Comments (0)Turkish-Israeli Woes
November 6, 2009Dr. Robert O. Freedman
Special to the Jewish Times
Since the beginning of 2009, Turkish-Israeli relations have seriously deteriorated.
• In January 2009, reacting to the Israeli invasion of Gaza in response to Hamas rocket and mortar fire, Turkish Prime Minister Recip Erdogan publicly stated, “The Jews know well how to kill.”
• Then in mid-October, Turkey cancelled Israeli participation in a multinational military exercise; Erdogan claimed Turks would not tolerate the participation of Israeli pilots who had been involved in the attack on Gaza.
One can point to two causes for this, the first geopolitical and the second related to the growing power of Islamist forces in Turkey.
Geopolitical Realities: Turkey, which had established diplomatic ties with Israel in 1949, had a low-level relationship with Israel until the 1990s. At that time Turkey faced a major insurrection by its Kurdish minority, an insurrection aided and abetted by Syria, then Turkey’s primary enemy. A February 1996 defensive agreement signed between Israel and Turkey squeezed Syria between the two countries, forcing Damascus to divide its forces to protect its northern and its southern borders.
By 1998, the Turkish strategy had proven successful. After mobilizing the Turkish army on Syria’s borders, the Turkish government forced Syria to expel the Kurdish rebel leader, Abdullah Ocalan, and cut its aid to the Kurdish rebellion, a development facilitated in large part by the Turkish-Israeli alignment.
Next comes the Armenian issue. Beginning in the 1990s, Armenian-Americans and other Diaspora Armenians mounted a growing campaign in the U.S. Congress to force Turkey to recognize the role of the Ottoman Empire, Turkey’s predecessor state, in a campaign of genocide against World War I era Armenians in Ottoman territory. Washington’s pro-Turkish lobby sought the pro-Israeli lobby’s help to counterbalance the pressure.
Until recently, that alignment helped prevent the signing of an Armenian genocide resolution by successive U.S. Presidents. The geopolitical ties between Turkey and Israel, in turn, facilitated a major burst of Israeli tourism to Turkey and major arms exports from Israel to Turkey
By this year, however, both geopolitical factors had changed.
• Syria and Turkey had become allies, their border de-mined, travel visas abolished and the two even carrying out joint military exercises.
• Earlier this year the Turks and Armenians signed an agreement to establish diplomatic relations, opened their border to trade and established a joint panel of scholars to investigate the fate of World War I era Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. Neither country’s parliament has ratified the pact and Diaspora Armenians have expressed strong opposition to it, but the accord has sufficed to lower the chances of the Armenian genocide issue getting political resonance in Washington this year.
Rising Turkish Anti-Semitism: With rapprochements with Syria and Armenia, Turkey has less geopolitical need for an alignment with Israel. Still, this does not explain Erdogan’s ugly anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli outbursts. In the 2002 elections, which Erdogan’s AKP Party won, it kept a low Islamic profile in the face of strong secularist forces led by the Turkish Army.
By 2009, the situation had changed. The AKP was re-elected by a wide margin two years ago and secularist forces have been seriously weakened. The Turkish military, bastion of secularism, has been badly damaged by allegations of its involvement in a plot to overthrow the government (as it has done in the past).
In addition, much of the Turkish press was either taken over by the Islamists, or threatened with legal action over such issues as tax evasion.
Given the changed political climate, Erdogan apparently feels free to pursue his Islamist agenda.
Future Ties: If these trends continue, the future of Turkish-Israeli relations looks dim. Israeli tourists have already begun to boycott Turkey; once American Jews are aware of Turkey’s rising tide of anti-Semitism, they may follow. That would damage the already recession-weakened Turkish economy.
While Erdogan may hope to make up for this with increased tourism from the Arab world and Iran, his turn from Israel and the West, his embrace of Middle Eastern authoritarian regimes in Syria and Iran (and Russia), has alarmed many pro-Western Turks. Whether they can reverse this new trend in Turkish foreign policy, however, is a very open question.
Dr. Robert O. Freedman is Peggy Meyerhoff Pearlstone Professor of Political Science Emeritus at Baltimore Hebrew University and is Visiting Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. Among his most recent books are “Israel’s First Fifty Years” and “Contemporary Israel.”