Fast Draw – Israel And Turkey Reach an Agreement

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Arie Egozi

Israel and Turkey have reached an agreement for normalizing their relations. This is definitely a good thing, but the Israeli government has a tendency to run forward much too fast, and here lies the danger.

The agreement includes compensating Turkey for the losses on the deck of the Marmara ship, where the Israeli navy took over the ship making its way towards Gaza.

One issue the agreement doesn’t include, which makes it so problematic: In the past, during the relationship’s golden age, there was multi-layered security cooperation between the two countries. This cooperation included joint maneuvers but mostly Turkish procurement of Israeli military systems. Back then deals were made and more deals were planned but everything stopped with Israel taking over the Marmara.

From past experience I assume there was a strong wish in Israel to renew the offers of procurement to Turkey. True, meanwhile the Turks have upgraded their defense industry greatly, but they still have a need for many systems developed in Israel. And here lies a grave problem.

The agreement serves mostly Arduan, who has found himself in an impossible situation with Moscow – or in fact with Putin.

Running forward with new armament deals is not sure to be wise until we can figure out exactly what lies behind the Turkish willingness to the deal. But Israeli governments sometimes have a tendency of having a short memory and this is where someone responsible must draw a strict line.

I think that no armament deal with Turkey should even be considered until we know that the agreement serves Israel for the long term as well. But more importantly: Until we know for sure that Arduan is distancing himself from Islamic terror in a clear and cut fashion. He should make it clear that he is returning to acting the way a NATO member state should act.

In recent years Arduan has spit in NATO’s – that is, in the US – face each time a problem arose of conflicting interests between his regime and NATO.

So this is the situation and so the Israeli government should not push forward with armament deals and intelligence sharing as it was before.

Will it happen? I’m not sure. Experience proves that Israel’s governments tend to not take into account many elements in complicated situations such as this.