Israel, Turkey exchange diplomatic cold shoulders

Turkey's Erdogan pinpointing the villain

The State of Israel was not among the more than 90 countries that sent a representative to the festive Aug. 27 inauguration ceremony of Turkey’s 12th president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, officially named the most powerful man in the country’s history since the founder of the republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Nor could a message from Jerusalem be found among the many dozens of congratulatory telegrams that arrived in Ankara to mark the event.

Erdogan’s crude attacks on Israel during his campaign coincided with the fighting against Hamas in Gaza. Israel must also have noticed that Turkey completely ignored its own presidential inauguration one month earlier, when Reuven Rivlin took the oath of office July 24.

I can testify that Rivlin is an enthusiastic supporter of mending the relationship between Israel and Turkey (as was his predecessor, former President Shimon Peres). Even in the midst of his presidential campaign, he had no qualms about stating so publicly. While there was somewhat more optimism then about the possibility of improving ties with Turkey, it was still not considered a very popular move.

It is safe to assume that Rivlin would have happily accepted the invitation sent by the Turkish government to the Israeli Embassy in Ankara to send an official representative to the inauguration if he had thought it would provide the momentum to break away from the crisis.

Two days later, Erdogan hosted all the senior diplomats in Turkey at a traditional reception to mark “Victory Day.” He even shook hands with the official Israeli representative and exchanged a few polite words with him. That representative was the charge d’affaires Yossi Levy-Sfari, the most senior Israeli diplomat in Ankara since Erdogan and Ahmet Davutoglu (then foreign minister and now prime minister) downgraded diplomatic relations between the two countries, recalled the Turkish ambassador and other senior embassy officials in Tel Aviv and expelled top Israeli representatives from Ankara.

It was the first time that Erdogan shook hands with an official Israeli representative since the Davos incident in 2009, when he lashed out at then-President Shimon Peres over the killing of Palestinians in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead.

In Jerusalem, the Foreign Ministry expressed a measured degree of satisfaction that Erdogan did not prevent an invitation to the inauguration from being sent to the Israeli mission in Ankara. At the same time, however, the ministry avoided attributing a hidden or symbolic meaning to this nongesture. After all, relations between the two countries reached an unprecedented low following Erdogan’s comparison of Israel to Nazi Germany during Operation Protective Edge.

Diplomatic sources in Israel are frustrated by what they call Turkish ingratitude toward Israel after it allowed the country to provide humanitarian aid to Gaza, despite Erdogan's tongue lashing.

The few Israeli diplomats who remained in Turkey were kept very busy during the fighting in Gaza. They were not only tasked with explaining Israel’s positions — an essentially meaningless exercise in Erdogan’s Turkey — but even more importantly, with helping the Turkish government provide aid to the civilian population in Gaza. At the height of the fighting, Davutoglu announced an “airlift” of humanitarian aid from the Turks to Gaza.

An airlift is a beautiful idea, but as everybody knows, there is no airport in Gaza that can accept such a delivery — or a seaport, for that matter. Sending the aid via Egypt wasn’t an option, either, due to tensions between Cairo and Ankara. As such, the only way that Turkey could provide its emergency aid in the face of what it considered “diabolical Israeli violence” was through Israel itself.

And so, even while Erdogan continued to attack Israel in less than diplomatic language, transport planes from the Turkish air force were granted permission to land at Ben Gurion Airport. These planes carried tons of equipment and supplies intended for the people of Gaza.

According to figures provided by the Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency, Turkey provided thousands of meals to families in Gaza during Ramadan. As the fighting continued, that same agency provided 12 truckloads of medical and sanitation supplies to Gaza in the name of the Turkish people. The trucks passed from Israel to Gaza through the Kerem Shalom border crossing. The coordinator of Israel Defense Forces (IDF) activities in the territories told Al-Monitor that at the request of Turkish representatives in Gaza, these trucks contained “medicine and medical equipment as well as school bags, oil, toothpaste, garbage bags, canned tuna, disposable diapers, women’s sanitary pads, laundry detergent and towelettes.”

