Turkey-Israel relations continue to degrade
September 7, 2011Israeli business site Globes reports that Turkey momentarily severed commercial relations with Israel yesterday, before issuing a clarification limiting the ban to military ties and to state sponsored relations, allowing commercial activities between private companies to remain. This was on the heels of the Turkish announcement of a presidential visit to Egypt to secure a new military agreement, and a proposal that Prime Minister Erdogan would use the occasion to break the Israeli embargo and personally visit Gaza via the Egyptian border crossing.
This more active and aggressive foreign policy might be appealing to the Turkish electorate, but Erdogan is boxing his nation in with hostile neighbors – a decades long cold war with Greece to the west, what is fast becoming a similar situation with Israel to the south, and a restive Kurdish population to the east. At the same time, he is courting potential discord with the European Union over Cyprus (an EU member that is set to ascend to the EU presidency soon). Although Turks claim that they are not turning away from the West, soon enough they may have no more friends there.
[...] Yesterday, we wrote that Turkey was risking the creation of another cold war with Israel not dissimilar from the one it has been engaged in with Greece. But, the Israelis will not back down, and this war could easily become very hot, very fast. The decline in Turkish/Israeli relations could end up being the most destabilizing event in the Middle East in decades. Advertisement LD_AddCustomAttr("AdOpt", "1"); LD_AddCustomAttr("Origin", "other"); LD_AddCustomAttr("theme_bg", "ffffff"); LD_AddCustomAttr("theme_text", "61636a"); LD_AddCustomAttr("theme_link", "36769c"); LD_AddCustomAttr("theme_border", "dddddd"); LD_AddCustomAttr("theme_url", "399cc6"); LD_AddCustomAttr("LangId", "1"); LD_AddCustomAttr("Autotag", "religion"); LD_AddCustomAttr("Autotag", "politics"); LD_AddCustomAttr("Tag", "energy-geopolitics"); LD_AddCustomAttr("Tag", "israel"); LD_AddCustomAttr("Tag", "strategic-geography"); LD_AddCustomAttr("Tag", "turkey"); LD_AddCustomAttr("Tag", "energy-geopolitics"); LD_AddCustomAttr("Tag", "israel"); LD_AddCustomAttr("Tag", "turkey"); LD_AddSlot("LD_ROS_300-WEB"); LD_GetBids(); Share this:PrintEmailTwitterFacebookStumbleUponLinkedInDiggRedditLike this:LikeBe the first to like this post. [...]