“Cautious optimism” — that is how Israeli musician and diplomat Yinon Muallem defines the climate of tension that currently reigns between Israel and Turkey, three years after the bloody clash on the high seas between the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and the Mavi Marmara Turkish ship carrying hundreds of pro-Palestinian activists to Gaza.

The business and tourism sectors in the two countries are waiting for a signal from the nervous pair of leaders who have waged an arm-wrestling match ever since that bitter morning in which nine Turkish activists were killed. Diplomatic ties between Turkey and Israel were downgraded, and the former friendship was replaced by the language of threats and defamation. Israeli tourists, who once thronged Turkish cities in the hundreds of thousands, frequented other countries.

But finally, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — as well as Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan — understood that this estrangement was not to their benefit. Regional reality was stronger than the ego of each of them individually, and of both of them together. The two capital cities declared a truce, although since then things have cooled a bit. Now all the players on the field are standing by for the signal that will move the clock back a few years, to the era of warm relations between the two countries.

Muallem, an Israeli musician who has been living in Istanbul for more than a decade, watched the crisis from the sidelines but never stopped working. Currently, he is releasing a new album. Muallem was not the only one who made an effort to show “business as usual.” The cultural relations between the countries never capitulated to the diplomatic frostiness.