The war between Israel and Hamas forces Erdogan to play the balancing act

2023-10-14 14:00:17
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan during the meeting of the group of his party, the AKP, in Ankara, October 11, 2023. ADEM ALTAN / AFP

It took three days of siege of Gaza by the Israeli army and strikes on the Palestinian enclave for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to raise his voice and denounce the “shameful methods” of the Hebrew State. “Bombarding civilian communities, killing civilians, blocking humanitarian aid and trying to present this as exploits can only be the reflex of an organization and not of a State”affirmed Mr. Erdogan, who usually uses the term « organisation » to qualify the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, classified as terrorist by Ankara and its Western allies. He added, before the elected representatives of his party, Wednesday October 11, in Ankara, that“Israel should not forget that if it behaves like an organization rather than a state, it will end up being treated as such.”

The tone is overall moderate, taking into account the outings to which the strong man of Ankara had ended up getting his interlocutors accustomed to on the Palestinian question. How, in fact, can we not remember Recep Tayyip Erdogan accusing his counterpart, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Jewish State of “keep the spirit of Hitler alive” during the Gaza war in 2014, or condemning Israel for its “state terrorism” and one “genocide” four years later ? And from this striking scene, in the middle of the plenary session of the economic summit in Davos, in January 2009, where we saw the Turkish leader scolding Israeli President Shimon Peres, despite being notoriously pro-Turkish and incidentally Nobel Peace Prize winner, accusing him of “know how to kill people very well” ?

But the situation has changed, taking away the sharpest anger of the Turkish president. Ankara today has great needs from its neighbors and in particular from Israel. Faced with growing diplomatic isolation and dizzying economic difficulties, Recep Tayyip Erdogan began to publicly display his desire for rapprochement with Tel Aviv at the end of 2020. After years of quarrels, invectives and slamming doors, the Turkish president, who has constantly presented himself as a defender of the Palestinian cause, has engaged in a policy of outstretched hands and, thereby, in a difficult balancing act in the region , a bit like he tries to do, sometimes successfully, in Ukraine.

Read also: Article reserved for our subscribers In Turkey, Erdogan, the acrobatic diplomat, put back in the saddle by the war in Ukraine

Gas field

While maintaining close ties with Hamas, Turkey announced, in the summer of 2022, after more than ten years of “freeze”, a complete restoration of its diplomatic relations with Israel and the return of ambassadors to the two countries. A few weeks earlier, Israeli President Isaac Herzog visited Ankara, before then-Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavusoglu visited Israel. Relations between Israeli and Turkish intelligence services had strengthened following revelations of terrorist threats emanating from Iran and targeting Israeli tourists in Turkey. This gesture was welcomed by Yaïr Lapid, then Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs.

You have 46.55% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.