(JNi.media) Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told a group of journalists during a flight back from a trip to Turkmenistan on Monday that “normalization with Israel” was possible, Yeni Safak and other Turkish media reported. Erdogan said all it took to thaw the relations was for the two sides to finalize a compensation deal for the 2010 Gaza Flotilla raid’s victims and for Israel to lift its blockade against the “Palestinians,” by which he meant stop the efforts to block weapons and other contraband materials from entering the Hamas controlled Strip freely.
Erdogan said the entire region would benefit from the normalization of ties between the two governments. “There is so much that we, Israel, Palestine and the region can gain from such a normalization process. The region is in need of this,” Erdogan said.
He listed his country’s three demands of Israel: “An apology—which Prime Minister Netanyahu has done; compensation—which Israel has offered, to the tune of $20 million, in 2014, but the Turks demanded $30 million coupled with the third demand, removing the Gaza blockade. “If the compensation issue and the lifting of the embargo are resolved then we can enter a process of normalization,” Erdogan promised.
Despite his unrealistic expectations regarding Israel’s Gaza blockade—as long as the government in Gaza continues to make the destruction of Israel its top priority—the benign statement from Erdogan is much nicer than the style of his statements back in 2014 against Israel’s operations in Gaza, when he accused it of committing genocide and “barbarism surpassing Hitler.”