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Daily Briefing:IS TURKEY FIXING TIES WITH ISRAEL? (December 3,2020)

Second parliament of Turkey (Wikipedia)

Table of Contents:

Turkey Opens Secret Channel To Fix Ties With Israel:  Amberin Zaman, Al-Monitor, Nov. 30, 2020

Arabs States Draw Closer To Israel To Counter Defiant Turkey, Iran:  Ariel Ben Solomon, Israel Hayom, Nov. 12, 2020

Turkey: Land of Heimatlos:  Burak Bekdil, BESA, Nov. 24, 2020

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Turkey Opens Secret Channel To Fix Ties With Israel
Amberin Zaman
Al-Monitor, Nov. 30, 2020

The chief of Turkey’s national intelligence service has been holding secret talks with Israeli officials, part of a Turkish-initiated effort to normalize relations, well-placed sources have told Al-Monitor. Speaking to Al-Monitor on condition that they not be identified by name, three sources confirmed that meetings had taken place in recent weeks with Hakan Fidan representing Turkey in at least one of them, but they declined to say where. Governments typically decline to formally comment on intelligence-related issues.One of the sources said, “The traffic [between Turkey and Israel] is continuing,” but he did not elaborate. There has been no ambassador in either country since May 2018, when Turkey showed Israel’s ambassador the door over its bloody attacks on Gaza and Washington’s decision to move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.Fidan is believed to have held several such meetings in the past, to discuss joint security concerns in Syria and Libya among other things, as first reported by Al-Monitor, but the sources said the latest round was specifically aimed at upgrading ties back to ambassador level.

There is mounting worry in Ankara that the incoming Joe Biden administration will be less indulgent of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s bellicosity, which has seen Turkey mount three separate incursions against the Syrian Kurds since 2016, send troops and Syrian mercenaries to Libya and Azerbaijan, and lock horns with Greece in Aegean and eastern Mediterranean waters. The biggest concern is that, unlike President Donald Trump, Biden will not shield Turkey from sanctions over its purchase of Russian S-400 missiles and for Turkish state lender Halkbank’s paramount role in facilitating Iran’s multibillion-dollar illicit oil for gold trade.

“The calculation is that making nice with Israel will win them favor with the Biden team,” said a Western official speaking not for attribution. “It’s like Lucy and the football; it works each time,” he said, referring to a recurring theme in the world-famous cartoon strip “Peanuts.”

Gallia Lindenstrauss, a senior research fellow at the Israeli Institute for National Security Studies, agrees that there’s a window of opportunity for turning the page. “I would think it would be in the interest of both states not to overstate the meaning of the step of bringing the ambassadors back. As relations were not downgraded in 2018, it is from the diplomatic protocol point of view a simple step.”

“Both states can present it as a goodwill step for the coming Biden administration that is likely to be more interested in relaxing tensions between Israel and Turkey than the Trump administration, which didn’t push this agenda at all,” Lindenstrauss added in emailed comments to Al-Monitor. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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Turkey’s Hamas-Supporting Regime Is Seeking to Use Israel Again – Analysis
Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem Post, Dec. 1, 2020

Turkey’s far-right government has hosted Hamas leaders twice this year – and backed claims that “Jerusalem is ours” and that it will “liberate” al-Aqsa Mosque from Israeli control – but now it wants to use Israel to escape its isolation from Washington.

That appears to be the message that has come out of a new report, stating that Turkey’s “national intelligence service has been holding secret talks with Israeli officials,” according to Al-Monitor.

On the one hand, the same Turkish officials have vowed to work with groups like Hamas and bash Israel at every opportunity, with key figures comparing Israel to the Nazis, and echoing extremist Iranian regime rhetoric about Israel. But the Al-Monitor piece claims that Turkey wants to “normalize” relations with Israel. This is the same Ankara regime that threatened to break off relations with Gulf states over normalizing relations.

What changed?

Ankara has been isolated from Washington in recent months. While Turkey was able to control the Trump administration’s foreign policy on Syria and in other areas for years through a carefully orchestrated lobby in Washington, it lost influence as it continued to bash Israel, buy Russia’s S-400 air defense system and threaten the US and its allies.