The C-130 Hercules transport planes of the Turkish military then flew back from Ben Gurion Airport to Turkey carrying a group of Palestinians from Gaza who had been wounded in the Israeli air raids. Each transportee was carefully selected to receive medical treatment in Turkey. So far, the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem has been working to approve the departure of dozens of injured Gazans and their escorts to Turkey, based on a detailed list provided by the Turks.

The decision to allow Turkey to provide humanitarian aid to Gaza at the height of the campaign should not be taken lightly. It was made despite opposition from those who believed that Erdogan did not deserve such a gesture from Israel while he attacked Israel and its leaders. In the end, it was decided to allow the aid as a gesture of goodwill, with the intention — or perhaps the hope — of improving relations between the two countries in some small way.

But good intentions were not enough. Jerusalem was surprised to read reports and telegrams arriving from Ankara, indicating that Erdogan was not only continuing with his diatribes against the Israeli government, but that Davutoglu also contributed to the vitriol. In his appearances before various forums, Davutoglu described efforts to provide aid to Israel as a Sisyphean task, working against Israel’s fervent opposition. He went on to say that Israel was doing everything it could to make it difficult for Turkey to provide aid to Gaza.

As part of the changes underway in Turkey, Erdogan chose Davutoglu to be his prime minister. Turkish officials involved in the relationship between the two countries estimate that it will be very difficult if not impossible to get back on the track of normalization between the two countries, mainly because Turkey is facing yet another election in 2015 (this one for parliament). Erdogan and Davutoglu, they say, both believe that their anti-Israel approach will win lots of votes.

One person who maintains a certain degree of optimism about the relationship between the two countries is the head of the Israel-Turkey Business Council, Menashe Carmon. In a conversation with Al-Monitor, he said Turkish businessmen tend to avoid politics. This year, trade between the two countries will amount to $5 billion (in 2011 it was $4 billion, and $1.5 billion in 2005), and the only threat he mentioned was the possibility of an economic crisis in Turkey. Furthermore, he emphasized that Turkey is not like Europe in that there are no calls there for a boycott of Israel. Quite the contrary, he pointed out, it is Israelis who are boycotting Turkish products. As a result of Erdogan’s statements and policies, many Israelis canceled their summer vacation reservations in Turkey and workers committees have announced that they will not be purchasing vacation packages there, at least in the foreseeable future.

Turkey will manage without Israeli tourists, who made up just 2% of visitors to the country in 2010. Israel emphasizes, though, that the real culprit in this ongoing crisis is Erdogan, who insists on foregoing any chance he may have had to have a real impact on the fate of the people he calls “his Palestinian brothers.” Had he conducted his affairs differently, he could have really helped the suffering people of Gaza with more than just garbage bags and canned goods.

Read more: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/09/israel-turkey-bilateral-relations-president-gaza-war-airlift.html#ixzz3Cq9YPZNm

Turkey's Geographical Ambition

STRATFOR - Geopolitical Weekly TUESDAY, AUGUST 12, 2014 

By Robert D. Kaplan and Reva Bhalla

At a time when Europe and other parts of the world are governed by forgettable mediocrities, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey's prime minister for a decade now, seethes with ambition. Perhaps the only other leader of a major world nation who emanates such a dynamic force field around him is Russia's Vladimir Putin, with whom the West is also supremely uncomfortable.

Erdogan and Putin are ambitious because they are men who unrepentantly grasp geopolitics. Putin knows that any responsible Russian leader ensures that Russia has buffer zones of some sort in places like Eastern Europe and the Caucasus; Erdogan knows that Turkey must become a substantial power in the Near East in order to give him leverage in Europe. Erdogan's problem is that Turkey's geography between East and West contains as many vulnerabilities as it does benefits. This makes Erdogan at times overreach. But there is a historical and geographical logic to his excesses.

The story begins after World War I.

