Shoshana Bryen: When All Else Fails, Erdogan Calls Israel/Neighborhood Tensions Push Turkey to Israel Rapprochement

When All Else Fails, Erdogan Calls Israel
Shoshana Bryen/Gatestone Institute/December 18/15

Erdogan came to office in 2003 with a policy of “zero problems with neighbors,” but has since led Turkey to problems with most, if not all, of them.
Turkey’s foreign policy choices and current crises have combined to make Erdogan reach out to Israel for help.
Israel has weighed the price and found it acceptable: Israel will pay Turkey $20 million; Turkey will expel the Hamas leadership from Istanbul and will buy Israeli gas.
The restoration of relations with Israel is less a political reconciliation than an admission of the utter bankruptcy of Turkey’s last five years of diplomatic endeavor.
The announcement of the restoration of Israel-Turkish relations should be seen in the context of Turkey having nowhere else to go.
Turkey’s relations with Israel have been strained, to put it mildly, since 2010 when, through a non-profit organization, Turkey funded the 2010 Gaza Flotilla aimed at breaking the Israeli-Egyptian blockade of the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip.
After a bloody confrontation, which ended in the deaths of nine Turks, Turkey demanded that Israel be tried in the International Criminal Court (ICC) and subjected to UN sanction. The ICC ruled that Israel’s actions did not constitute war crimes. In addition, the UN’s Palmer Commission concluded that the blockade of Gaza was legal, and that the IDF commandos who boarded the Mavi Marmara ship had faced “organized and violent resistance from a group of passengers,” and were therefore required to use force for their own protection. The commission, however, did label the commandos’ force “excessive and unreasonable.”
Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had already in the past show hostility towards Israel. Already in 2009, then Prime Minister Erdogan denounced Israel’s President Shimon Peres publicly at the Davos World Economic Forum. “When it comes to killing, you know very well how to kill. You know very well how to kill.” When Hamas was thrown out of Damascus, Erdogan invited Hamas leaders Khaled Mashaal and Ismail Haniyeh to put the terrorist organization’s “West Bank and Jerusalem Headquarters” in Istanbul.
Speaking at the Paris rally in January 2015, after the murderous attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices and the terrorist murder of four Jews in a kosher supermarket, Turkey’s Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said, “Just as the massacre in Paris committed by terrorists is a crime against humanity, Netanyahu… has committed crimes against humanity.” Erdogan, speaking in Ankara, said he could “hardly understand how he (Netanyahu) dared to go” to the march in the French capital. Just last month, Davutoglu told an audience, “Israel kneels down to us.”
Not exactly.
Turkey’s foreign policy choices and current crises have combined to make Erdogan reach out to Israel for help. Erdogan came to office as Prime Minister in 2003 with a policy of “zero problems with neighbors,” but has since led Turkey to problems with most, if not all, of them. Alon Liel, former Director General of the Israeli Foreign Ministry said, “Turkey didn’t do very well in the last five years in the region. Turkey needs friends.”
That is an understatement.
Turkey helped Iran evade international sanctions, but has since fallen out with the Islamic Republic of Iran over its support of Syria’s Bashar Assad. A Muslim Brotherhood supporter, Erdogan was close to Egypt’s former President, Muslim Brotherhood member Mohamed Morsi, and has been an outspoken adversary of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Turkey was and remains a conduit for arms and money for various parties to the Syrian civil war. The U.S. has demanded that Erdogan seal Turkey’s border with Syria, which he has not done. Turkey also has bombed Kurdish fighters; deployed its forces to Iraqi territory and declined to remove them; and sold ISIS oil on the black market. There are allegations that the Turkish government knew sarin gas was transferred to ISIS across Turkish territory. In November, Turkey shot down a Russian military jet, in the biggest move down the current slide of Turkish-Russian relations, which began when Vladimir Putin stepped in to prevent the collapse of Syria. [This is on top of historical animosity between Turkey, the successor to Muslim Ottoman rule, and Russia, the self-proclaimed defender of the Christian Orthodox Church.]
Russia, furious at the downing of its plane, instituted a series of economic sanctions against Turkey, the most important of which is suspension of the TurkStream project, designed to boost Russian gas exports to Turkey. Turkey is the second-largest importer of Russian gas, after Germany.
As a corrective to all of Turkey’s “problems with neighbors,” Erdogan raised the possibility of renewed relations with Israel — which is currently finalizing the mechanism for developing large offshore natural gas fields. Erdogan told Turkish media last week that normalization of ties with Israel would have benefits for Turkey. Insisting that Israel must still end the blockade of Gaza (not happening), apologize, and pay reparations for the flotilla, Erdogan nevertheless made clear his desire for progress — or at least for Israeli gas.
Which way will Turkish President Erdogan go on Israel?
Left: Erdogan (then Prime Minister) shakes hands with then Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, on May 1, 2005. Right: Erdogan shakes hands with Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh on January 3, 2012.
It’s not as if Turkish-Israel relations were ever entirely severed. Since the flotilla confrontation, Turkey-Israel trade doubled in the past five years, to $5.6 billion. While arms deals signed prior to 2010 have been put on hold, trade in civilian chemicals, agricultural products, and manufactured goods has increased. And, in one of those “only in the Middle East” stories, Turkish businesses have been shipping goods to Israel by sea, then trucking them across the country to Jordan and beyond, in order to avoid having to ship overland through Syria.
The basis for increased trade, including gas sales, is there, and Israel has weighed the price and found it acceptable. Israel will pay Turkey $20 million; Turkey will expel the Hamas leadership from Istanbul and will purchase Israeli gas.
After entering office in 2003, Erdogan offered Turkey as a model for democratic governance in a Muslim country. President Obama called him one of the foreign leaders with whom he was most comfortable. But Turkey’s was always a double game. The restoration of relations with Israel is less a political reconciliation than an admission of the utter bankruptcy of Turkey’s last five years of diplomatic endeavor.
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Neighborhood Tensions Push Turkey to Israel Rapprochement