In 2017, during a Turkish presidential visit to Washington, Turkish security attacked peaceful American protesters. Then Ankara held an American pastor hostage. It harassed US soldiers at airports, and imprisoned a US consular worker. Nevertheless, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan enjoyed a direct line to US President Donald Trump, often berating the US president and ordering him to leave Syria. This led to chaos in Syria and ethnic cleansing between 2018 and 2019.

Ankara’s narrative, often woven in conversations with Trump, was that it could handle Syria and save the US on costs. But the invasion in 2019 where Turkey attacked US partners, and the presence of ISIS officials and al-Qaeda members in Turkish-occupied northern Syria, led the US to wonder if they were getting a bad bargain.

The most pro-Ankara elements in the US State Department, such as Syria and anti-ISIS envoy James Jeffrey, left their position when Trump lost the US election. When Pompeo came to the region in recent months, he avoided Turkey. No more appeasement, no more groveling to Ankara, appeared to be the message.

In the past the US had shared intelligence with Turkey, only to find that Ankara hired Syrian refugees, trained them as religious zealot mercenaries and sent them to hunt down women like Hevrin Khalaf in Syria, an activist who had worked with the US. Christians and Yazidis told US officials they had been ethnically-cleansed by Turkish backed Syrian National Army members.

Then Turkey encouraged a war between Azerbaijan and Armenia and threatened Greece, a fellow NATA ally. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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Arabs States Draw Closer To Israel To Counter Defiant Turkey, Iran
Ariel Ben Solomon
Israel Hayom, Nov. 12, 2020

The decision by three Arab states to make peace with Israel can be credited both to efforts by the White House under US President Donald Trump administration and the recognition by these Sunni states that doing so would bolster their security against ongoing threats from Turkey and Iran.

Iran and its proxies interfere in Arab states while promoting their Shiite revolutionary ideology, while Turkey pushes the Muslim Brotherhood’s Sunni revolutionary ideology throughout the region. For both these countries, the normalization deals struck between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Sudan have been a shock to the system.

“Iran is a tactical enemy for the [Persian] Gulf states because the regime is controlled by Shiite fanatics who want to destroy the Sunni regimes in the Gulf,” Harold Rhode, a former adviser on Islamic affairs in the US Defense Department who was in Iran during the early months of the Islamic Revolution, said.

Israel’s burgeoning alliance with the Gulf Arab states reverses the situation the Jewish state had found itself in during the first few decades of its existence. In its early years, during the successive Arab-Israeli conflicts, it relied on an alliance of non-Arab states, such as Turkey and Iran, as its only regional allies. However, this all began to change when the pro-Western Shah of Iran was overthrown in the Islamic Revolution in 1979, and has increased under the Islamist anti-Israeli policies of Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

According to Rhode, were the Iranian people to topple the current regime, the country would most likely focus its efforts on rebuilding and re-establishing its connections with the world.

The Turkish threat

According to Hay Eytan Cohen Yanarocak, an expert on Turkey at Tel Aviv University’s Moshe Dayan Center as well as the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, Turkey and the Gulf Arab states are engaged in an undeclared proxy war in Libya and the Eastern Mediterranean.

“Almost in every theater, Turkey, Qatar, and Hamas are challenging the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt,” said Yanarocak. “From Turkey’s perspective, Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi lacks legitimacy due to the military takeover from the Muslim Brotherhood.”

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is seen by the Islamist powers as illegitimate for his government’s assassination of slain journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018 at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, added Yanarocak.

“And now, the UAE lacks legitimacy in their eyes because of [the] normalization with Israel,” he asserted. In other words, “in Turkey’s eyes, the Gulf states are not considered ‘kosher’ for leading the Sunnis,” he concluded.

Rhode says that “from the Gulf states’ perspective, Turkey is their long-term strategic enemy because Sunni fundamentalism—today headed by Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan—has been a perennial nemesis throughout Islamic history by assassinating or overthrowing Sunni Arab leaders.

