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| American Jews and Turkey: allies no more | ||
| 2010-06-11 | ||
The Memorial Day flotilla affair marks an end of Israel's more than 20-year strategic alliance with Turkey, and the resulting support from the pro-Israel lobby in Washington. Barry Jacobs, the American Jewish Committee's former director of strategic studies in the office of government and international affairs, noted Turkey's critical stance toward Israel's 2006 invasion of southern Lebanon to root out Hezbollah terrorists attacking the Jewish state. "This started in 2006 when I remember one Israeli diplomat complained that Turkish support for Hezbollah had 'out-Arabed the Arabs,'" Mr. Jacobs said, adding that Turkey's unconditional support for Hamas since 2007, combined with Jewish discomfort with defending the Turks on the Armenian issue, led to a dampening of support. "The major Jewish organizations decided in 2008 that the question of the Armenian genocide resolution was so sensitive we would no longer take public and private positions to oppose it," Mr. Jacobs said. Abe Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said he thinks the Turks made a strategic decision to break with Israel during the Gaza war. He pointed to a heated exchange in 2009 at the annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, when Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan walked out of a session with Israeli President Shimon Peres, telling him: "When it comes to killing, you know well how to kill." "We saw things deteriorating but it did not surface publicly until Davos," Mr. Foxman said. "Until then, the trade continued, the military continued. It did not happen till the Gaza war. My feeling is that Turkey made a geopolitical decision before, but it needed an excuse to turn so dramatically." Today, far from being an asset for Turkey, the American Jewish community appears to becoming a potent foe of Turkish interests in Washington. On Tuesday for example, the Anti-Defamation League issued a press release calling on the State Department to designate the IHH, the Turkish charity that helped organize the free-Gaza flotilla as a foreign terrorist organization. In Turkey, the IHH has been praised as a group of peace activists and humanitarians. The liberal Jewish organizations J Street and Americans for Peace Now declined to comment on the deterioration of Israeli-Turkish ties in Washington.
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| #1 RENSE > [Israeli Army Radio]ISRAEL THREATENS WAR [again] IFF TURKEY DELIVERS GAZA AID. Act of war agz Israel. and * TOPIX > ISRAEL MADE MISTAKE, BUT WAS RIGHT TO STOP GAZA FLOTILLA. |
| Posted by: JosephMendiola 2010-06-11 22:13 |