Epress.am News from Armenia
Israel knows what it needs to do to ease the tension with Turkey, said Turkish officials during a meeting with US Vice President Joe Biden in Istanbul, adding that Israel must apologize for the Mavi Marmara flotilla incident, when Israeli soldiers killed nine Turkish citizens trying to defy embargo on Gaza strip, and provide compensation to the families of those killed.
According to diplomatic sources, the issue was raised by Biden briefly in his talks with Turkish President Abdullah Gül, Parliamentary Speaker Cemil Çiçek and PM Erdoğan. When Biden said the US wanted to work with Turkey on a number of conceivable subjects — not limited to the Arab Spring issues — and Turkey’s efforts to have a better profile in the US Congress, where Israeli, Greek and Armenian lobbies were active, he got a similar reply from his counterparts. Ankara told Washington that Turkey did not want relations with Israel to hit rock-bottom like this; it wanted normalization and told Israel what is needed for that.
“We told the Americans they could go and talk to the Israeli government,” one Turkish official, who did not want to be named, told the Hürriyet Daily News. “Israel knows what to do.”
Ankara expects Biden to share this stance with US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta before his visit to Turkey, planned for January 2012. Panetta recently told Israel to find a way to normalize its relations with Turkey, Egypt and Jordan in order to break the isolation surrounding it and sit at the “damned” table with Palestinians.
Ankara believes it was up to Washington to convince Tel Aviv for an acceptable solution.
Photo: Boston.com