http://www.independent.co.uk/stories/B2402909.html
Jerusalem Draws in the Turks to Spy On Arab Foes
By Robert Fisk in Beirut
THE INDEPENDENT 02/24/1999
FOR MONTHS, Israeli and Turkish intelligence officers have manned
joint listening posts on the Syrian, Iraqi and Iranian borders,
sharing information on guerrillas of the Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK)
and Syrian and Iraqi military movements.
In Ankara and Jerusalem, Israeli and Turkish officials have also
shared their experiences of two similar occupation zones - Israel's
in southern Lebanon and Turkey's so-called "security zone" in
northern Iraq. Israeli jets now regularly fly along the
Turkish-Syrian frontier and - according to Syrian sources - over
northern Iraq as well.
Encirclement of Syria lies at the heart of this still-growing
alliance. When Syria put the Kurdish PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan on a
plane to Moscow last year - the first part of a journey of exile that
has ended in a Turkish prison - it was a sign of just how concerned
Damascus had become by Turkey's power and the threats it was
uttering. Indeed, the warnings to Syria from Sulieman Demirel, the
Turkish President, to end its support for Mr Ocalan were almost
identical in wording to those issued by Benjamin Netanyahu, the
Israeli Prime Minister, to Syria when faced by Hizbollah attacks
against Israeli occupation troops in southern Lebanon. "We reserve
the right to retaliate against Syria," Mr Demirel said last October.
"All necessary measures will be taken over Syria if the need
arises."
But the extent of Turkish-Israeli military co-operation is still
largely unknown to the Arab states, and to many in Israel itself. The
Turks are interested in purchasing Israel's "Propine" early-warning
system and its top secret "Wall" anti-missile technology, which is
partly funded by the United States.
The upgrading by Israel of Turkey's Phantom jets is already
costing Ankara £382m, a small price for the Turkish military,
which has £19bn to spend on hardware over the next 10 years.
Turkey has given Israel permission to fly its jets through Turkish
airspace to attack Iraq if Israel is targeted by Iraqi missiles as it
was in the 1991 Gulf War.
Professor Efraim Inbar, director of the Begin-Sadat Centre for
strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, first revealed
the extent of Turkish-Israeli co-operation in a remarkable - but
largely unpublicised - lecture at the Woodrow Wilson Centre in
Washington five months ago. He spoke only vaguely of the joint
listening posts on the Syrian, Iraqi and Iranian borders but
described them as "an important facet of our intelligence gathering
capability". There was also, Professor Inbar added, "co-operation on
terror".
The alliance was a Turkish idea, initiated in 1997 when the
Turkish air force commander arrived without warning to see the
Israeli ambassador in Ankara with the words - according to Professor
Inbar - "we want to invite the Israeli chief of the air force to come
to Turkey to visit". It wasn't all plain sailing. When the Turkish
navy paid its first official visit to the Israeli port of Haifa last
year, the Israelis had not bothered to send a naval representative to
meet it; and Turkish officers were astounded when the Israeli
harbourmaster refused to let their ships into port unless they agreed
to pay harbour dues.
But Israeli planes are now training in Turkey, using Turkish
bombing ranges, just as Turkish pilots are now flying in the skies
over Israel. The Americans chair a regular meeting of Turkish and
Israeli intelligence officers in Tel Aviv and on at least one
occasion last year a Jordanian officer was also present. If Jordan's
new King Abdullah was to upgrade this relationship, it would further
isolate Syria. Mr Netanyahu's government has long believed - wrongly
- that President Assad can be blackmailed into making peace without
handing back the occupied Golan Heights if Syria was sufficiently
intimidated.
President Demirel attempted to calm Arab fears when he attended
the Islamic summit in Tehran last year although Turkey pointedly
hosted a senior Israeli air force officer in Ankara at the same time.
Oddly, Turkish distrust of Syria sometimes outdoes even Israel's
suspicions. In 1996, just after the Israeli prime minister Yitzhak
Rabin was murdered, the deputy Turkish foreign minister described
Israel's policy towards Syria as appeasement.
Back in 1982, Turkey condemned Israel's invasion of Lebanon as
aggression until Israel furnished Turkey with intelligence files on
the Armenian ASALA extremist group. Much to Turkey's delight, Mr
Ocalan's PKK are always referred to by the Israelis as "terrorists";
Israel has expressed sympathy for Iraqi Kurds - but never for the
millions of Kurds who live under Turkish military oppression. Israel
supports only a limited form of autonomy for the Kurds of Iraq; which
is not surprising since that is precisely the limited freedoms it
wishes to give the Palestinians.
For Israel has had to cut its moral cloth to maintain its Turkish
alliance. Turkey has successfully sought the help of Jewish lobby
groups in New York and Washington to cosy up to the Americans and
emphasise Turkey's strategic importance to the Middle East in the
aftermath of the Soviet Union's collapse. Inevitably, pro-Israeli
groups have now begun to sympathise with Turkey's contention that the
1915 Turkish massacre of 1.5 million Armenians did not constitute
genocide and may not have been - despite absolute proof to the
contrary - the century's first holocaust.
Professor Inbar lamentably ducked the moral point in Washington.
"I cannot really make a competent statement on this issue," he said -
and Jewish American members of Congress have gone so far as to
suggest no Armenian genocide took place. Others have been braver.
Yosi Sarid, a member of the Knesset's foreign affairs and defence
committee, remarked that "Jews who lost 6 million of their people in
the horror of the Nazi genocide should be the last to join in denying
the existence of another genocide . There is a hardly a single
outrage this [Israeli] government is not willing to commit
under the pretence of a narrow-minded national interest, which is
bound to prove counter-productive."
