Kerry in Middle East, Two Hot Topics: Gaza-Israel Conflict, Relations with Turkey and Erdogan

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry is back in the Middle East and engaged in two “impossible missions”: defusing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and softening the mutual antipathy and mistrust between Israel and Turkey.

His first mission is impossible because the (extendable) 30-day ceasefire agreed on between the two sides is difficult to honor. The president of the Palestinian National Authority is not able to prevent the Palestinians of Gaza, who consider the truce a betrayal, to stop launching rockets against Israel; conditioned by the settler movement, the government in Jerusalem finds it difficult to prevent provocations that extremists — who are opposed to negotiations aimed at creating a Palestinian state — carry out, fueling the mutual violence. It is difficult to imagine how the timorous contacts the U.S. seeks can turn into serious negotiations. Not confined to circles opposed to the creation of a Palestinian state, the prevalent opinion in Jerusalem is that any commitment the Arabs — whether Palestinian or not — make is not worth the ink with which it is written because of the changes the political, religious and tribal storms of the Arab uprisings have caused and because of the conflict between Sunni and the Shiite Muslims.

The secretary of state’s second mission, the re-establishment of good relations between Israel and Turkey, is not an easy task. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s apology to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan is an apology of convenience. A staunch Muslim, the Turkish prime minister cannot admit that Jerusalem should remain under the control of the infidels, nor that Israel should maintain control of Gaza, which he himself tried to disrupt. After decades of close collaboration between the two countries, the dispute with Israel stems from the abandonment of Turkish secularism and the re-launching of a great modern Islamic power to turn Turkey into the decisive power in the region. The Turkish hegemonic dream was shattered. The government in Ankara failed to contain the Kurdish revolt for autonomy and was forced to negotiate. Iran, the Shiite ideology standard bearer, proved to be a tough adversary for Sunni Turkey, turning Syria into a battlefield between these two historical “empires,” the Turkish and Persian empires. Egypt and the regimes led by the Muslim Brotherhood rejected Erdogan’s democratic-Islamic state, which is an oxymoron. Cyprus and Greece have been able to fend off the Turkish threats through their cooperation with Israel on oil strategy. Turkey’s indecision on the Syrian crisis highlights the limits of its military capacity.

Following all this are three new factors:

The first is the complete shift in focus of U.S. strategic interests from the Middle East to the Pacific. This is not only because of China’s emergence as a second world power. It is because the technological revolution allowed the U.S. to put an end to its energy dependence on Arab countries — Saudi Arabia in particular — turning the U.S. into a top oil producer. The U.S., Obama said, cannot want [peace] more than the Arabs (and Israelis), therefore leaving to them the responsibility of finding a solution or dealing with the consequences if the conflict continues.

The second factor is that the focus has shifted to internal, economic and social problems among the countries of the Arab Spring: International issues are waning in interest and with them the Palestinian issue, which served as a good excuse for decades for Arab regimes to avoid unpopular domestic challenges. The victimization of the Palestinians no longer has a global dimension justifying their transformation into the only people who make international and institutionalized charity into a political right.

The third factor has to do with Israel’s transformation from an energy consumer to a producer — and maybe exporter — of hydrocarbons with the discovery of huge sub-marine gas deposits on its shores. This means new security problems, new potential conflicts with its neighbors, the beginning of the end of the isolation process and the delegitimization of the Jewish state as complicit in discovering the retaliatory power of oil as an Arab political instrument to blackmail Western countries.

The Middle East is still far from finding peace and stability, but the U.S.-Arab game with Israel — and Israel’s game with the U.S. and the Arabs — is now being played with new cards.