Israeli Press
Trump's envoy says Israel may have baited Turkey before its election
Image credit: Tom Barrack, US ambassador to Turkey and special envoy for Syria — US State Department via Wikimedia Commons (public domain) · License
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The American ambassador to Turkey, Tom Barrack, has said one possible reason for Israel's strike on a base in Syria is that Israel wanted to draw Turkey into responding, and that such a clash would be received well in the Israeli election campaign, according to reports carried on Friday and Saturday by the Israeli news site Ynet and the daily Haaretz.
Barrack set out several explanations and called one of them the most likely — that somebody received intelligence about something in the future and decided it would not happen. In the Israeli reporting he also said that, contrary to the information Israel presented, the United States knows of no Turkish intention to place forces at the base that was struck.
Haaretz reported his account of the sequence: Turkey was not told that Israeli aircraft were approaching its southern frontier, and could therefore have read the approach as a threat and answered it. Israel is in an election period, Barrack said in that account, and a government in an election period may exercise what he called irrational judgment on questions of this kind.
Why an American envoy's guess matters here#
The remarks are an ambassador's assessment, not a finding, and Israel has not accepted the framing. They are worth a Palestinian reader's attention because of who is making them and about whom.
Turkey answered the wider confrontation this week by asking Interpol to circulate an arrest request for Benjamin Netanyahu over the Gaza flotilla case, and by joining seven other Arab and Muslim states in condemning the tender for housing in E1.
The proposition Barrack put into the open — that an Israeli government nine weeks from a vote may pick a fight because the fight polls well — is one Palestinians have been making about Gaza and the West Bank for months, usually to be told it is cynicism. Here it arrives from the president's own ambassador.
