Turkey and Israel will once again enjoy full diplomatic relations, as their respective heads of government, Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Yair Lapid, have agreed by telephone. The note from the Israeli government announces the return, shortly, of consuls general and ambassadors - to Ankara and Tel-Aviv - after a lapse of four years.
The Turkish-Israeli thaw has been underway for several months, facilitated by the absence of Beniamin Netanyahu, evicted from the Israeli executive just over a year ago. The proximity of new and uncertain elections in Israel has led both parties to press the accelerator.
Relations between the two countries hit rock bottom in 2010, following the assault by Israeli special forces on the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish ship that intended to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza. Ten Turkish activists perished at the hands of said command, when the ship - approached from helicopters - was still in international waters.
However, the climate had been rarefied since Erdogan's noisy condemnation of the Israeli military operation in Gaza, between 2008 and 2009, which included a live blow to President Shimon Peres at the Davos Forum that winter. Shortly afterward, Turkey stopped purchasing Israeli weapons - for which it had been the best customer - and closed its airspace to the Israeli Air Force, which had been using it for decades of training.
The last withdrawal of ambassadors occurred in 2018, following the killing of sixty Palestinians who were protesting on the Gaza border against the transfer of the US embassy to Jerusalem. Erdogan described that action by the Israeli army snipers as "genocide" and removed the ambassador from him, obtaining the same response from Israel.
The climate began to change after Netanyahu was ousted as prime minister last year. Only one excuse was missing, and this was provided on a platter by an Israeli tourist couple arrested in November while photographing the private residence of the Erdogan family from a television tower. They were accused of espionage, but the intervention of Erdogan himself, after a telephone conversation with the new Israeli president, facilitated his release.
Then, last March, Isaac Herzog visited Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Ankara, the first by an Israeli president to Turkey since 2007. Shortly after, their respective foreign ministers exchanged visits (which in the case of Mevlüt Çavusoglu included an excursion to Ramallah).
Finally, this month, Israel has reopened its commercial office in Turkey, which had been closed for three months. "The improvement of relations will contribute to deepening ties between the two peoples, expanding economic, commercial and cultural ties and reinforcing regional stability," Lapid's office said.
The Turkish government, for its part, has specified that this initiative does not mean any change in its support for Palestinian demands.
It should be said that Turkey was the first Muslim country to recognize the state of Israel, shortly after its independence, and has a Sephardic community of about ten thousand people. But it also recognizes Palestine and, with the Islamo-Democratic Justice and Development Party, support for the Palestinian cause has become more explicit, with nods to Hamas.
An uncomfortable situation for several Arab regimes that have abandoned this cause for the sake of improving relations with the Zionist state and who also dislike Recep Tayyip Erdogan's attempts to lead the sentiments of Sunni Islam.
Erdogan, in any case, seems to have reached the conclusion that Turkey does not have many friends, in the current international troubled waters, which make his re-election difficult within ten months, with runaway inflation. Turkey's renewed international prominence was made clear last month, when it played its cards deep to condition the negotiations for Sweden and Finland's accession to NATO.
Tomorrow, Erdogan travels to Lviv to meet with the UN secretary, António Guterres, and the president of Ukraine, Volodimir Zelensky. An active neutrality that does not prevent Turkey from registering record numbers of Russian tourists or giving shelter to Roman Abramovich's fleet of yachts among other Russian tycoons, who have their other favorite destinations in Israel and the Emirates.
The reconciliation between Turkey and Israel comes the same week that the world is awaiting another even more momentous agreement. Namely, the possible relaunch of international supervision of the Iranian nuclear program, with the United States back on board, in exchange for the lifting of sanctions.
