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Gazas waves will crash on Turkeys shore
If the flotilla incident turns Turks against Israel and towards the east, it should fill us with fear for the future
David Aaronovitch From Times Online June 3, 2010
Somewhere, in some coastal briefing room, some Israeli officer must have told his colleagues of his plan for having commandos slide slowly, one at a time, on to the deck of a ship partially peopled as Israeli sources had already warned by fanatics who welcomed victory or martyrdom without discrimination. And somehow intellects suspended they must have agreed to what the novelist David Grossman, writing in the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, described as the insane operation that left ten flotillistas dead.
If only (and it would be bad enough) the harm done was limited to the families of the killed and the bodies of the injured. And if only the question didnt matter so much, so disproportionately, to take a vogue word, to so many people. Gaza and Israel are small places, the annual casualties in their various incursions, rocketing and bombings would fill a Darfuri week. I have yet to see a figure given to the Pakistan-Taleban war, but I would think it dwarfs the victims of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
And yet people care more about what happens here, per square inch, than anywhere else outside their own lands or seas. When North Korea decided to send a torpedo into a South Korean corvette, the governments were grave but the campaigners were silent. When the Mavi Marmara was stormed by Israeli troops three nights ago, the carescape lit up with a zillion outraged tweets.
Me, I felt fear. The Marmara, which hosted the clubbings and then the shootings, was a Turkish boat, and it followed that many of the dead would probably be Turks. If so, the reaction in Turkey to this one incident could help to determine all our futures.
For many years, to say that Turkey was an ally of the West was not to claim any great pleasure in the association. Turkey was intermittently run by military juntas, and even civilian governments lived under the perpetual threat of a coup.
With a name like mine the assumption is often made that I must be an Israelophile. In fact I am much more of a Turkey-lover. I can see well the mistakes and crimes committed by Turkish governments over the years, and yet I love the country and have watched with pleasure its evolution from a Republic of Fear to a disputatious democracy that really does, in a way no other country can, span the chasm between worlds. Again, I have no liking for religion in politics, but the Justice and Development Party of the Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has been pragmatic and moderate, though Islamist, since first elected eight years ago.
But there are problems, as the world discovered at Davos last year. On stage with the Israeli President, Shimon Peres, shortly after the rocket war in Gaza that left more than 1,000 Palestinians dead, Mr Erdogan became very angry, accused Mr Peres of lying and stormed off the stage. Not long afterwards there was a troubling sequence of events sparked by the transmission of Turkish TV programmes in which Israelis were shown committing a variety of crimes, including kidnapping Turkish babies.
Such fare is commonplace in Syria and on Hezbollah TV in Lebanon, but seemed ominous screened in Izmir and Kayseri.
In an extraordinary piece of diplomatic cack-handedness the Israeli Foreign Minister invited the Turkish Ambassador in to complain about the shows, pointing out to the Israeli media that he had placed the envoy in a lower seat and banished the Turkish flag. The Turkish media were outraged at the snub and Mr Peres had to apologise. We must learn not to do this again, he said.
Of course, the relatively new-found interest of Muslim Turkey in the humanitarian condition of the Palestinians has its ironies, as Kurds, Armenians and Cypriots could all confirm. But throwing that back in Ankaras face, as though engaging in a debate that can be won on points, would be utterly counter-productive. Far-sighted politicians in the West have long understood the need to have Turkey take its place at the European table, before it sought an alternative and to us less palatable way of expressing its identity.
For the past 20 years the strategy for cementing Turkey into a real alliance of interests and values was to hold out the prospect of EU membership. And at first the question was how to find a way to get rid of the various obstacles to Turkish accession. But gradually, especially in Paris and Berlin, as enlargement lost popularity, the issue became how the obstacles could be used to deny Turkey full entry.
Nicolas Sarkozy famously said that Turkey could not be in Europe because it was in Asia Minor (though, mon cher, Guadeloupe remains a département of France). Britain, Spain and Italy took the contrary view. Only last November David Miliband, then Foreign Secretary, reiterated our strategic desire for Turkey to join the EU.
The Turks have noticed the snubs and Turkey has tired of waiting. More recently there has been talk of neo-Ottomanism of Turkey creating an orientation towards the Orient. This might suggest rapprochement with countries such as Syria and Iran and a weakening of alliances with the West, whereas we have wanted to see a democratic Turkey, leading by example in the region to its east and southeast.
This is high politics, but in democracies high and low meet. Democratic Turkey is a young nation and still a touchy one. Even acknowledging that there was a genocide of Armenians in Turkey in 1915-16 has been enough, until recently, to earn the acknowledger a spell in the Turkish slammer, or a bullet from an ultra-nationalist militant. In such a country a mass movement centred on hostility to Israel could do immense damage. With Gaza such a movement has its potential unifier and, in the events of the Mavi Marmara, it has gained its first Turkish martyrs.
In this, yet again, the issue of Gaza shows its capacity to cause polarisation and violence well beyond the land itself. The wealthy Turkish backers of the first boats are now putting together the money for another flotilla. And what will our clever Israeli commander do then?
The risking of the relationship with Turkey symbolises the impossibility of current Israeli policy towards the strip. This blockade must be lifted and some way of having a dialogue with those who run Gaza must somehow be established. Time to brandish the carrot and to hide the stick. The stick is broken in any case.
