Turkey Politics Turkey and Hamas grow close
Turkey and Hamas grow close
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Ties between Turkey, NATO's biggest Muslim member, and Hamas, the Islamic militant group that says Israel should not exist, are blossoming.
Last month, the Hamas premier visited the Turkish prime minister at his Istanbul home. Today, Turkish and Palestinian flags fly side by side at a building site in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.
It seems like bad news for Israel, whose alliance with Turkey collapsed over a deadly raid by Israeli troops on a Turkish aid ship bound for Gaza in 2010. Yet some pundits believe that Turkey, a rising power that has worked with Washington on Iraq and other regional problems, could seek to nudge Hamas away from the principle of armed struggle or reduce the influence of Iranian sponsors.
They acknowledge closer engagement with Hamas could disrupt Turkish diplomacy if there is another Gaza war, or a return to rocket attacks and bombings of Israeli targets. Israel wonders if Turkey will veer closer to the Hamas line, rather than the other way around.
Another Hamas sponsor, Syria, is struggling to quell an uprising and has broken with Turkey, a former ally that says President Bashar Assad should resign. Turkey has said there are no plans for Khaled Mashaal, the Hamas political leader based in Damascus, to move to Turkey, though some Turkish analysts think the government phrasing did not close the door on the idea of a Hamas office in Turkey.
"Turkey would like to have more influence over Hamas as part of its general program of increasing influence in the region. Certainly, the decline of Syria has made that relationship more attractive to Hamas," Howard Eissenstat, a Turkey expert at St. Lawrence University in the United States, wrote in an email.
However, he noted: "Hamas would have to be very isolated indeed for Turkey to be able to push it in directions that it doesn't want to go. Given its ability to get aid from private donors in the Gulf and from Iran, that type of desperation seems unlikely in the short term."
(source: AP)
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