We will not howl with the wolves. Pack behavior never honors human reason. The swift and massive condemnation of Israel by the international community—obscuring the circumstances of its reaction—must ultimately cast doubt on the good faith of some accusers: the occasion was, it seems, as perfect as it was rare, to exert pressure on the Hebrew state to obtain a revival of the peace process with the Palestinians. This is, apparently, high politics.
However, there is another lesson from these tragic events: the singular behavior of the Turkish government and its Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan. While openly supporting the IHH association, widely suspected of links with Hamas, the Ankara authorities tint their overbidding with outraged nationalism. This marks the resounding return of the Sublime Porte and its tortuous diplomacy. In a modern and Islamized version: the organization seen as “terrorist” by the European Union would no longer be so for Erdogan. The very term “freedom” flotilla fits poorly with the political philosophy of Gaza’s Islamist leaders. After all, Hezbollah arms a supposedly Lebanese “resistance” and the former Stasi informed a Germany called “democratic”. Interviewed this week by France 24, Deniz Ünal, a secular Turkish sociologist and member of the CEPII prospective club, expressed surprise at having “never seen so many headscarves and beards at a public demonstration in Istanbul.” Brussels’ Europe will no doubt applaud.
Isn’t the AKP’s ruling leader defending “his dear friend,” President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, despite rigged presidential elections and violence against thousands of young Iranians whose rebellion is bloodily repressed by the regime of the mullahs? Is he not also seeking to torpedo, through a joint initiative with Brazil, UN attempts to impose new sanctions on an Islamic Republic of Iran obsessed with acquiring nuclear weapons?
A vindictive diplomacy that hardly concerns itself, like armed incursions into northern Iraq, with historical precautions: evidenced by recent Turkish injunctions to Lebanese authorities, a first since the Cedar Country’s independence in 1943, not to send official representatives to the annual commemorative ceremonies of the Armenian genocide on April 24 in the suburbs of Beirut.
However, the strategic partnership with Israel vividly illustrates Turkish ambiguity: initiated in the mid-1990s when Ankara was pursuing possible benefits from the Oslo Process, still deemed “inevitable” by Turkish diplomats on the eve of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s arrival, military relations between the two countries developed under President Demirel, despite the weak protests of the Refah Partisi, the precursor of the AKP dissolved in 1998. They were cemented by a free trade agreement signed in 2000. A few months later, in an arrest staged in Kenya with material and human aid from the Mossad—a dowry of inestimable value in the marriage basket—the PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan was captured. Trade between the two has more than tripled in ten years, reaching a volume comparable to that of France with the Hebrew state.
Despite President Abdullah Gül’s declarations—“relations with Israel will never be the same again”—Turkish Defense Minister Vecdi Gönül simultaneously recognized that an ongoing contract, amounting to $183 million and involving the supply to Ankara by the Israeli firm IAI of 10 Heron-type drones, would be completed. According to Dominique Bourra, one of the best specialists in defense industries, Turkey has more to lose than Israel from stopping cooperation: “two-thirds of Turkish trade with Israel, according to him, is based on sensitive military orders: modernization of M-60 tanks for over $600 million; modernization of 300 helicopters for $57 million; contract for fighter jet modernization: $850 million.” “The exchanges don’t stop at simple import-export operations but extend, according to the president of ‘NanoJV’ (https://nanojv.wordpress.com), to alliances for penetrating third-party markets,” such as selling tanks to Colombia. Business as usual.
A final, unexpected consequence of Turkish activism: ordinarily rather stingy in his public appearances, Hezbollah’s Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah intervened twice within 48 hours. His call for establishing a “second freedom flotilla chiefly composed of Lebanese,” if it comes to fruition given the negative resonances of the Palestinian issue in the Cedar Country, betrays a double fear: first, of his regional marginalization by the Sunni power at the risk of seeing the aura acquired in the Arab world after the July 2006 war fade. Secondly, of losing the monopoly on anti-Israeli rhetoric, a patented formula of Iranian Shiism of which the Lebanese militia is the armed wing.
“Yes to cooperation with Israel, but not to the point of alienating the Arabs,” explained renowned Turkish political scientist Dogu Ergil in the early 1990s. Encouraged if not supported by the United States to counter the Shiite arc in the Middle East, the Sublime Porte will undoubtedly strive to perpetuate the first option without risking initiating the second.
