PM Erdoğan decries Israel as ‘spoiled boy’

Turkish Navy ships will “show up” more frequently in the East Mediterranean as part of measures against Israel, Turkey’s prime minister has said, slamming the Jewish state as the “spoiled boy” of the region.

“The eastern Mediterranean Sea is not a region unfamiliar to us,” Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said Tuesday in his first public comments on measures that Turkey was taking over Israel’s failure to apologize for killing nine Turks on a Gaza-bound aid ship last year.

Turkish forces stationed at naval bases in Aksaz and İskenderun are capable of patrolling regional waters and escorting civilian ships in the Mediterranean, Erdoğan told reporters.

“Certainly, our ships will show up more frequently in these waters. We will see them [there] very frequently,” he said. “So far, Israel has always played the role of a spoiled boy in the face of U.N. resolutions concerning Israel, thinking that it would carry on with this role.”

On Friday Ankara last said it would take action to ensure the safety of maritime navigation in the East Mediterranean as part of measures against Israel that included also the downgrading of diplomatic ties to the second-secretary level.

The departure deadline for the Israeli diplomats concerned by the decision expires Wednesday.

Erdoğan said Turkey was “totally suspending” military ties and defense industry cooperation with Israel, warning of “various other sanctions” depending on developments in the future.

He initially said that trade with the Jewish state had also been frozen, but his office later clarified that the prime minister meant “commercial ties in the defense industry sector.”

Also Tuesday, Erdoğan held a 1.5-hour meeting with Chief of General Staff Gen. Necdet Özel to discuss ways of protecting maritime navigation in the Mediterranean, the NTV said.

Israel’s deadly raid on the Mavi Marmara ferry in international waters on May 31, 2010 was an example “of savagery and state terror,” Erdoğan said, stressing that Turkey was determined to protect the rights of its citizens.

A report on the raid, penned at the end of a U.N. panel inquiry and leaked to the media last week, “is of no value to us,” Erdoğan said, echoing Ankara’s disappointment over the document.

The report declared that Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip was lawful and justified by attacks on Israel by militants in Gaza, even though it found that the troops used “excessive and unreasonable” force.


/Hurriyet Daily News/