The term “all-inclusive” was popularized by Club Med a generation ago to describe an innovative approach to vacation packaging. For a single fee, guests could enjoy all of the benefits that the facility had to offer. Since then, it has become a generic term, commonly used by Israelis to describe a vacation in one of the many hotels built along the country’s Mediterranean coast. In contemporary Hebrew, “all-inclusive” has come to mean an inexpensive but enjoyable holiday at a Turkish hotel with an all-you-can-eat buffet open round the clock, and — even better — free drinks at the bar, too.
When Turkish Foreign Minister Feridun Sinirlioglu served as his country’s ambassador to Israel in the early 2000s, his goal was to increase the number of Israeli tourists to his country from 200,000 a year to half a million. In the summer of 2008, just a few months before the Davos incident in which then-Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan assailed Israeli President Shimon Peres, the number of Israeli tourists visiting Turkey had already surpassed the target at almost 600,000 that year.
Diplomatic relations between the two countries were downgraded following the Mavi Marmara flotilla incident in 2010, when Israeli troops killed 10 Turks who were trying to break Israel’s siege on the Gaza Strip. Since then, the number of Israeli tourists to Turkey has plummeted to just a few thousand per year.
Israeli tourists sought out “all-inclusive” alternatives nearby, but were repeatedly disappointed. They went on holiday to Greece, Cyprus and Bulgaria, but continued to dream of Turkey. As a result, the Israeli media, which kept close tabs on ups and downs in the negotiations between Jerusalem and Ankara for the normalization of bilateral relations, created what can only be described as an “all-inclusive index.” Every so often, news and current events shows returned to the most popular vacation resorts in Antalya and Bodrum, counted the number of Israelis there, examined the attitudes of service providers toward them and compiled the information into an index of how willing Israelis are to forgive Turkey and turn a new page in their relationship. According to this index, Israelis may be getting ready to forgive Erdogan for his verbal assaults against them because they really miss their old vacation haunts.
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