Turkish speaker snubs Israeli invite

ISTANBUL, Jan 25: Parliament Speaker Cemil Çiçek on Tuesday wrote a letter to his Israeli counterpart, Reuven Rivlin, declining an invitation to come to Israel.

Çiçek stated he would not accept the invitation until Israeli-Turkish relations are normalized. “I cannot accept your invitation for the time being, but I am sure that you, too, will acknowledge that Turkey anticipates improved relations with Israel,” Çiçek said in his letter.

Turkish leaders try to avoid Israeli politicians on the international stage after the already tense relations with the country reached fever pitch with the Mavi Marmara incident in 2010. In December, President Abdullah Gül skipped a lunch organized as part of the fourth World Policy Conference in Vienna as Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak would be in attendance, highlighting the reduced diplomatic ties with the country.

Turkey decided to downgrade its diplomatic representation in Israel from chargé d’affaires to the level of second secretary in September.

In May 2010, Israeli naval commandos stormed the Mavi Marmara, which was carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza, as the flotilla of which it was a part tried to breach an Israeli naval blockade. Turkey demanded an official apology and compensation for the victims’ families in August. However, Israel refused to apologize, claiming that its soldiers had acted in self-defense.

Turkish-Israeli ties started to get tense over Israel’s occupation of Gaza since 2009. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan explicitly deplored the Gaza policy of the country in January 2009 during a session at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland. Erdoğan walked off the stage when a moderator, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, cut off his remarks in response to an impassioned monologue by Israeli President Shimon Peres, who strongly defended Israel’s offensive against Gaza, which claimed the lives of hundreds of innocent civilians and injured thousands of others. Up until the early 2000s, Turkey was known as Israel’s only ally in the Middle East.