JERUSALEM — After the 2010 Mavi Marmara incident and its diplomatic fallout, many debated long and hard whether Israel or Turkey most needed the other. When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered an official apology to Turkey on March 22, another type of debate ensued. Turks presumed that Israel decided that it could not bear the loss of Turkey as an ally, even if a frosty one, and therefore extended the apology. In Israel, meanwhile, the issue became that the Turkish government seemed to be deceiving the public in its statements on the apology. After spending nearly a week in Israel and having conversations with numerous diplomatic sources, the following is what I gathered about the state of Turkish-Israeli relations.
First of all, Israel prefers to have Turkey on its side, but that does not necessarily mean that its survival depends on good relations with the Ankara government. “The past three years have shown us that we don’t necessarily need each other,” an Israeli diplomatic source told Al-Monitor. “We extended our political and diplomatic relationships with Greece, Greek Cyprus, Bulgaria, Romania and Serbia — that is, mainly the Central European countries — and we don’t really feel isolated at all.” Another diplomatic source asserted to Al-Monitor, “The apology was the right thing to do, and we did it. We could have done that before, but the negotiations did not yield results then.”