![\"Turkish-drone\"](\"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/03\/Turkish-drone.jpg\")
<\/p>\nIsraeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu granted the Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan a face-saver for ending their three-year rift out of willingness to crown US President Barack Obama\u2019s three-day visit with an impressive diplomatic breakthrough. He swallowed Israel and its army\u2019s pride and, at the airport, with Obama looking on, picked up the phone to Erdogan and apologized for the killing by Israeli soldiers of nine Turkish pro-Palestinian activists in 2010 aboard the Mavi Marmara, which was leading a flotilla bound on busting the Israeli blockade of the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The crowing comment by Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu – \u201cTurkey\u2019s basic demands have been met; we got what we wanted\u201d \u2013 was out of place, spiteful and ill-mannered.<\/p>\n
He knows perfectly well that for the past year, amid a constant stream of ranting abuse from Ankara, Israel has been quietly responding to Turkey\u2019s desperate need for cooperation in four essential fields, which are disclosed here by\u00a0DEBKAfile:
\n1. The Turkish armed forces are heavily dependent on Israeli military technologies from the long years of the close alliance between the two countries, which Ankara cut short. This dependence applies most particularly to its drones, the backbone of today\u2019s modern armies. It is also holding up the huge transaction for the sale of American Boeing Awacs electronic warning airplanes to Turkey.<\/p>\n
Boeing was unable to deliver the aircraft without Jerusalem\u2019s consent, because a key component, the early warning systems, is designed in Israel. This consent has been withheld in the face of Turkey\u2019s urgent need and the US aviation firm\u2019s impatience to consummate the deal.<\/p>\n
Turkey is in need of those planes – not just to monitor events in neighboring wartorn Syria, but to complete its air defense lineup against Iranian ballistic missiles. Without the AWACs, the advanced FBX-radar system the US has stationed at the Turkish Kurecik air base is only partly operational. The Kurecik battery is linked to its equivalent at a US base in the Israeli Negev, a fact which Ankara chooses to conceal.<\/p>\n
2. \u00a0In view of the turmoil in Syria, the bulk of Turkey\u2019s exports destined for the Persian Gulf and points farther east have been diverted to the Israeli ports of Haifa and Ashdod, whereas just a year ago, they went through Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.<\/p>\n
Since no end is seen to the Syrian conflict and the closure of the Turkish-Syrian border, more and more export traffic from Turkey is making its way through Haifa port and thence by rail across Israel to Jordan. \u00a0Turkish goods bound for destinations in Europe and the US are diverted to Israeli ports too as Egyptian ports are made increasingly dysfunctional by that country\u2019s economic crisis..
\n3. In the first year of the Syrian uprising, when Davutoglu was still a frequent traveler to Damascus for talks with Bashar Assad, Ankara entertained high hopes of becoming a major player for resolving the Syrian debacle.\u00a0 But he also sought to strike a deal with the Lebanese Hizballah, Assad\u2019s ally,\u00a0for obstructing Israeli gas and oil exploration in the eastern Mediterranean
\nThree years on, Turkish leaders have woken up to the realization that they had better hurry up and jump aboard the US-backed Israeli energy bandwagon or else they will miss out on an outstanding and lucrative economic development, namely, the forthcoming opening up of a Mediterranean gas exporting route to Europe.<\/p>\n
4. Turkey, Israel and Jordan are all in the same boat as targets for the approaching large-scale use of Syria\u2019s chemical and biological weapons.
\nThis topic was high on the agenda of President Obama\u2019s talks with Jordan\u2019s King Hussein Friday, March 21, in Amman, after he had explored the subject with Israel\u2019s prime minister in Jerusalem.
\nObama presented them with his plan to consolidate into a single US-led Turkish-Israeli-Jordan HQ the separate commands established six months ago in each of those countries to combat the use of unconventional weapons.
\nThis unified command would stand ready to launch units of the four armies into coordinated land and air action inside Syria upon a signal from Washington.
\nThe US president used his visits to Jerusalem and Amman to tie up the ends of this contingency plan with Netanyahu and Abdullah, while Secretary of State John Kerry got together with Erdogan in Ankara.<\/p>\n
However, this four-way military effort to combat the Syrian chemical threat could not have taken off with Ankara and Jerusalem not on speaking terms.
\nThis had been going on for three years, ever since Erdogan suspended military ties with Israel and downgraded diplomatic relations pending an Israeli apology for the Marmara incident, compensation for the victims and the lifting of its naval blockade on Gaza.<\/p>\n
The Turkish prime minister insisted on the Israeli prime minister paying obeisance to Turkish national honor. And finally Netanyahu relented. But Israel stood its ground on the last condition; a UN probe had pronounced the Israeli blockade legal and legitimate although its raid on the Turkish ship was deemed \u201cexcessive.\u201d So the blockade remains \u00a0in place and, indeed, Friday, March 23, Israel\u2019s new defense minister, Moshe Yaalon, tightened it by restricting the Gaza offshore areas open to Palestinian Mediterranean fishermen.<\/p>\n
This was punishment for the four-rocket attack staged from Gaza on the Israeli town of Sderot Thursday, the second day of President Obama\u2019s visit to Israel.
\nDEBKAfile\u2019s military sources comment that the new defense minister may have also been directing a reproach at the prime minister for apologizing to Turkey and admitting to \u201coperational errors,\u201d thereby casting aspersions on the professionalism of the Israel Navy\u2019s Shayetet 13 commando unit and its legitimate action in defense of Israel\u2019s legal Gaza blockade<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu granted the Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan a face-saver for ending their three-year rift out of willingness to crown US President Barack Obama\u2019s three-day visit with an impressive diplomatic breakthrough. He swallowed Israel and its army\u2019s pride and, at the airport, with Obama looking on, picked up the phone to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":68828,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[148],"tags":[8267,3803],"class_list":["post-68827","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-israel","tag-drones","tag-netanyahu"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68827","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68827"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68827\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/68828"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68827"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68827"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68827"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}