July 21, 2016 | Quoted by Raphael Ahren - The Times of Israel

Despite detente, Erdogan may find Israel too good a scapegoat to resist

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is likely to start blaming Israel for the attempted coup that threatened to depose him over the weekend, due to a perceived connection between the Jewish state and the cleric he accuses of instigating the putsch, a leading Israeli expert on Turkey said.

Erdogan blames the Turkish cleric Fethullah Gülen, now in exile in Pennsylvania, for instigating the failed coup. Gülen, who denies the allegations, has had ties with various Jewish groups and in the 1990s met with Israel’s chief rabbi and a senior Israeli diplomat.

“Even though Turkish and Israeli leaders are saying that the coup won’t affect the rapprochement between the two countries, in my mind it’s just a question of time until Erdogan starts talking about Israel in the context of the coup,” Bar-Ilan University’s Efrat Aviv told The Times of Israel on Tuesday.

The Turkish president might wait until the normalization process between Ankara and Jerusalem has been concluded before publicly scapegoating Israel, surmised Aviv, who focuses her research on modern Turkey and Gülen’s spiritual movement. “But I have no doubt that this will happen. I don’t think that Erdogan will accept Israel with open arms.”

Populist politicians in Turkey tend to blame either Israel or a Jewish conspiracy for most evils befalling their country, said Aykan Erdemir, who served as a member of parliament for the opposition CHP party from 2011 until 2015. “Thanks to the ongoing Turkish-Israeli normalization, Israel and Jews were spared from such hate speech and scapegoating this time.”

Supporters of Erdogan’s AKP party “could take advantage of the current unrest and mobilization to propagate anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic messages,” Erdemir, who is currently a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington, told The Times of Israel on Saturday.

Read the full article here.

Issues:

Israel Turkey