You know this is going to play well in Turkey.
[Israel's Deputy Foreign Minister Danny] Ayalon [(Well known to this blog for his claim that we're getting UN Security Council sanctions on Iran this month)]refused to shake [Turkey's] Ambassador Ahmet Oguz Celikkol's hand when asked to do so by journalists attending the official reprimand at his office, and said in Hebrew that "we just want it to be seen that he is seated below us and that there is only one flag here".A breach is developing between Israel and Turkey. I'm trying to be careful not to overstate it. It is impossible to know how long Erdogan will remain Prime Minister and who will secede him in office. Ayalon is not helping, but the problems are more structural.
Tensions between Turkey and Kurdish separatists have increased dramatically since the US invasion of Iraq. It seemed to me that until late 2007, around the time of the NIE about Iran's nuclear program, that the US was actively working to leave the Kurds of Iraq effectively independent. That policy changed late in Bush's term and Barack Obama inherited and continues a policy of holding Iraq together which means limiting the independent power of the Kurds to the degree possible given the commitments the US had made to them earlier. But there is a sense in which the damage is already done.
A Turkey that is angry at the US has even less patience for Israel or the US project of making sure 5 million Jewish people have a secure majority state in a region of over 200 million people that do not consider it legitimate.
Turkey's foreign policy has historically been devised and implemented by Turkey's military independent and even superior in rank to Turkey's civilian leadership. Turkey's foreign policy has, under Erdogan and his AKP party been coming increasingly under the purview of the civilian leadership. This is a process that is ongoing and possibly still reversible to some degree, but Turkey's voters are less pro-Israel than its generals.
It seems that Turkey's move away from Israel is structural. There will be swings back and forth but by the end, Turkey's foreign policy will reflect that Turkey's voters empathize with the Arabs of Palestine just as strongly or more strongly than US voters empathize with the 5 million Jewish people in Palestine.
