Ankara – Israel is interested in the normalization of ties with Turkey, as well as with all its neighbors, but this is a “two way street,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Tuesday.
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Netanyahu’s comments, during a tour of the security fence going up along the Jordanian border, came on the same day that Malcolm Hoenlein, the executive vice chairman of Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, met in Turkey with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Asked if Hoenlein was bringing a message from Jerusalem, Netanyahu said, “I will be happy to hear what they told him.”
Hoenlein was joined in his meeting by some 20 other heads of US Jewish organizations. The meeting comes about two months after a secret meeting in Geneva in mid December between senior Turkish and Israeli officials in Geneva that sources in the Prime Minister’s Office said at the time put Ankara and Jerusalem on the brink of normalizing ties.
That normalization, however, has still materialized.
The Turkish Hurriyet website on Tuesday said Erdogan’s meeting with “influential Jewish lobbying groups” in the US is “a sign of Ankara’s willingness to normalize bilateral ties with Israel.”
The report said that Turkish Jewish Community President İshak İbrahimzadeh also took part in the closed-door meeting at Erdogan’s presidential palace.
Hoenlein was in Jerusalem last week, and his organization will be holding its annual meeting in Jerusalem next week.
In December, Erdogan, whose country is increasingly isolated in the international arena, made his first conciliatory statement toward the Jewish state in years, saying the region needs a normalization of Turkish-Israeli ties, and that this “has a lot to offer to us, to Israel, to Palestine and also to the region.”
According to government sources, US Vice President Joe Biden is actively involved trying to push forward reconciliation, using the possibility of a natural gas pipeline from Israel to Turkey as a common interest issue that might bring the states together.
Netanyahu met Biden last month in Davos, before the vice president went to Turkey and met with Erdogan.
who put these people in charge of “international Jewish affairs” these people making over $200,000 a year are the reason for the existence of the David Duke’s. Erdogan has Jewish blood on his hands and they meet with him?