Gaza’s waves will crash on Turkey’s shore | David Aaronovitch - Times Online
If the flotilla incident turns Turks against Israel and towards the east, it should fill us with fear for the future
David Aaronovitch From Times Online June 3, 2010
Somewhere, in some coastal briefing room, some Israeli officer must have told his colleagues of his plan for having commandos slide slowly, one at a time, on to the deck of a ship partially peopled as Israeli sources had already warned by fanatics who welcomed victory or martyrdom without discrimination. And somehow intellects suspended they must have agreed to what the novelist David Grossman, writing in the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, described as the insane operation that left ten flotillistas dead.
If only (and it would be bad enough) the harm done was limited to the families of the killed and the bodies of the injured. And if only the question didnt matter so much, so disproportionately, to take a vogue word, to so many people. Gaza and Israel are small places, the annual casualties in their various incursions, rocketing and bombings would fill a Darfuri week. I have yet to see a figure given to the Pakistan-Taleban war, but I would think it dwarfs the victims of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
And yet people care more about what happens here, per square inch, than anywhere else outside their own lands or seas. When North Korea decided to send a torpedo into a South Korean corvette, the governments were grave but the campaigners were silent. When the Mavi Marmara was stormed by Israeli troops three nights ago, the carescape lit up with a zillion outraged tweets.
Me, I felt fear. The Marmara, which hosted the clubbings and then the shootings, was a Turkish boat, and it followed that many of the dead would probably be Turks. If so, the reaction in Turkey to this one incident could help to determine all our futures.
For many years, to say that Turkey was an ally of the West was not to claim any great pleasure in the association. Turkey was intermittently run by military juntas, and even civilian governments lived under the perpetual threat of a coup.
With a name like mine the assumption is often made that I must be an Israelophile. In fact I am much more of a Turkey-lover. I can see well the mistakes and crimes committed by Turkish governments over the years, and yet I love the country and have watched with pleasure its evolution from a Republic of Fear to a disputatious democracy that really does, in a way no other country can, span the chasm between worlds. Again, I have no liking for religion in politics, but the Justice and Development Party of the Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has been pragmatic and moderate, though Islamist, since first elected eight years ago.
But there are problems, as the world discovered at Davos last year. On stage with the Israeli President, Shimon Peres, shortly after the rocket war in Gaza that left more than 1,000 Palestinians dead, Mr Erdogan became very angry, accused Mr Peres of lying and stormed off the stage. Not long afterwards there was a troubling sequence of events sparked by the transmission of Turkish TV programmes in which Israelis were shown committing a variety of crimes, including kidnapping Turkish babies.
Such fare is commonplace in Syria and on Hezbollah TV in Lebanon, but seemed ominous screened in Izmir and Kayseri.
In an extraordinary piece of diplomatic cack-handedness the Israeli Foreign Minister invited the Turkish Ambassador in to complain about the shows, pointing out to the Israeli media that he had placed the envoy in a lower seat and banished the Turkish flag. The Turkish media were outraged at the snub and Mr Peres had to apologise. We must learn not to do this again, he said.
Of course, the relatively new-found interest of Muslim Turkey in the humanitarian condition of the Palestinians has its ironies, as Kurds, Armenians and Cypriots could all confirm. But throwing that back in Ankaras face, as though engaging in a debate that can be won on points, would be utterly counter-productive. Far-sighted politicians in the West have long understood the need to have Turkey take its place at the European table, before it sought an alternative and to us less palatable way of expressing its identity.
For the past 20 years the strategy for cementing Turkey into a real alliance of interests and values was to hold out the prospect of EU membership. And at first the question was how to find a way to get rid of the various obstacles to Turkish accession. But gradually, especially in Paris and Berlin, as enlargement lost popularity, the issue became how the obstacles could be used to deny Turkey full entry.
Nicolas Sarkozy famously said that Turkey could not be in Europe because it was in Asia Minor (though, mon cher, Guadeloupe remains a département of France). Britain, Spain and Italy took the contrary view. Only last November David Miliband, then Foreign Secretary, reiterated our strategic desire for Turkey to join the EU.
The Turks have noticed the snubs and Turkey has tired of waiting. More recently there has been talk of neo-Ottomanism of Turkey creating an orientation towards the Orient. This might suggest rapprochement with countries such as Syria and Iran and a weakening of alliances with the West, whereas we have wanted to see a democratic Turkey, leading by example in the region to its east and southeast.
This is high politics, but in democracies high and low meet. Democratic Turkey is a young nation and still a touchy one. Even acknowledging that there was a genocide of Armenians in Turkey in 1915-16 has been enough, until recently, to earn the acknowledger a spell in the Turkish slammer, or a bullet from an ultra-nationalist militant. In such a country a mass movement centred on hostility to Israel could do immense damage. With Gaza such a movement has its potential unifier and, in the events of the Mavi Marmara, it has gained its first Turkish martyrs.
In this, yet again, the issue of Gaza shows its capacity to cause polarisation and violence well beyond the land itself. The wealthy Turkish backers of the first boats are now putting together the money for another flotilla. And what will our clever Israeli commander do then?
The risking of the relationship with Turkey symbolises the impossibility of current Israeli policy towards the strip. This blockade must be lifted and some way of having a dialogue with those who run Gaza must somehow be established. Time to brandish the carrot and to hide the stick. The stick is broken in any case.
Gaza’s waves will crash on Turkey’s shore | David Aaronovitch - Times Online
