After Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said publicly last week that he wanted to improve relations with Israel, the Israeli government decided to start a low-profile communication with Turkey to determine whether its intentions were sincere, two Israeli officials told me.
Why does it matter: Relations between Israel and Turkey, once close allies, began to deteriorate in 2008 and entered an ongoing crisis. In 2018, Turkey degraded its diplomatic relations with Israel after unrest around the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
News management: In recent weeks, Turkey has sent ambiguous signals to Israel, either through the press or through third parties, such as the president of Azerbaijan, as Axios first reported.
- Last Friday, Erdoğan told reporters that Turkey maintains relations with Israel through intelligence channels and stressed: “We have some difficulties with the people at the top.”
- The Turkish president said his country could not accept Israel’s policy towards the Palestinians, but added: “Our heart wants us to be able to move our relations with them to a better point.”
- The Israeli government does not know how to read the signals from Turkey, but Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazi has decided to hold a meeting on the subject, according to Erdoğan’s remarks.
- The meeting, which took place on Wednesday at the foreign ministry, was attended by senior officials from the prime minister’s office, the defense ministry and the Mossad.
What’s next: Israeli officials who were briefed on the meeting told me that Ashkenazi had said he would start sending “quiet pillars” to the Turks through several channels to assess how serious Erdogan is about improving relations with Israel.
- Officials said Israel would not show any formal public reaction to Erdogan’s remarks and would try to engage the Turkish government privately.
- A spokesman for the Israeli foreign ministry declined to comment.
The whole picture: Israeli officials believe Erdogan’s new tone is directly linked to the upcoming inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden.
- Erdogan is worried that Biden – who called the Turkish leader “an autocrat” – will take a heavy line on Turkey and that warm-up relations with Israel could score points for him with the new US president.
- Israeli officials say they will be very careful, given their suspicions about Erdoğan’s true intentions. In any case, Israel will not affect its relations with Greece and Cyprus in order to remedy relations with Turkey.
Flashback: Israeli-Turkish relations have deteriorated since the 2008 Gaza war. Contacts were almost completely frozen after the 2010 “Gaza Fleet incident” in which Israeli commanders attacked activists trying to break the Israeli blockade to provide aid to Gaza. .
- Then, President Barack Obama facilitated a trilateral phone call with Netanyahu and Erdogan in 2013 to try to encourage a reconciliation agreement.
- Those talks lasted until 2016, and the eventual agreement was resolved two years later, when a new crisis broke out on the Temple Mount.