Turkey’s political shift: What it mean to Israel

An Israeli diplomat indicated this week that the Jewish state and Turkey are continuing to make a concerted effort to rebuild the strained relationship that has existed between the former allies under Turkish President Recep Tayip Erdogan, despite the doubts that were cast on the stop-and-go reconciliation process by Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu’s recent resignation announcement.

Israel’s consul general in Istanbul, Shai Cohen, affirmed that normalization talks between Israel and Turkey have seen “advanced momentum.” 

“We hope the reconciliation process won’t be affected by the political shift in Turkey,” Cohen said, Reuters reported.

The two countries have been mired in a longstanding feud since the 2010 Gaza flotilla incident, in which nine Turks were killed in clashes after Turkish militants attacked Israeli commandos who had boarded a ship that was trying to breach the Gaza blockade. But more recently, the Turkish government’s offering of condolences to Israel in the aftermath of the March 2016 suicide bombing in Istanbul, in which three Israeli tourists were killed, was viewed as signaling a shift in Turkey’s outlook on the Jewish state. Additionally, Erdogan’s AKP political party expelled a low-level official, Irem Aktas, for tweeting that she “wished that the wounded Israeli tourists were dead.” 

Yet after the announcement of the impending May 22 resignation of Davutoğlu—who the West views as a more moderate leader than Erdogan—questions arose about the future of the Turkish-Israeli reconciliation effort. Davutoğlu reportedly resigned because he opposes the presidential system that Erdogan wants to implement in order to consolidate his power in lieu of the current Turkish parliamentary system, among other reasons. Israel’s Cohen confirmed that the resumption of negotiations on normalization “will have to wait until the composition of the new Turkish government on May 22.”