The election atmosphere that is starting to dominate Israel’s public discourse is having an impact on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s approach to the Turkish arena. For a long time he maintained the vow of silence he imposed upon himself, and intentionally avoided referring to any outspoken comments about him or the State of Israel by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Now it seems as if Netanyahu has decided that continuing this policy of self-restraint could be perceived as weakness by the electorate, and that it gives his political rivals on the right materials with which to attack him.
Netanyahu initially held back when the Turkish president condemned his participation in the Paris anti-terrorism march Jan. 11, asking, “How can you see this individual who carries out state terrorism by massacring 2,500 people in Gaza waving his hand?” In contrast with Netanyahu, Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman quickly reacted to Erdogan’s imagery and demagoguery. Speaking to a gathering of Israeli ambassadors, which took place in Jerusalem on Jan. 14, he called the Turkish president “an anti-Semitic neighborhood bully,” and spoke accusingly of how “the silence of the lambs of cultured Europe, politically correct Europe, toward … Erdogan and his friends, brings us back to the reality of the 1930s.”
It seems as if this aggressive rhetoric ultimately convinced Netanyahu that this time around he would no longer be obliged by protocol. For the first time in public, the prime minister used his meeting with members of the pro-Israel lobby American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) to publicly denounce Erdogan’s comments and disassociate himself from them. Netanyahu even tied the “required” condemnation in with the war on terrorism, emphasizing this by saying, “I think the war against terror will not succeed if it´s founded on hypocrisy.”
It was no coincidence that Netanyahu chose his meeting with AIPAC to respond to Erdogan’s attacks. A senior diplomatic official in Jerusalem told me, “The new Congress that will be sworn in this week in Washington is a lot less friendly to Turkey than any of the other congresses that were elected recently.” The statement implied a threat as well, since on April 24 of this year, Armenians around the world will mark the 100-year anniversary of the “Medz Yeghern” (Great Crime), the genocide they claim the Ottoman Turks committed against the Armenian people.
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