A new axis: the emerging Turkish-Israeli entente.

• Author: Pipes, Daniel

In Sincan, a suburb of the Turkish capital of Ankara, a routine event took place on February 2 of this year. The town council sponsored a rally to commemorate "Jerusalem Day" and, as elsewhere in the Middle East, the occasion offered a chance to execrate both Israel and the Arab-Israeli peace process. On a stage featuring a large picture of Fathi Shiqaqi, late leader of the terrorist group Islamic Jihad, politicians, activists, and the guest of honor - Iran's ambassador to Turkey - launched into a predictable and well-received tirade.

In the usual course of events, such a rally would attract little attention; such things happen almost daily some place around the world. In Iran and Sudan, where fundamentalists rule, the central governments themselves sponsor anti-Israel events; in Egypt and Jordan, countries where the state is formally at peace with Israel, the governments avert their eyes and permit such meetings. Even in the United States similar hate fests take place in the ballrooms of major hotels, attended by thousands of sponsors and supporters.

But things did not go as usual in Turkey last February. The next day, a high-ranking military official told a Hurriyet reporter, "I followed the meeting in Sincan. I was terrified by what I observed", and a day after that the army sent fifteen tanks, twenty personnel carriers, and an assortment of other military vehicles through the town. Two of those tanks just happened to "malfunction" as the convoy traversed the main road, and had to park for many hours in the very square where the meeting had earlier been held.

Nor did matters end there. The interior minister arrested the town's mayor and dismissed him from office. Charging the mayor (and eleven others) with violating public order and promoting religious hatred, the state prosecutor sought a twelve-year prison sentence for His Honor. The Iranian ambassador was told, "Israel is our friend, you cannot talk like this about it", and was effectively expelled from Turkey - prompting Tehran to respond by expelling the Turkish ambassador.

All this is quite stunning. A town virtually occupied for celebrating Jerusalem Day? A mayor arrested and pushed out of his job for anti-Israel remarks? A diplomatic row over an ambassador's anti-Zionism? In the Middle East in 1997 this could only take place in Turkey, the one Muslim country where a powerful institution completely rejects the demonization of Israel and instead fosters a hard kernel of pro-Israel sentiment. The events in Sincan also point up an extremely significant strategic development: a budding Turkish-Israeli alignment with the potential to alter the strategic map of the Middle East, to reshape American alliances there, and to reduce Israel's regional isolation.

Ups and Downs

Relations between Turkey and Israel go back to March 1949, less than a year after Israel came into existence, when Ankara recognized the Jewish state. Establishing formal ties with Israel sent a strong message about Turkey's international orientation, bringing it close to the West even as it alienated the Arabs; as Gamal Abdel Nasser explained in 1954, "Turkey, because of its Israeli policy, is disliked in the Arab world." But the Turkey-Israel tie at that time was mostly symbolic and, despite efforts to make it substantial, had little content. Relations diminished in the aftermath of the 1973 war, when Turks, bowing to the Arab oil weapon, distanced themselves from Israel. Coolness toward Israel remained for about a decade afterwards, decreasing only as did the Arabs' wealth and clout. Israel and Turkey quietly enhanced intelligence cooperation in the aftermath of Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon but formal and public relations remained cool.

The Oslo process that began in the summer of 1993 pleased Ankara very much, and it responded to "the handshake" by finally sending an ambassador to Israel. Soon after, the Turkish foreign minister paid an unprecedented visit to Israel and the two states signed three agreements over the next year dealing with security cooperation, combating terrorism, and (along with the U.S. government) agricultural projects in Central Asia. More high-level visits followed, and in February 1996 Israel established its first-ever formal military link to a predominantly Muslim country when it signed a military training agreement permitting Israeli air force jets to fly in Turkish air space. In March, the two sides initialed a free-trade accord. In all, the two sides signed thirteen accords.

But then, in July 1996, a seemingly fatal blow hit this burgeoning relationship: Necmettin Erbakan, a fundamentalist Muslim who sees Israel roughly as do the leaders in Iran, became Turkey's prime minister. Erbakan talks of Israel as a "timeless enemy" and "a cancer in the heart of the Arab and Muslim world." For him, Israel seeks to undermine the Islamic faith and annihilate the Muslims. He warns of a "Greater Israel" extending from the Nile to the Euphrates and blames a "Zionist conspiracy" for Turkey's economic problems. Erbakan despises Turkish links to Israel and has spoken often about ending them. As Erbakan took office, news commentaries predicted that he would abrogate Turkey's recent agreements with Israel, and were Turkey like other Middle Eastern states, he would no doubt have fulfilled his public promises. Who, after all, would stand up for ties to the Jewish state against a determined assault by the prime minister?

Ataturk's Men

But Turkey is different, and the secularist legacy of Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the Turkish Republic, is perhaps its most distinctive element. Ataturk's thinking owed much to the training he received as an army officer. As he rose through the ranks a century ago, the officer corps stood for secularism and a readiness to learn from the West; Ataturk developed and codified this outlook, then extended it to the country as a whole. Thanks to the force of his will and the prestige he enjoyed as the victorious commander-in-chief who pulled Turkey together after the First World War, Ataturk managed in a brief fifteen-year period (1923-38) to empower a body of modernizing ideas that still has no counterpart elsewhere in the Muslim world. He changed not only many outward Turkish customs, but even the nation's inner mentality. World history has witnessed few such transformations, especially ones...