generalspeaking

Total Collapse: Israel/Turkey Relations

The writing was on the wall, so to speak, when Turkish Islamism made its inroad into government a decade ago. With the ascension to power of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a rigidly autocratic Islamist who cleverly designed and orchestrated a campaign to delegitimize senior Turkish Armed Forces generals as traitors to the country who had planned to unseat the legally elected government of the Justice and Development Party, he succeeded in removing the only opposition to his rule that could effectively present as a threat to his government.

Where the Turkish military was well known to have removed earlier Islamist-inspired governments plotting to overturn Turkey's Ataturk, secular separation between state and religion, to bring Turkey into the modern era, they failed to succeed on this occasion, if indeed a plot was underway to remove Erdogan and his Islamists. Turkey's senior generals also presented as a threat for their affinity with their Israeli counterparts.

Over the years Prime Minister Erdogan solidified his power base, achieving a majority mandate, and he discreetly began the process to reverse the secular tradition he inherited.

It can hardly be totally surprising that with his background and his strict conservative religious views the long-held relationship between Turkey and Israel would dissolve. In fact, Erdogan set about sundering relations with Israel as soon as he came to power, subtly at first, then with growing assertion, provoking a final break on the pretense that the infamous Mavi Marmara Gaza-blockade-busting travesty gained him.

Erdogan embarked on a process of re-investing Turkey with a gradual integration back into the Muslim-Arab fold of the Middle East, where the Ottoman Empire encompassed the entire geography within its much broader sweep of hegemonic power. Turkey's interest in other emerging Islamist movements expressed itself in moving closer to the Muslim Brotherhood, and to Iran. Complementing his manipulated estrangement from Israel.

Certainly maintaining friendly relations with a Jewish state would be rather incompatible with the new direction Turkey was taking, and it made no sense to view Hamas as a respectable Islamic entity with admirable values, while continuing strategic alliances with Israel, in trade, diplomacy and defence. But the real fuel to the fire of Turkey's denunciation of Israel as an implacable thorn in the side of Islam in the Middle East was Erdogan's own inherent anti-Semitism.


A man who despises Jews and everything about Judaism, inclusive of its State, could hardly be expected to forge ahead with a renewed vigour to complete a reconciliation agreement between the two countries. Erdogan has, just like the Palestinian Authority, put forward one demand after another that Israel must acquiesce to before he could consider re-establishing relations. And finally, like the PA, in its refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish state, Erdogan demanded Israel lift the blockade of Gaza.

When he knows very well that to do so would spell the death knell of the country at the armed and determined hands of an Islamist group whose core principle is to be the means by which Israel is destroyed. Another facet of the method used far more subtly by the West Bank PA, insisting on right of return for Palestinian "refugees" to Israel, thereby diminishing its Jewish character and overwhelming the Jewish presence by an Arab renaissance to dissolve the state into a Palestinian one.

Israel's fond hope to regain the support and loyalty of a large and influential Muslim country -- in a geography full of hostile Islamic ill-wishers -- a condition which had prevailed for decades, has been dashed. Yet another reality in the Middle East, an agglomeration of countries comprised of tribal adversities and sectarian hatreds, political intrigues and social collapses, in one giant dysfunctional geography.

Labels: Crisis Politics, Islamism, Israel, Security, Turkey

posted by Pieface @ Saturday, February 15, 2014