Turkey and Israel: Premature Optimism for Normalization
by Burak Bekdil • January 6, 2021 at 5:00 am
It would be childish to believe that the man whose political formation was based on a militant expanse of anti-Zionism as raison d'être was not anti-Israeli, but had merely been under the influence of advisors who no longer hold sway. Erdoğan is anti-Israeli today as he was 40, 30, 20 and 10 years ago.
In August, The Telegraph revealed that Ankara had granted citizenship and passports to "senior operatives of a Hamas terrorist cell" .... Also in August, Erdoğan met in Istanbul with Hamas's senior military leader, Saleh al-Arouri, and senior political leader, Ismail Haniyeh.
These are not blurred memories from distant past.... They follow an ideological pattern of hostility along religious lines. They do not make Erdoğan a reliable partner for peace.
As a matter of fact, none of the reasons why Erdoğan preferred to steer otherwise friendly relations between Turkey and Israel into where they stand today has disappeared. Without their disappearing for good, a reset will remain but a sweet wish.
It has been more than a decade since Turkey and Israel, once strategic partners, broke up badly, with an angry Ankara passionately vowing to isolate Israel internationally. It has also been exactly four years since the two countries decided to give peace a chance once more and appointed ambassadors. They would have to pack up and leave after 17 months of trying to put things back together again.
The decade of animosity between Turkey and Israel, clearly a choice of Turkey's Islamist President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has produced exactly the opposite of what Ankara had hoped would happen: The Abraham Accords produced a landmark opportunity for peace in the Middle East. Israel's former Arab foes have lined up to end hostilities, one after the other, while Turkey, oddly, criticized the establishment of diplomatic ties between the Arab world and Israel, having apparently forgotten that it already had diplomatic relations with Israel since 1949.
