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Gul defends criticism of Israeli atrocities
Monday, October 19, 2009
ANKARA/OCCUPIED-AL-QUDS: Turkish President Abdullah Gul defended his government’s criticism of Israel on Sunday amid a war of words over the Gaza conflict which has soured relations between the regional allies.
Gul noted in a television interview that majority-Muslim Turkey was one of the “rare” countries to maintain good relations with both Arab nations and the Jewish state. “But that does not mean that Turkey will not raise its voice against mistakes if they are made. ... We should not think that Turkey would keep quiet,” he told TRT public television.
Gul did not specify the mistakes, but Turkey has repeatedly slammed Israel over the 22-day war in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, launched on December 27 in response to rocket fire from the Palestinian territory.
Turkey criticises Israeli policy regarding the Palestinian territories with “courage”, but this “is not bound to shake the foundations” of bilateral relations, Gul said. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan launched on Saturday a new, if veiled, verbal attack on Israel saying: “Turkey has never, in its history, been on the side of persecutors, it has always defended the oppressed.”
Erdogan has been at the forefront of global criticism of the Gaza war, storming out of a debate at the World Economic Forum in January where he told Israeli President Shimon Peres that “you know well how to kill people.”
Relations took another sharp downturn last week when Ankara excluded the Jewish state from annual joint military exercises, prompting a rebuke from the United States.Meanwhile, a large Israeli cafe chain has decided to stop selling Turkish coffee and plans are afoot to boycott Turkish resorts in the wake of increased tensions between the two allies, officials said Sunday.
“We have decided for the time being to stop selling ‘Istanbul coffee’—our Turkish coffee blend, and we shall keep doing it until matters improve,” Michael Steg, director of marketing for the Ilan coffee shop chain, told the Ynet news website.
“We believe anyone can be active in his own way and this is our small and symbolic way of doing that,” he said. Yossi Levy, a senior official with Israel’s national carrier ElAl, told Army Radio his employee association and those of several other major Israeli businesses plan to stop subsidising vacations for their workers to Turkey during the Passover holiday next April, the next major holiday season in the Jewish state during which up to 80,000 Israelis are expected to visit Turkish resorts.
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ISSN 1563-9479 
