Israel — VOICES for REASONVOICES for REASON

President Obama’s March mission to coax an apology from Israel for the 2010 flotilla raid that left eight Turks dead has brought the decrepit state of Turkish-Israeli relations back into the spotlight.

According to the popular narrative, the Israeli decision to confront the boats with maritime commandos was not only unjustified and reprehensible, but also drove a wedge between the two states, ruining a once-cooperative relationship.

The truth, though, is that the relationship was crumbling long before 2010. And not on any fault of the Israelis.

Turkey expert Michael Rubin, of the American Enterprise Institute, argues that the secular, relatively-free Turkey that Israel had come to trust began to disappear as early as 2002, when the Islamist Justice and Development Party won Turkey’s general election. Over the next decade, he writes, Turkey underwent a methodical revolution that transformed it from a staunchly secular state, to an Islamic one:

Gone, and gone permanently, is secular Turkey, a unique Muslim country that straddled East and West and that even maintained a cooperative relationship with Israel. Today Turkey is an Islamic republic whose government saw fit to facilitate the May 31 flotilla raid on Israel’s blockade of Gaza. Turkey is now more aligned to Iran than to the democracies of Europe. Whereas Iran’s Islamic revolution shocked the world with its suddenness in 1979, Turkey’s Islamic revolution has been so slow and deliberate as to pass almost unnoticed. Nevertheless, the Islamic Republic of Turkey is a reality—and a danger.

Since the 2002 election of the Justice and Development Party, Turkey’s increasingly theocratic orientation has expressed itself in the form of antagonism against Israel. One way this has been manifest is in Turkey’s dealings with Israel’s enemies. In addition to aligning itself with Iran, Turkey has effectively endorsed Hamas by inviting its leader Khaled Meshaal to meetings in Ankara in 2006 and then, of course, sponsoring the blockade-challenging flotilla in 2010.

Taking account of these observations, the deterioration of Turkish-Israeli relations has to do with a more consequential factor, which predates the flotilla raid: Turkey’s embrace of a hostile ideology.