Following Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan these days is like watching a chameleon. You never know which color he’ll turn next. But through all the shifts,a strategic goal emerges: He wants to Putinize Turkey.
The increasingly slavish Turkish press is full of adoring portraits of Erdogan: He managed to get Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu down on his knees, apologizing for “operational mistakes” by his navy that led to deaths of nine Turkish activists in the June 2010 Mavi Marmara incident.
(In America, the press similarly credits President Obama for supposedly pressuring the Israeli hard-liner to finally apologize to Turkey.)
In truth, if anyone needed bending in the three-year Israel-Turkey drama, it was Erdogan.
Yes, he now proudly tells his Turkish media acolytes that he’d rejected past Israeli offers for rapprochement because they didn’t explicitly contain the word “apology.” But Israeli sources tell me Bibi’s envoys to Ankara have offered, as early as two years ago, a similar apology to the one he eventually delivered to Erdogan on the telephone last Friday.
Ankara rejected these previous apologies, I’m told, because Erdogan and his aides insisted that Bibi deliver them publicly, on television.
So why did Erdogan finally agree to an apology in a private phone call (which, as he said yesterday, he secretly recorded)?
Two weeks ago, Secretary of State John Kerry landed in Istanbul facing ugly headlines: Erdogan had just smeared Israel’s founding movement, Zionism, as a “crime against humanity.”
Kerry, who came to embrace Ankara as our top regional partner, was shocked. He leaned hard on Erdogan to issue a (mealy-mouthed) retraction in a Danish newspaper — and then got him to finally agree to accept Bibi’s apology.
Last Friday, in the final moments of Obama’s Jerusalem visit, we finally learned that Israel and Turkey are BFFs again.
But are they?
Since Obama’s departure, Erdogan has started to renege on terms that, according to Jerusalem and Washington, at least, he’d initially agreed to.
No, he can’t drop a civil lawsuit in Turkish courts against Israeli military officials, as it was first understood he would. And renewal of full diplomatic ties will have to wait until every Israeli restriction in Gaza is removed.
Yesterday, we learned that negotiations over compensation for the nine families of the killed Mavi Marmara activists hit a major snag: Israel is offering $100,000 for each family, while Turkey demands $1 million.
Meanwhile, much to the disappointment of Washington, Erdogan insists on an April visit to Hamas-controlled Gaza, which is bound to considerably weaken the US-favored Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.
What’s going on? Why does Erdogan promise Obama that he’ll bury the hatchet one day, while on the next he goes against Washington’s wishes and disses a contrite Bibi?
Look at Turkish politics: For 10 years Erdogan, a political wizard, maneuvered the country close to where he wants it to be. But in a year and a half from now, his premiership, which is term-limited, will end.
Unless, that is, he manages to change the rules by significantly strengthening Turkey’s presidency, which is currently a mostly ceremonial position with no executive powers.
And then, of course, the prime minister would become president. Presto: Erdogan would have a new title, but the same powers he has now — thus bypassing laws meant to prevent one person from ruling for life.
It’s the Russian model of democracy: Tsar Vladimir Putin has long seen his titles (president, prime minister) as interchangeable — as long as they keep him in power.
But to do likewise, Erdogan must push through a set of new laws for which he needs to get most of the country behind him. So he needs to joggle a bit.
That means doing a 180 on a decades-old Turkish policy of ruthlessly fighting Kurdish separatists: Ankara now envisions Turkish-affiliated federations of Kurdish autonomies in Iraq, Iran and Syria. Whether that’s realistic is irrelevant; what matters for Erdogan is that it could help get Kurdish parties in parliament to back his presidential ambitions
And while virulent anti-Israel rhetoric is popular with Erdogan’s political base, Turkey’s business class and the military favor strong Israeli ties. Guess what: Even with all the rhetorical daggers in the three years since the Mavi Marmara incident, military ties and commercial trade between the two countries, despite a drop in tourism, are actually on therise.
Erdogan must maneuver between Western-favoring urbanites who are the backbone of Turkey’s economic success and the rural Islamists that keep him in power and that he favors ideologically. Expect a lot more zig-zagging.
Twitter: @bennyavni