After the Israeli election, when everyone else was heavily criticizing Netanyahu, Turkey was not. In fact it’s silence was almost more deafening than the than the criticism, because it was very strange for Erdogan and his government to be so uncritical of Israel.
Then suddenly we saw Turkey gesturing that it wanted to restore ties with Israel, even reopening a historic temple in Edirne after Israel’s election, the first temple to been opened in Turkey two generations.
And now we see both Israel and Turkey meeting in secret in Rome to continue this discussion:
HAARETZ – After over a year of deep freeze in Israeli-Turkish ties, talks about a reconciliation agreement between the two nations have resumed with a secret meeting between Foreign Minister director general Dore Gold and his Turkish counterpart, Feridun Sinirlioglu.
A senior Israeli official said that Gold secretly left for Rome on Monday to meet Sinirlioglu, who is responsible for the “Israel portfolio” in the Turkish government, and led the Turkish negotiating team in resolving the crisis with Israel.
Gold, considered a close associate of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and recently appointed director general of the foreign ministry, did not makes his plans known to either National Security Advisor Yossi Cohen, nor the PMO’s special envoy to Turkey, Joseph Ciechanover, who has handled ties with Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government for five years, and kept lines of communication open with Sinirlioglu.
Cohen and Ciechanover, who compiled the draft agreement in Febuary 2014, learned about the meeting between Gold and the Turkish official after the fact. Gold’s predecessor, Nissim Ben-Sheetrit, was also a member of the negotiating team with Turkey. The senior Israeli official, who asked to remain nameless due to the sensitivity of the issue, noted that before Gold left for Rome, there was no official discussion on the status of negotiations with Turkey. Foreign Ministry spokesman Emanuel Nachshon refused to comment.
The meeting in Rome took place just weeks after the parliamentary elections in which Erdogan’s party failed to attain a majority that would allow it to continue altering the constitution. The election even forced Erdogan to form a governing coalition with a smaller party.
We’ve written in the past that if Turkey is going to have a voice in trying to solve the ‘palestinian problem’, they will need to be on good terms with Israel. Since the people of Israel spoke so strongly in the last election, Turkey seems to have figured out that it will not get a more ‘palestinian friendly’ government as they were no doubt hoping, and that they must start now at trying to mend fences.