel, for its part, feels that Mr. Erdogan is no longer a
disinterested party in the peace process, and though the two countries
will remain allies, the trust is no longer as strong.

"He has burned all the bridges with Jerusalem," said one senior
Israeli official, who spoke anonymously because of the delicacy of
the issue. "He won’t be seen as an honest broker anymore."

While Israel said it went to war to end rocket fire by Hamas,
Mr. Erdogan said he saw the war through the prism of democracy.

"The world has not respected the will of the Palestinian people,"
he said in an interview with Newsweek on Jan. 31. "On the one hand,
we defend democracy and we try our best to keep democracy in the
Middle East, but on the other we do not respect the outcome."

He also rejects Hamas’s use of violence. "I’m not saying Hamas is a
good organization and makes no mistakes," he said.

Mr. Erdogan’s stance has won him praise in Arab societies, which
opposed Israel’s military campaign and chafe at their leaders’
support of it.

"In one stroke, he became the moral patron saint of the Arab world,"
said Mr. Candar, the columnist. But some Turkish columnists criticized
Mr. Erdogan for what they said was an implicit hypocrisy — raising
the issue of the Israeli killings of Palestinians while failing to
mention his own country’s abuses in the mostly Kurdish southeast
during years of war there.

"One would naturally ask Erdogan, who stands up against violence
imposed on people in Gaza, what he thinks about Kurds being killed in
his own country," wrote Ahmet Altan in the liberal Turkish daily Taraf.

The fallout has affected Israeli tourism to Turkey, which is down
in recent weeks, according to Avi Mendelbaum of Unital, a Tel Aviv
travel agency. He said that his agency alone could fill a plane of
180 tourists going to Turkey a year ago, but that this year five
agencies have joined to fill the same flight. The economic crisis
is partly responsible, he said, but other destinations have not been
hit as badly.

But Israelis make up less than 2 percent of Turkey’s tourism industry,
and it would be far more serious if there were repercussions in
the United States, where Jewish groups have helped Turkey block
a resolution that condemns the genocide of a more than a million
Ottoman Empire Armenians from being discussed in Congress.

Abraham H. Foxman, director of the Anti-Defamation League, said that
Mr. Erdogan’s criticism was "like a shock to the system," but added
that the league had not changed its opposition to the genocide bill
in Congress. "It’s not a question of punishment," he said. "There’s
too much at stake in the relationship."

As for charges that anti-Semitism is flaring in Turkey, Mr. Foxman
said it was no worse than in any other country.

Though Turkey’s role as a mediator in the Middle East might suffer,
the broader relationship will not, analysts said. A $141 million
contract for surveillance equipment signed on Dec. 25 has not been
canceled, said the Israel company that signed it.

Sabrina Tavernise reported from Istanbul, and Ethan Bronner from
Jerusalem. Sebnem Arsu contributed reporting from Istanbul.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress