“Turkey and Israel are both vital allies of the United States. We want to see them work together in order to be able to go beyond the rhetoric and begin to take concrete steps to change this relationship,” said new U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry at a news conference in Ankara on Friday [March 1]. Kerry also condemned Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan for his verbal attack two days earlier, when he compared Zionism to fascism and called it a “crime against humanity.” These two sentences by Kerry express the vast distance between hope for rehabilitating the relations with Ankara — and reality.
In the past, I had thought that it would be possible for Israel and Turkey to consider their joint interests and restore their relationship in the near future. The leaders of the two countries, I had reckoned, would be forced to swallow their pride, if only out of Middle Eastern logic. After all, friends are friends, all hell broke loose in the Middle East and this is the time to make up and bury the hatchet.
