Turkish objections have thwarted Israel’s attempt to open a NATO office, says Turkish FM, stressing determination to also keep Israel out of data-sharing after a high-powered US radar system is deployed in Turkey. Hürriyet Daily News
Turkey has blocked an Israeli move to open a representation office at NATO headquarters, its foreign minister said Sunday, adding that data collected by a radar system in eastern Turkey would not be shared with Israel. “Israel recently made an attempt to open an office at NATO [headquarters] in Brussels. We said we would veto this attempt and the issue was not even put on the agenda,” Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu said in an interview with the CNNTürk news channel. A Foreign Ministry official told the Hürriyet Daily News that Israel made the request under NATO’s Mediterranean Dialogue program, launched in 1994 with seven Mediterranean countries. Israel attempted to have its request approved earlier this month after Ankara downgraded ties with Tel Aviv over its failure to apologize for a deadly raid on a Gaza-bound aid ship, the official said, adding that the issue could not even make its way onto NATO’s agenda after Turkey threatened to use its veto. Davutoğlu insisted that information gathered by a U.S.-led radar system, to be stationed in Turkey’s Malatya province as part of a NATO missile-shield project, would be available for use only by alliance members, denying suggestions that intelligence would be shared with Israel. “We will provide support only for systems that belong to NATO and are used solely by members of NATO,” he said. The minister dismissed as “manipulation” a newspaper report that quoted an unnamed U.S. official as saying that data collected by the radar would be used to help defend Israel, stressing that Washington had assured Ankara that no such official existed. According to a Wall Street Journal report Friday, U.S. officials said they planned to fuse data from radars in Turkey, Israel and other sites to create a comprehensive picture of the missile threat to the region. Turkey, for its part, could also benefit from real-time data from radar the United States already operates in Israel, the report said. Gaza blockade application In his comments to CNNTürk, Davutoğlu also said Turkey was seeking support from the Arab League, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and the African Union for a planned application to the International Court of Justice for an advisory opinion on whether Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip was lawful. “The process will probably reach a certain point in October and we will make our application,” he said, adding that the application, which needs the approval of the U.N. General Assembly, is planned not as a Turkish initiative but as a joint move by regional countries. The move aims to secure a legal condemnation of Gaza’s blockade and refute a recent U.N. panel report that declared the siege lawful. Davutoğlu was scheduled to fly to New York on Sunday for the annual gathering of the U.N. General Assembly. Reluctance on US mediation Davutoğlu on Sunday gave the cold shoulder to suggestions that the United States might attempt to mediate a solution to end the crisis, saying it was too late now and that mediation efforts usually aimed to produce midway formulas that required concessions from both sides. “We don’t mean that we have closed the door to diplomacy, but we have already been through this process over the past year,” he said. “We will not accept any apology [for the flotilla raid] that does not formally and clearly include the word ‘apology.’” Meanwhile, Davutoğlu said that Turkey was not after “exporting a Turkish-type democracy or Turkish-type secularism” to the region, adding that Erdoğan’s appeal in favor of secularism in Egypt referred not to hard-line laicism hostile to religion but to the equal treatment of all religious groups.