Because Ottoman Turkey was on the losing side of that war (along with Wilhelmine Germany and Hapsburg Austria), the victorious allies in the Treaty of Sevres of 1920 carved up Turkey and its environs, giving territory and zones of influence to Greece, Armenia, Italy, Britain and France. Turkey's reaction to this humiliation was Kemalism, the philosophy of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (the surname "Ataturk" means "Father of the Turks"), the only undefeated Ottoman general, who would lead a military revolt against the new occupying powers and thus create a sovereign Turkish state throughout the Anatolian heartland. Kemalism willingly ceded away the non-Anatolian parts of the Ottoman Empire but compensated by demanding a uniethnic Turkish state within Anatolia itself. Gone were the "Kurds," for example. They would henceforth be known as "Mountain Turks." Gone, in fact, was the entire multicultural edifice of the Ottoman Empire.

Kemalism not only rejected minorities, it rejected the Arabic script of the Turkish language. Ataturk risked higher illiteracy rates to give the language a Latin script. He abolished the Muslim religious courts and discouraged women from wearing the veil and men from wearing fezzes. Ataturk further recast Turks as Europeans (without giving much thought to whether the Europeans would accept them as such), all in an attempt to reorient Turkey away from the now defunct Ottoman Empire in the Middle East and toward Europe.

Kemalism was a call to arms: the martial Turkish reaction to the Treaty of Sevres, to the same degree that Putin's neo-czarism was the authoritarian reaction to Boris Yeltsin's anarchy of 1990s Russia. For decades the reverence for Ataturk in Turkey went beyond a personality cult: He was more like a stern, benevolent and protective demigod, whose portrait looked down upon every public interior.

The problem was that Ataturk's vision of orienting Turkey so firmly to the West clashed with Turkey's geographic situation, one that straddled both West and East. An adjustment was in order. Turgut Ozal, a religious Turk with Sufi tendencies who was elected prime minister in 1983, provided it.

Ozal's political skill enabled him to gradually wrest control of domestic policy and -- to an impressive degree -- foreign policy away from the staunchly Kemalist Turkish military. Whereas Ataturk and the generations of Turkish officers who followed him thought in terms of a Turkey that was an appendage of Europe, Ozal spoke of a Turkey whose influence stretched from the Aegean to the Great Wall of China. In Ozal's mind, Turkey did not have to choose between East and West. It was geographically enshrined in both and should thus politically embody both worlds. Ozal made Islam publicly respected again in Turkey, even as he enthusiastically supported U.S. President Ronald Reagan during the last phase of the Cold War. By being so pro-American and so adroit in managing the Kemalist establishment, in the West at least Ozal -- more than his predecessors -- was able to get away with being so Islamic.

Ozal used the cultural language of Islam to open the door to an acceptance of the Kurds. Turkey's alienation from Europe following the 1980 military coup d'etat enabled Ozal to develop economic linkages to Turkey's east. He also gradually empowered the devout Muslims of inner Anatolia. Ozal, two decades before Erdogan, saw Turkey as a champion of moderate Islam throughout the Muslim world, defying Ataturk's warning that such a Pan-Islamic policy would sap Turkey's strength and expose the Turks to voracious foreign powers. The term neo-Ottomanism was, in fact, first used in Ozal's last years in power.

Ozal died suddenly in 1993, ushering in a desultory decade of Turkish politics marked by increasing corruption and ineffectuality on the part of Turkey's sleepy secular elite. The stage was set for Erdogan's Islamic followers to win an outright parliamentary majority in 2002. Whereas Ozal came from the center-right Motherland Party, Erdogan came from the more openly Islamist-trending Justice and Development Party, though Erdogan himself and some of his advisers had moderated their views over the years. Of course, there were many permutations in Islamic political thought and politics in Turkey between Ozal and Erdogan, but one thing stands clear: Both Ozal and Erdogan were like two bookends of the period. In any case, unlike any leader today in Europe or the United States, Erdogan actually had a vision similar to Ozal's, a vision that constituted a further distancing from Kemalism.

