Turkey Stalls on Reconciliation With Israel
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has accepted the Turkish conditions for restoring relations between the two countries, but is Ankara willing to move forward?
The process of reconciliation between Israel and Turkey — which started with a phone call between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Prime Minister Recep Tayyiyp Erdogan on March 22, when Netanyahu offered to meet every demand made by Turkey after the Mavi Marmara affair — has come to a standstill.
Since that phone call, no progress has been made in the normalization process, although its outline had been predetermined and agreed upon in advance. By the end of it, Ankara was supposed to send an ambassador to Israel and accept the credentials of Israel’s ambassador to Turkey. This final fanfare, signifying the end of the process, now seems even more remote than ever.
In the months since the two sides began talking about the compensation that Israel would pay to the families of the Mavi Marmara victims, the media in both countries has focused on discrepencies between the sums that were expected to be paid. Various media outlets reported that the Turkish demands were ten times higher than what Israel had offered. Some gave numbers to support this claim. According to some outlets, Turkey had demanded $100 million, while Israel offered $10 million. Others claimed that Turkey had demanded $60 million, while Israel only offered $6 million.
When I told a senior Turkish official involved in the negotiations how surprised I was that these things were not concluded in advance, before the reconciliation discussion between Netanyahu and Erdogan, he dismissed the differences and emphasized, “An agreement has been reached on everything except for the figure.” According to him, there wasn’t even any need for a further round of talks. It would take just a few phone calls for the parties to reach agreement on the sum, and then they could continue down the path to normalization.
