When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan on March 22 to offer an apology for the killing of nine civilian Turks on the Gaza Flotilla of 2010, he certainly took an unexpected step. Because many observers, both in Israel and Turkey, were long convinced that as long as these two leaders stayed in power, no reconciliation would ever come.

Personally speaking, I clearly observed the Israeli side of this skepticism among the dozens of Israeli statesmen, academics or journalists I have talked to in the past three years. Many of them looked convinced that Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) were too “Islamist” to be friendly or even pragmatic towards Israel. Even if Israel offered an apology for the deaths of Turkish civillians, a former Israeli diplomat once explained to me, he and his colleagues do not believe that Turkey would restore good relations with the Jewish state because of “the AKP ideology.” This ideology, he seemed to believe, necessitates that Israel, sooner or later, must the wiped out and the whole historical Palestine should be restored to Muslim rule.

The more I conversed with Israelis, in meetings in the West or Israel, the more I noticed the strength of this deep-seated suspicion towards  Islamism. Many seemed convinced that this is a much less flexible and adaptable ideology than Israel's older foes — such as Arab nationalism and "anti-colonial" communism — and thus the Jewish state had to stand firmly against it.

This categorical alarmism about Islamism is probably also the main reason why many Israelis see the Arab Revolutions — in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and hopefully Syria — in a more negative light than the proponents of democracy in the Middle East. These revolutions are replacing secular dictatorships with elected Islamists, and many Israelis, who might be sympathetic to democratization in principle, seem to prefer the old order masters out of distaste with the new winners.