In order to understand the dynamics of the current crisis between Israel and Turkey, let’s first examine Turkey’s perspective on this crisis. In the short term, the best possible solution from the Turkish point of view would be for Israel to cave in by accepting the responsibility for the crisis and meeting Turkish demands on the flotilla issue and, in the long run, to have Israel reaching the compromised solution with its Arab neighbours. Such an outcome would boost enormously the prestige of Turkey not only as one of quite a few defenders of the Arab and more generally Islamic downtrodden and humiliated population, but as the only effective safeguard of their rights. More over, in case of such an outcome, Turkey would be completely vindicated in the eyes of the Western public, who begins to see with the increasing suspicion Turkish independent policy vis-a-vis its allies. As the result of such development, Turkey would be able to maintain friendly, but not special relations with Israel, thus putting itself above the local politics both in the eyes of the Arab and the Western public. From the Israeli perspective, however, the best solution for the current crisis in the relations would be the return to the “antebellum” status with Turkey relinquishing its demands.  This would allow the renewal of the military and economic cooperation between the countries, which are so vital for the Israeli standoff against Iran.

On the surface, the Turkish ambitions are optimal for all the parties involved in the conflict and that indeed makes Turks more persistent and offence-prone in their dealing with Israel. However, such an approach has one major flaw of being impractical. Whatever the stereotypical view of the conflict tends to suggest, there is no solution just around the corner. The truth is that the minimal and the legitimate Jewish aspiration of having a sovereign state, i.e. what is known as a recognition of the Jewish nature of Israel, is inconsistent with the minimal and legitimate Palestinian demand of the right of return. The basic problem of the conflict that it would be impossible to find on the Jewish side a leader who would consider relinquishing the former and on the Palestinians side - the later.

Since both the Jews and the Palestinians are perfectly aware of the fact, that no matter what progress is achieved at the peace talks, no real solution will be found in a foreseeable future, I think it is safe to assume that the Turks are aware of this fact too. Thus from their perspective they are forced to lead a suboptimal game with the view of maximizing their gains, while keeping the costs low. The Turks realized that being perceived a close partner in Israel incurs a very serious loss in the eyes of the new promising clients among the Arab and Islamic nations. In order to maximize Turkish gains there the best policy would be to change the perception of being an ally of Israel, while keeping some level of cooperation in order to ensure the flow of the Israeli technology and the support of the the pro-Israeli elements in the US and Europe.

This approach is at the heart of the conflict and leads to fare amount of bad blood between the two nations. The problem from the Turkish perspective is that they are interested in change of perception more than in breaking the actual ties with the Jewish state. According to this scheme Israel was expected to put up with the Turkish angry invectives in order to preserve the ties which are deemed (correctly) by Turkey as being vital to the Israeli standing in the region. That is why Turks were sincerely surprised by the Israeli forceful reaction, which manifested itself in the incident of the ambassador humiliation and in the blank refusal to concede any ground in the flotilla incident.

From the Israel’s perspective, however, the picture is different. The Israelis could have put up with some Turkish preaching, but not with the spring in the relations between Turkey and Iran-Syria block. Israelis need their Turkish ally mostly in order to contain the creeping Iranian influence at its borders. If not for Iran and Syria, Israel’s interests have much more in common with Kurds rather than Turks. And that on top of the concern of having Israeli military know-how and Israeli intelligence compromised by the emerging Turko-Iranian cooperation. In short, Israel on the one hand, is not interested in sharing their Turkish ally with their arch-enemy and on the other hand, perceives the deterioration of the relations as the Turkish strategic plan to realign itself both regionally and globally in order to get a new recognition as truly independent power broker.  

The gap between what Turkey had estimated Israel would be willing to accept in order to preserve the ties with Turkey and what Israel was ready to put up in the real life, put everyone in a very inconvenient situation, far beyond any reasonable interest of the both countries. Turkey has clearly overplayed its hand in their reaction to the latest crisis in that that it made it virtually impossible for the Israeli government to deal with it in a way that would allow any kind of healing between the countries. Turkey’s demands of apology, compensation, restitution, international investigation and a complete removal of the siege over Gaza, amounts not only to public humiliation of Israel over the incident, for which more than one side should bear the responsibility, but also a very serious intervention in the matters related to the security of the state as it is perceived in Israel.

In view of this situation, the prognosis for the Turko-Israeli ties is not very bright. Turkey has achieved an important gain of positioning itself as a fearless defender of the Palestinian rights. It scored an important point by associating itself with the success of the flotilla to affect some change in the Israeli siege over Gaza. On the cost side it disrupted the relations with Israel far beyond what it had intended in the first place. If the purely economic damage will be amply offset by the development of the relations with its Eastern neighbours, the technological aspect would still be a serious loss for Turkish army and industry. However, the most serious damage will come from the perceived shift of axis by Turkey, which occurred far two quickly in order to be effectively contained. Although the alliance with Israel was a burden in dealing with the Muslim partners, a complete dissolution of it accompanied by a very vociferous and vitriolic anti-Israeli campaign, bearing uncanny resemblance of the Iranian rhetoric, may not go well with some of the Western public.

From the Israeli perspective the loss of Turkish ally is extremely damaging. Its standing in the Middle East has suffered a heavy blow and the international reaction showed that Turkey’s stance has found resonance among many people in the West. However, since Israel finds itself in a situation, where it has very little space for political maneuver, it seems that Israeli government just came to accept the dissolution of this alliance and would make little effort to appease Turkey. It would and should not exacerbate the situation any further, but  it’s bound to be drown into publicity wars, with almost unavoidable effect of alienating not only the current Turkish government, but also the Turkish public even more. All in all, Israel undoubtedly suffered more from these events than Turkey, but some of the damage came as a result of calculated shift in Turkish regional strategy.