Israel and Turkey End Six-year Stand-off with Deal on Gaza Flotilla Killings

The deal will allow Turkey to build a 200-bed hospital in Gaza and invest in other other infrastructure projects as part of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s policy of casting himself as a champion of the Palestinians. Turkey also agreed to use its influence with Hamas, the Islamist group that controls Gaza, to help recover four Israeli citizens missing in Gaza, an Israeli official said.

Two of them are soldiers who were killed in the 2014 Gaza war and the other two are Israelis who entered the enclave of their own accord and are believed to be in Hamas captivity. Israel recently discovered vast natural gas reserves off its Mediterranean coast and Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, hinted that the deal would lead to a lucrative agreement for Israel to supply Turkey with natural gas.

“I think it’s an important step here to normalise relations on one side,” Mr Netanyahu said in Rome. “It has also immense implications for the Israeli economy – and I use that word advisedly.” The US has been eager to end the rift between its two Middle Eastern allies and President Barack Obama nudged Mr Netanyahu into calling Mr Erdogan from a tent in Ben Gurion airport when the American leader visited Israel in 2013.  Joe Biden, the US vice president, hailed the agreement as a “significant positive security and economic benefits for both countries”.

Turkish officials, eager to sell the agreement to a Turkish public that is generally hostile to Israel, said the deal had the support of the Palestinians because of the economic benefits it could bring to both Gaza and the occupied West Bank.

One Palestinian official dismissed it as “Muslim Brotherhood politics”, with Mr Erdogan trying to use the Palestinians as a shield to ward off criticism from his own Islamist supporters for making a deal with the Jewish state.    

One of Turkey’s original demands for a deal was that Israel ends its blockade of Gaza. Turkey backed away from the demand but appears to have extracted some concessions from Israel over allowing access to Gaza. Turkey was the first major Muslim country to recognize Israel in 1949 and the two cooperated closely for decades even as Israel fought with Muslim Arab nations.

But the relationship soured after the Mavi Marmara flotilla incident in May 2010. A flotilla of six civilian ships crewed by Turkish activists set off from Cyprus towards Gaza despite warnings from the Israeli navy to turn back. In the early hours of May 31, 2010 Israeli naval commandos boarded the Mavi Marmara in international waters. As Israeli forces descended from a helicopter they were attacked by the activists onboard. The commandos opened fire and killed eight Turkish citizens and one Turkish-American.  Mr Erdogan denounced the killing as “state terrorism” and withdrew the Turkish ambassador from Israel and later expelled Israel’s ambassador to Ankara.

Relations began to thaw somewhat in 2013 after Mr Netanyahu agreed to apologise for the killings. The deal received mixed reactions in both Israel and Turkey. The Turkish humanitarian relief organisation IHH, which organised the 2010 flotilla, objected to the agreement because it did not include an end to the Gaza blockade. But the Islamist-leaning newspaper Yeni Safak conceded: “If Palestinians support this work, we can consider it the right thing to do.”

Many Israelis believe the commandos were justified in boarding the flotilla and in using lethal force when they came under attack. Tzahi Hanegbi, an Israeli government minister, defended the decision to pay compensation to the Turkish families. “Had Israelis been killed, the Turks would have been supposed to compensate them,” he told Army Radio.

“Since Turks were killed, we’ll pay compensation to the families who lost their loved ones, and this is a basic part of the culture of dialogue that ultimately leads to mutual agreement. (By Raf Sanchez, Jerusalem Zia Weise, Istanbul - http://www.telegraph.co.uk)