Since 2010, Israel has made repeated attempts to patch up its alliance with Turkey. Benjamin Netanyahu even telephoned his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to apologize for the Israeli raid on a Turkish flotilla intended to break the blockade on Gaza. Not only did Erdogan decline to reciprocate, but, now as Turkey’s president, he seems bent on making things worse. Burak Bekdil writes:
Since Netanyahu’s apology, Turkey, both governmentally and publicly, has reached peak after peak in exhibiting anti-Semitism unseen before. . . . During Operation Protective Edge in July 2014, Erdogan commented that “Israel had surpassed Hitler in barbarism.” Erdogan . . . has both pragmatic and emotional reasons to challenge Israel publicly, and to maintain Turkey’s “cold war” with Israel. Emotional, because a holy struggle against Israel is a prerequisite for his pro-Hamas Islamism. And pragmatic, because the cold war and his explosive rhetoric around it have yielded a treasure-trove of votes in a country that champions anti-Semitism. The critical parliamentary elections scheduled for June 2015 will most likely be another setting for his new verbal assaults on Israel.
Read more on Gatestone: http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4828/israel-turkey-normalization