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Senior Israeli ministers to render decision on Turkey’s apology conditions
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has twice withdrawn at the last moment from signing similar agreements in the past year, due to the strong objections of Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, Haaretz also reported, without citing its sources.
Netanyahu must make a decision on the issue by next Wednesday, when the United Nations is set to release its report on the flotilla, Haaretz said. Israel’s jurists recently recommended satisfying Ankara’s demand for an apology to help fend off possible war crimes lawsuits.
Netanyahu has so far voiced only “regret” for the Israeli navy’s killing of nine pro-Palestinian Turks aboard the Mavi Marmara, but Israeli officials say support for a stronger show of contrition is spreading in his government. Spurring the debate has been the imminent publication of a UN report on the seizure, which Israel predicts will mostly vindicate its Gaza blockade strategy, while infuriating the Turks, who have said they would reject any such finding.
Hoping to avoid deepening the crisis, the former allies have been discussing a reconciliation deal, with Turkey insisting it include an Israeli apology. Netanyahu has not publicly responded but some top cabinet colleagues have voiced opposition.
“We are not ready to apologize, as apology, actually, is taking responsibility. You know, our soldiers on the Mavi Marmara were fighting to defend their lives,” Vice Prime Minister Moshe Yaalon told foreign journalists on Thursday.
But other officials said Netanyahu had received legal advice to the effect that apologizing would forestall Turkish bids to prosecute, in international courts, the marines who clashed with activists while boarding the cruise ship on the Mediterranean high seas.
Defense Minister Ehud Barak, the lone center-left figure in Netanyahu’s conservative coalition government, has called for compromise with Turkey “to put things behind us,” citing the spiraling instability of a region where Israel lacks friends.
Asked whether Israel might change tack, Yaalon allowed that apologizing to Turkey “might be a debate” in the government and said his demurral was his personal opinion. “We still have six days” to decide, he said, referring to Israel’s announcement that the inquiry set up by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and chaired by former New Zealand Prime Minister Geoffrey Palmer would publish its findings on July 27.
The exact phrasing of an Israeli apology, should one be forthcoming, would have to be in “language that both sides can live with,” a senior Turkish official told Reuters in Ankara.
The chief foreign policy adviser to Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has, meanwhile, denied a report that said his country aims to normalize relations with Israel “across the board,” saying an Israeli newspaper mischaracterized his comments on the topic.
“The bottom line is that Turkey’s position is the same, and no normalization will happen until and unless Turkey’s three conditions are met,” İbrahim Kalın said in an e-mail sent to The Washington Times on Thursday. In order to normalize relations, Turkey wants Israel to apologize for the killings, compensate the activists’ families and lift its blockade of the Gaza Strip. Haaretz wrote Wednesday that “Turkey intends to normalize its relations with Israel across the board.” It also quoted Kalın as saying “from the return of the [Turkish] ambassador, the renewal of joint military maneuvers, military and civilian cooperation, ministerial visits, to all other areas, relations will return to the way they were before the flotilla incident.”
Calling the report false, Kalın said he has “asked for a correction.”
“The Haaretz piece has completely twisted what I said and put their words into my mouth,” he told The Times.
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