Gulf Insider
US Envoy Tom Barrack has downplayed escalating tensions between Turkey and Israel as just “rhetoric” and pushed for regional cooperation between the two countries in security and energy projects. Speaking during a panel at the Antalya Diplomacy Forum, Barrack pushed back against comments from some officials in both countries that suggested they could come into conflict in the near future. “I think Turkey is just not a country to be messed with,” Barrack said. Barrack said that both countries were seeing a distorted image of each other as a result of sensationalized media coverage that painted both as expansionist. “So if you wake up in Tel Aviv, you read the newspaper, what do you see? You see the diagram on the paper of The Ottoman Empire 2.0, which is Vienna to the Maldives, right,” he said. “You wake up in Istanbul and read the paper and it’s Greater Israel.” Turkey was the first Muslim-majority country to recognize the state of Israel in 1949, and has enjoyed largely cordial security and trade ties throughout most of their modern history. However, since the 2010 attack on the Mavi Marmara flotilla, when Israeli forces raided a Turkish ship delivering aid to Gaza and killed 10 of those on board, […]
Go to News Site