There’s an old Israeli saying: “A guest passing through sees every problem.” While I don’t know how accurate that expression is, I do know that I could foresee the recent riots in Turkey during my last visit there, just a few months ago. Even then I heard plenty of people — many, many people — who had no qualms about calling Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan a “dictator.” Those same people said that no effort should be spared to bring him down.
Statements like these made a deep impression on me because I was so surprised to hear them. Until just a few months ago, before Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s apology and reconciliation with Erdogan, the average Israeli who followed TV news about Turkey or read about it in the newspaper lived under the impression that Turkey as a whole, or at least the bulk of Turkey, is becoming something like Iran. The overall feeling was that the country spoke with one voice, the resolute voice of Prime Minister Erdogan. Ever since his Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in 2002, Israelis felt that Turkey was undergoing a dramatic policy shift. Local television stations substantiated this. It looked like Turkey was transforming from a tolerant, enlightened, Western nation; ''an island of sanity in the Middle East,'' into something very different and menacing; a country which was doing all it could to draw closer to the Arab League, Iran or the Muslim Brotherhood.