The Government of Israel, we learned yesterday from a Turkish source, has delivered Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) equipment by ELTA, a subsidiary of Israel Aerospace Industries, that gives military aircraft protection from electronic attacks. Not only will the AWACS planes, in the wording of the Today's Zaman article, "greatly increase [the Turkish air force's] dominance over Turkey's own airspace" but they will also be useful to it in the Syrian civil war and vis-à-vis "tensions with Israel and Greek Cyprus over the issue of gas drilling."
 What a Turkish air force AWACS looks like. |
Israel Defense continues: "There are voices within the Israeli defense establishment calling for the end of the Marmara crisis vis-à-vis Turkey, by finding a formula of apology, in order to return to the Israeli-Turkish alliance against Syria and Iran."
Comments: (1) As the Turkish newspaper itself notes, the AWACS will potentially be used against Israel in the Mediterranean Sea. (2) This move fits into a larger pattern of an Israeli and more broadly a Western reluctance to recognize the AKP-dominated government of Turkey as hostile. Neither appeasement nor seduction will work. The time has come to see Erdoğan & Co. as the opponents they are. (February 18, 2013)
