Israel’s defense minister said that a daylong visit to Turkey had helped end an ugly diplomatic feud, but analysts expressed skepticism that the trip would ease tensions rising since Israel’s Gaza war.
Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak told reporters on Sunday that the countries had moved beyond a disagreement that erupted after Israel’s deputy foreign minister deliberately humiliated the Turkish ambassador to express anger over an anti-Israeli show on Turkish TV.
Israel apologized, and Barak said at a joint news conference with Turkey’s defense minister that, “I believe it was a mistake, and the right step was taken according to the norms of diplomacy.”
“It is appropriate that all the ups and downs in our relationship over the years should be solved and put behind us,” Barak said.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said he was satisfied with Barak’s description of the humiliation as a mistake and said Turkey would not pursue the issue further.
Turkish Defense Minister Vecdi Gonul did not address the diplomatic spat directly and said the two countries had common interests but delivered an assessment of the relationship that Israeli analysts saw as lukewarm at best.
“We are strategic allies as long as our interests force us to do so,” said the minister, who is not a fluent English speaker. “We are living in the same area. Although we don’t have common borders, we have the same interests.”
Turkish defense ministry officials could not be reached for comment on the his choice of words. But Israeli analysts described the remark as evidence that relations were not back to what they were.
“The honeymoon days of the ’90s are over and will not return,” said defense analyst Alon Ben-David, reporting from Ankara for Israel’s Channel 10 TV.
Turkish analysts said they doubted that Turkey was prepared to back away from its harsh criticism of Israel’s offensive in Gaza a year ago, a conflict that threatened the military and economic alliance between the two countries.
“It is not possible for relations to return to the warm level they were at up until recently,” said Ali Tekin, an assistant professor of international relations at Ankara’s Bilkent University.
Dogu Ergil, a former political science professor at Ankara University and a columnist for Zaman newspaper, said neither country was ready to break off ties but Turkey wanted to keep relations at a low profile.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
RSS