Agence France Presse/Naharnet/December 18/15/ Seeking to make up for drastically worsening ties with neighbors Iran and Russia as well as bolstering its energy security, Turkey is moving to restore full relations with Israel after falling out more than five years ago. NATO member Turkey was for years seen as the main Muslim ally of Israel, but ambassadors were withdrawn following the deadly storming by Israeli commandos in 2010 of a Turkish aid ship bound for Gaza. But in a surprise announcement, Israeli officials said Thursday that initial understandings had been agreed with Turkey at secret talks in Switzerland on normalizing ties. Turkish officials said no agreement on reconciliation had yet been reached but confirmed for the first time that the discussions were making progress. The talks — led by Mossad chief Yossi Cohen for Israel and Turkey’s powerful foreign ministry undersecretary Feridun Sinirlioglu — have also been accompanied by a conspicuous change in tone from Turkey’s outspoken President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Erdogan, a stout defender of the Palestinian cause, in July 2014 was accusing Israel of “keeping Hitler’s spirit alive” over its offensive in the Gaza Strip that summer — incendiary comments that infuriated Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. But this week he said: “We, Israel and the Palestinians and the region have a lot to win from a normalization process.”
‘Changing dynamics’ -
The about-turn has come amid a drastic worsening of ties between Turkey and Russia following Ankara’s downing of a Russian warplane over Syria on November 24, which has wrecked several joint cooperation projects including on energy. In a rapidly-changing regional context, mainly Sunni Muslim Turkey’s relations with mainly Shiite Iran — Israel’s arch foe — are deteriorating as Tehran assists Syrian President Bashar Assad, who Ankara wants ousted. “During the past few years, we heard a number of times that Turkey and Israel were about to mend their relations, but each time the process collapsed,” said Marc Pierini, visiting scholar at Carnegie Europe. “This time around, there are a number of reasons for both countries to make a fresh effort,” he told AFP. He said Turkey was confronted with “a largely stalled Middle East policy… It needs some real positive news.”Turkey’s Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu coined the phrase describing Turkish foreign policy as “zero problems with neighbours”, a comment that is now roundly mocked as Ankara faces troubles on almost all its borders amid the Syrian civil war. With President Vladimir Putin in no mood for forgiveness, the dispute with Moscow is of major concern for Ankara, which relies on Russia for over half its natural gas imports. Despite delays, Israel is set to become an important supplier of natural gas once its 18.9 trillion cubic feet Leviathan gas field begins production, a development Turkey is closely watching. “Israeli gas could be a serious game changer while Turkey is having problems with its biggest gas supplier Russia,” said Ozgur Altug, chief economist of BGC partners in Istanbul. Verda Ozer, foreign policy commentator at the Hurriyet newspaper, said the sudden progress was due to “the changing dynamics in the region and the new balance of power”. “The gas dispute with Russia and joint energy projects that could be halted forced Ankara to seek alternatives,” she wrote Friday.
‘Tangible progress’ -
According to Israeli officials, the start of talks on gas exports to Turkey is a one of the key points in the plan for a deal on normalizing ties. Israel will also compensate victims of the 2010 raid on the Mavi Marmara ship that left 10 activists dead, but Turkey will drop all legal proceedings over the issue, according to Israel. Meanwhile, Turkey will prevent senior Hamas operative Salah Aruri from entering its territory. The reconciliation is not yet a done deal. A senior Turkish official said Friday the two sides had not signed an agreement but were nearing a final framework. “There is tangible, positive progress,” said the official.
Relations were damaged but never entirely broken. Trade doubled in the period from 2009 to 2014, while Israeli tourists are again returning to Turkey. The reconciliation will also please the European Union, NATO and above all the United States, which in 2013 brokered an Israeli apology for the Mavi Marmara incident but not a final deal. Pierini said that in 2016 Turkey could also be seeking “good news” on ending the four-decades division of Cyprus and the dispute with Armenia over whether Ottoman-era killings constituted genocide.