Rather than Ataturk's emphasis on the military, Erdogan, like Ozal, has stressed the soft power of cultural and economic connections to recreate in a benign and subtle fashion a version of the Ottoman Empire from North Africa to the Iranian plateau and Central Asia. Remember that in the interpretation of one of the West's greatest scholars of Islam, the late Marshall G.S. Hodgson of the University of Chicago, the Islamic faith was originally a merchants' religion, which united followers from oasis to oasis, allowing for ethical dealing. In Islamic history, authentic religious connections across the Middle East and the Indian Ocean world could -- and did -- lead to wholesome business connections and political patronage. Thus is medievalism altogether relevant to the post-modern world.

Erdogan now realizes that projecting Turkey's moderate Muslim power throughout the Middle East is fraught with frustrating complexities. Indeed, it is unclear that Turkey even has the political and military capacity to actualize such a vision. To wit, Turkey may be trying its best to increase trade with its eastern neighbors, but it still does not come close to Turkey's large trade volumes with Europe, now mired in recession. In the Caucasus and Central Asia, Turkey demands influence based on geographic and linguistic affinity. Yet Putin's Russia continues to exert significant influence in the Central Asian states and, through its invasion and subsequent political maneuverings in Georgia, has put Azerbaijan in an extremely uncomfortable position. In Mesopotamia, Turkey's influence is simply unequal to that of far more proximate Iran. In Syria, Erdogan and his foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, thought -- incorrectly, it turns out -- that they could effectively mold a moderate Islamist Sunni opposition to replace President Bashar al Assad's Alawite regime. And while Erdogan has gained points throughout the Islamic world for his rousing opposition to Israel, he has learned that this comes at a price: the warming of relations between Israel and both Greece and the Greek part of Cyprus, which now permits Turkey's adversaries in the Eastern Mediterranean to cooperate in the hydrocarbon field.

The root of the problem is partly geographic. Turkey constitutes a bastion of mountains and plateau, inhabiting the half-island of the Anatolian land bridge between the Balkans and the Middle East. It is plainly not integral to a place like Iraq, for example, in the way that Iran is; and its Turkic language no longer enjoys the benefit of the Arabic script, which might give it more cultural leverage elsewhere in the Levant. But most important, Turkey is itself bedeviled by its own Kurdish population, complicating its attempts to exert leverage in neighboring Middle Eastern states.

Turkey's southeast is demographically dominated by ethnic Kurds, who adjoin vast Kurdish regions in Syria, Iraq and Iran. The ongoing breakup of Syria potentially liberates Kurds there to join with radical Kurds in Anatolia in order to undermine Turkey. The de facto breakup of Iraq has forced Turkey to follow a policy of constructive containment with Iraq's Kurdish north, but that has undermined Turkey's leverage in the rest of Iraq -- thus, in turn, undermining Turkey's attempts to influence Iran. Turkey wants to influence the Middle East, but the problem is that it remains too much a part of the Middle East to extricate itself from the region's complexities.

Erdogan knows that he must partially solve the Kurdish problem at home in order to gain further leverage in the region. He has even mentioned aloud the Arabic word, vilayet, associated with the Ottoman Empire. This word denotes a semi-autonomous province -- a concept that might hold the key for an accommodation with local Kurds but could well reignite his own nationalist rivals within Turkey. Thus, his is a big symbolic step that seeks to fundamentally neutralize the very foundation of Kemalism (with its emphasis on a solidly Turkic Anatolia). But given how he has already emasculated the Turkish military -- something few thought possible a decade ago -- one should be careful about underestimating Erdogan. His sheer ambition is something to behold. While Western elites ineffectually sneer at Putin, Erdogan enthusiastically takes notes when the two of them meet.

Read more: Turkey's Geographical Ambition | Stratfor
Follow us: @stratfor on Twitter | Stratfor on Facebook