The only public response heard in Israel to the results of the Turkish elections came from the mouth of former President Shimon Peres at the Herzliya Conference. On June 8, a day after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's party suffered a defeat at the ballot box, Peres said, “I am happy about what happened in Turkey — Erdogan wanted to turn Turkey into Iran, and there is no room for two Irans in the Middle East. The results of the Turkish elections show a positive trend for Israel and the Middle East.”
Peres has a very old account to settle with the Turkish leader, ever since Erdogan sparred with him at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2009. That was the incident that heralded the beginning of the crisis in the relations between the two states, which reached its height in the Marmara flotilla raid a year later in May 2010. In the violent confrontation that erupted on the flotilla that was on its way to violate the blockade on the Gaza Strip, Israeli soldiers killed 10 Turkish citizens.
The anti-Israeli rage that characterized all election campaigns conducted by Erdogan subsequent to the flotilla confrontation was practically absent in the recent campaign. In this election, the president’s party lost the absolute majority of the vote that it had enjoyed in the Ankara parliament since 2002. However, during the last days of the campaign, Erdogan did make one flagrant anti-Semitic comment: Since The New York Times had adopted a critical stance against him, the Turkish president accused the Jews of funding the newspaper, and concluded his words with cackling laughter.
Erdogan does not hide his longing for a return to the Ottoman Empire legacy. In a statement made a few weeks before The New York Times incident, Erdogan expressed his sorrow that Turkey lost its foothold in Jerusalem when the British routed the Ottomans in World War I. Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, Erdogan’s follower and right-hand man, hurried to declare at an election rally that Jerusalem does not belong to Israel at all, but to Islam.
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