Turkey and Israel could move towards reconciliation within days or weeks, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in an interview aired Tuesday.
Erdogan told PBS’s Charlie Rose that the issue of the amount of compensation Israel will pay the families of the nine Turks killed on the Mavi Marmara in 2010 as they tried to break the blockade of Gaza has been resolved.
He said that the “other step of the negotiations,” was the issue of sending humanitarian aid to Palestinians through Turkey.
“With the completion of that phase we can move towards a process of normalization,” he said. “I think we’re talking about days, weeks.”
In Jerusalem, however, officials – who have heard Turkish leaders talk for the last five months about an imminent agreement – were more skeptical.
“We have yet to hear that this is concluded,” one source said.
Another official pointed out that while Erdogan in the past spoke about the need for Israel to remove the naval blockade of Gaza before there would be a reconciliation, in this interview he only talked about “sending humanitarian aid to Palestinians through Turkey.”
The official said this may indicate that Erdogan is no longer demanding that Israel lift the naval blockade as a condition for resuming full ties, something that would make an agreement easier.
An editorial in Firas Press shows that this news, whether it is true or not, is being received with dismay by Palestinian Arabs.
Seemingly overnight the tone of [Erdogan] changed. Before he was demanding a written pledge in which the Occupying Power would lift the siege on the Gaza Strip, as a prerequisite for the normalization relations with the state of the occupation and the restoration of diplomatic ties...
The remarks of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan proves that he is a man without principles who abandoned his previous demands to break the siege on Gaza, after being hailed by the Palestinian people as their savior and as a "Superman for this day and age," capable of ending the siege and stopping the military machine of Zionism.
Now his words have been proven to be the promises of a clown. He is selling the issue of Gaza for a fistful of dollars and decided to restore relations with the occupation. Are there enough of those dollars to erase the shame that will be attached to the man and throw him into the dustbin of history?