From the 1980s onwards the Turkish-Israeli relations started improving gradually. The year 1996 in particular was a milestone as the two countries signed a series of agreements of military cooperation and training, among others. The agreements were of outmost strategic significance as they gave rise to a pro-Western strategic axis which had a serious impact on the regional balances of power.From Friends to FoesThe election of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) to power of the Turkish state in 2002 had a gradually negative influence on the relations between Turkey and Israel for two main reasons. The first reason was the systemic changes that occurred in the region after 9/11 and the...
On 22 March 2013, official sources from Turkish Prime Minister’s Office confirmed that Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu expressed Israel’s apology for Mavi Marmara case (including for the death of nine Turks) in Gaza-bound flotilla in 2010. Israeli PM, Benjamin Netanyahu apologized during his phone meeting with Turkish PM, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, while two sides agreed on normalization of relations between two countries, including returning the ambassadors and to work on improving the humanitarian situation in the Palestine. In his turn, PM, Erdogan also accepted Israel’s apology on behalf of Turkey. [Aljazeera]. Israeli side also expressed his w...
It was back in March 2002, when US Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz presented Turkey as a “model” for the Muslim world in the “Broader Middle East”.[1] The hope had been that, once it was freed from the restrictions imposed by the authoritarian military-supported political leaders, the political system in the region would develop into a fully-fledged democracy. In the absence of strong system of checks and balances or an effective parliamentary opposition, in many countries of the Broader Middle East, the result has been what Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way refer as “competitive authoritarianism”.[2] Turkey, often presented as the model country for the r...
Since 1950 the Republic of Turkey has a multi-party system where parliamentary politics has been dominated by conservative parties. The last Turkish election took place on 12 June 2011 and the next one is planned for 2015.The Voting System and the ThresholdParty-list proportional representation systems are voting systems where parties make lists of candidates to be elected, and seats get allocated to each party in proportion to the number of votes the party receives. Voters may vote directly for the party, as in Israel, or for candidates, and that vote will pool to the party, as in Turkey and Brazil, or for a list of candidates, as in Hong Kong.Some countries wher...
Based largely in southeastern Turkey, a new Islamic Kurdish party has announced its foray into politics to “protect peace, justice, and brotherhood,” which for many analysts, targets to trim the votes of the ruling AKP and pro-Kurdish BDP.The founders of the party hail from Mustazaf Der, an NGO that was shut down last May for its ties to Kurdish Hezbollah—a Sunni group with no relation to the Lebanese Shi’a Hezbollah—branded as a fundamentalist terrorist organization by the Turkish state.Sait Sahin, founding member of the new party, said in a phone interview that the association would be called Huda-Par, which can also be translated as “On God’s Path”.Huda...
