World fury at the May 31 interception led Israel to ease land commerce with the blockaded Palestinian territory and hold fence-mending talks with Turkey, a trade partner and rare Muslim ally. But Israel has resisted Ankara’s demand for an apology. Revising a call on Israelis to shun the country, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Counter-Terrorism Bureau said in a statement that tourists or businesspeople could make do with steering clear of demonstrations as well as “political arguments with the locals.”
“It has been a month and half, there are no demonstrations, the [Turkish] street has pretty much calmed down,” the bureau’s Elkana Har-Nof told Israel Radio. He credited Turkey’s police with keeping order and said there was no specific concern that Israelis there could be terrorist targets: “It’s possible they won’t be so welcome in the discos. ... But the public reception is not within our purview.”
Some 150,000 Israelis had been expected to take summer vacations in Turkey but as many as two-thirds cancelled as the crisis unfolded, tourism officials said. Turkish commercial aviation out of Tel Aviv has been slashed. Israel’s Yedioth Ahronoth daily said restoring tourism was among the issues discussed by Netanyahu’s envoy, Trade and Industry Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, in an unannounced June 30 meeting in Zurich with Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu.
