Turkey’s return to the east

The deep involvement by Turkey’s prime minister in the recent conflict between Israel and Gaza marked Ankara’s return, after an absence of nearly a century, into the fold of Middle Eastern politics. This was something Mustapha Kemal Ataturk, the architect of the post-Ottoman Turkish Republic, wanted very much to avoid. Indeed, much to the chagrin of many of his compatriots, Prime Minister Receb Tayyip Erdogan’s Islamist Justice and Development Party openly sympathized with Hamas in the recent war in Gaza, and that despite cordial relations between Turkey and Israel and Turkey’s neutral stance in the Arab-Israel conflict. For many Turks, the prime minister’s change of direction in foreign policy is seen as a serious deviation from Kemalist tenet. Ataturk, the architect of the new republic, was a great visionary who wanted to take Turkey out of the Levant once and for all, and bring it into Europe, where he felt