Yesterday, the Turkish media was mulling over Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's efforts to downplay his harsh wartime criticism of Israel.
This is not to claim that his tone was undeservedly tough, but just as Israel has to do something to undo the harm of its unnecessarily destructive occupation of Gaza, the prime minister should have felt the urge to return to the normal flow of things in international relations. For the time being, Erdoğan exempted the Israeli nation from his rebuke and said he is angry only at Israel's leaders. Well, we know that the 82 percent of the nation which escaped Erdogan's reprimand was supportive of the operation to the final minute. As I am not a political figure and do not carry the load of having to be politically correct, let me underline that whatever I wrote about Israel during that war of denigration, deprivation and provocation, I wrote about the entirety of Israel, including the peace-loving Israelis who kept silent.
Erdoğan was understandably angry at seeing the Nobel Peace Prize escaping from his reach, along with seeing the huge amount of effort Turkey put into indirect negotiations between Syrian and Israeli teams being frittered away. And that came just when the expectations of direct negotiations reached their zenith -- so similar to Turkish wedding-night fights! And just like the wedding fights, this one also has to get back on the road that it was on before.
Yesterday, the Milliyet daily published an interview with retired diplomat Faruk Loğoğlu and an interesting news item about Turkey's possible role in Syrian-Israeli and Palestinian-Israeli negotiations. Loğoğlu's analysis was shaped by his worldview, just as he claims the Justice and Development Party's (AK Party) worldview is shaping the foreign policy of the government. But an analyst should have this luxury. I have to admit that Loğoğlu's analysis was "advisory" rather than "demonizing." In that sense, it is worth seeing what it had to say. Loğoğlu is hopeful that our "very clever" prime minister will "get back on course" and will get back on the diplomatic path he was on before.
The new item that appeared in Milliyet claimed that Turkey has lost its potential to become an unbiased mediator between Israel and Palestine, more specifically Israel and Hamas. The Milliyet correspondent spoke to political scientist Hillel Frisch of Israel's BESA Center for Strategic Studies and University of Michigan Professor Juan Cole. Both the analysts claim that Turkey may still be able to continue to mediate between Syria and Israel, but won't be able to do so when it comes to mediating between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Cole underlined that even if Israel decides to speak to Hamas, it will choose Egypt over Turkey as a mediator. For both observers, Turkey's "biased" stance on Hamas disqualifies it as a mediator in the eyes of Israel.
Loğoğlu's analysis matches this view and shares its main weakness. Both give Israel the upper hand in deciding with whom to work when it comes to peacemaking. But the experience in Syrian-Israeli negotiations showed that it is not one of the sides that decide about the identity of the mediator. If it was left to Israel, it would most probably opt for the US and since the US and Syria don't want to speak to each other, the negotiations would fail from the very beginning. It is understandable for an Israeli academician who works at one of the nationalist institutions of Israel to look at world affairs from the subjective and unilateral point of view of Israel. Let it be known that if one day Hamas and Israel speak to each other, it won't be by the mediation of any country that Israel, or Hamas chooses, but of a country that both have reservations about. That could be Turkey, or another country.
It should also be kept in mind that mediating between Israel and Hamas is not Turkey's priority. Turkey is trying to mediate between Hamas and Fatah first, and the Arab regimes that have different positions with regard to the two. Furthermore, Turkey is not trying to be the sole mediator in this endeavor. It has high regard and respect for Egypt's hand in reaching both sides. Turkey hopes to be a complementary force to Egypt's efforts -- complementary in the sense that it can balance Egypt's pro-Fatah bias and it can convince the Arab countries that do not want to work with Egypt to work with the Egypt-Turkey pairing.
Even if we give Israel the authority to decide with whom to work, we should understand that the kind of Israeli leadership that will feel ready to speak to Hamas will be ready to forget about Turkey's "Hamas bias" and will even feel indebted to a Turkey that has convinced Hamas to come to a universally acceptable, recognizable, communicable position.
I mean, if it ever happens.
