The Israel-Turkey Imbroglio
By ROGER COHEN
NYT
NEW YORK — Here’s an intriguing nugget, given Turkey’s recent decision to close its airspace to Israeli military planes: When Israel attacked a covert Syrian nuclear reactor on Sept. 6, 2007, its bombers overflew Turkey.
A former senior U.S. official who was intimately involved in handling the fallout from the raid told me Turkish officials raised the issue with Israel, were invited to discuss the matter, but in the end let it drop.
Those were different times, before Turkish-Israeli ties entered their current poisonous phase.
The biggest injection of poison was administered by Israel’s killing of nine Turkish activists (one of them also a U.S. citizen) on a Gaza aid ship on May 31. This was the immediate catalyst to the airspace exclusion. But well before that, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish prime minister who heads a party of Islamist bent, had hit the (negative) reset button with Israel.
Erdogan was infuriated by Israel’s Gaza offensive of 2008-09, in which about 1,400 Palestinians, and 13 Israelis, were killed.
(More here.)
NYT
NEW YORK — Here’s an intriguing nugget, given Turkey’s recent decision to close its airspace to Israeli military planes: When Israel attacked a covert Syrian nuclear reactor on Sept. 6, 2007, its bombers overflew Turkey.
A former senior U.S. official who was intimately involved in handling the fallout from the raid told me Turkish officials raised the issue with Israel, were invited to discuss the matter, but in the end let it drop.
Those were different times, before Turkish-Israeli ties entered their current poisonous phase.
The biggest injection of poison was administered by Israel’s killing of nine Turkish activists (one of them also a U.S. citizen) on a Gaza aid ship on May 31. This was the immediate catalyst to the airspace exclusion. But well before that, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish prime minister who heads a party of Islamist bent, had hit the (negative) reset button with Israel.
Erdogan was infuriated by Israel’s Gaza offensive of 2008-09, in which about 1,400 Palestinians, and 13 Israelis, were killed.
(More here.)
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