“This is because Erdogan is the de facto leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose goal is to re-establish the Sunni Caliphate and destroy all Sunni leaders who don’t agree with its goals,” said Rhode. “Iran, but even more so Turkey, was certainly a major impetus for the Gulf state deals with Israel.” … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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Turkey: Land of Heimatlos
Burak Bekdil
BESA, Nov. 24, 2020

Turks have many good reasons not to be proud of their country’s current standing in terms of wealth, democracy, civil liberties, and justice. Turkey is a country of 83 million people, excluding 4 million or so Syrian refugees, and its per capita income for 2019 was barely $9,000. Freedom House put Turkey on its “not free” list of countries in its 2020 assessment, a grouping that also contains Afghanistan, Angola, Belarus, Brunei, Chad, Djibouti, Eritrea, Gabon, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Myanmar, North Korea, Nicaragua, Qatar, Rwanda, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen. According to the World Justice Project, Turkey ranks 107 out of 128 countries on rule of law. According to Reporters Without Borders’ press freedom ranking, Turkey is 154th out of 180 countries, scoring worse than Pakistan, Congo, and Bangladesh.

These are gloomy facts and figures that should make any Turkish citizen unhappy about his country. But the feeling among Turkish citizens that they do not even belong to their own country is a different story.

A 19-year-old Turkish student I interviewed in July for an article I wrote for Gatestone Institute told me, on condition of strict anonymity for fear of prosecution: “This is not the country I dreamed of… I don’t feel I belong to my own country anymore. I see no sign of a free life. I will go to Europe for further studies and probably visit Turkey just for holidays.”

New research has found that millions of Turks feel this way. A study by KONDA, a leading Turkish pollster, revealed that 38% of Turks feel like heimatlos, or “strangers in their own country.”

The percentage of Turks who feel like heimatlos varies, of course, depending on their political preferences. Seventy-four percent of Turks/Kurds who vote for a pro-Kurdish party feel they do not belong in Turkey, as do 51% of “modern Turks.”

Strikingly, this feeling is shared by a full third of religious/conservative Turks and even 24% of Turks who vote for President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP).

KONDA’s research also found that most Turks, with the exception of AKP loyalists, do not see a bright future for their children. Seventy-four percent of AKP voters say they expect a bright future, but the percentage is only 44% for supporters of Erdoğan’s de facto partner, the Nationalist Movement Party, and less than 20% for voters of all other parties.

KONDA’s findings are consistent with those of other research on Turkish youth behavior. For instance, SODEV, another pollster, found that 60.5% of youths who support Erdoğan said they would prefer to live in Christian Switzerland even if they had only half the salary they would earn in Muslim Saudi Arabia. SODEV’s study also found that 70.3% of respondents think a talented young person would never be able to get ahead professionally in Turkey without political/bureaucratic connections or nepotism. Only 30% feel they can freely express their opinions on social media. … [To read the full article, click he following LINK – Ed.]
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For Further Reference:

Erdogan Calls For Establishment Of Palestinian State With East Jerusalem As CapitalAMN, Nov. 29, 2020 — Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Sunday that Turkey will continue its struggle to establish a sovereign Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital.

Erdogan’s Policies Push Turkish Jews To Emigrate – Analyst: Ahval,Nov 22 2020 — Ties between Turkey and Israel will persist, despite the policies of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, said Dr. Aykan Erdemir, a former Turkish parliamentarian and senior director of the Turkey Program at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD).

Turkish Gov’t-Backed Charity IHH Cultivated Ties With Palestinian Islamic Jihad group:  Abdullah Bozkurt, Nordic Monitor, Nov. 3, 2020 — A Turkish intelligence-linked jihadist charity group cultivated ties with the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a secret wiretap obtained by Nordic Monitor has revealed.

Israeli General Calls For Closer Cooperation With Egypt Against Turkey:  MEMO, Nov. 10, 2020 — An Israeli general has said that Egypt’s public support for the normalisation agreements with the UAE, Bahrain and Sudan are one of the distinguishing features and benefits of Israel’s partnership with its neighbour in the eastern Mediterranean, Arabi21 has reported.

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