A sandstorm was kicking up at Ben Gurion International midday last Friday, winds bad enough to cancel the departure ceremony for President Obama’s winning trip to Israel. But in a sheet metal trailer on the tarmac, Obama was calming another storm, three years along and finally running out of bluster. In the box with him was his host, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Nentayahu. In Netanyahu’s hand was a cell phone. And on the other end of the line was the prime minister of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. As arranged in advance by Obama and diplomats from all three countries, Bibi read out an official apology for the nine lives lost on the Turkish vessel Mavi Marmara in May 2010, when Israeli commandos boarded the aid ship en route to breaking Israel’s blockade on the Gaza Strip. Netanyahu’s words, along with a promise to compensate survivors and continue to ease strictures on the Palestinian enclave, ended a diplomatic cleavage seated in sheer cussedness, and restored what one Israeli diplomat calls “the triangle” – made up of the two most stable and prosperous democracies in the Middle East, and the superpower that needs them on the same side. If that was all that went Erdogan’s way last week, he might have come in second to Obama, whose tour of Israel left the supposedly wary Jewish population something close to twitterpated. But Erdogan had already pulled off a diplomatic coup of his own — and just one day earlier: Abdullah Ocalan, the imprisoned head of the insurgent Kurdistan Workers’ Party, known by its intials in Turkish as the PKK, had agreed to end the country’s bloody 29-year civil war and bring the Kurdish struggle into the realm of representative politics. In the space of two days, Erdogan – once jailed himself for an Islamist proclamation – had brought to life the foreign policy slogan of Turkey’s modern founder, the rigorously secular Kemal Ataturk: “Peace at home, peace abroad.” (MORE: New Day for the Kurds: Will Ocalan’s Declaration Bring Peace With Turkey?) The story of![]()
