Sitting inside Turkish prisons are 250 senior military officers who are beating themselves up because they were unable to pre-empt Recep Tayyip Erdogan's takeover of their country.
They had the legal right to prevent the rise of Islam in Turkey. The constitution bequeathed to the Turkish nation by its founding father Mustafa Kemal Ataturk obligated them to thwart the revival of religious rule on the banks of the Bosphorus. However, they failed, and were unjustly imprisoned.
But Erdogan still fears them. Both they and Erdogan are observing the dramatic events in Egypt. Erdogan is angry that Col. Gen. Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi and other Egyptian military leaders stymied the "Turkey-ization" of Egypt and sent Mohammed Morsi straight from the presidential palace to prison. Erdogan knows that such moves could spread wildly throughout the Mediterranean basin and threaten his government.
But why did Erdogan take the opportunity to tell members of his party that a leftist Jewish intellectual stated in 2011 that the Muslim Brotherhood would not be able to hold onto power in Egypt even if it was democratically elected? On what basis did Erdogan spout the nonsense that Israel had a hand in the military coup against Egypt's Islamist rulers? Erdogan knows there is not even a kernel of truth to this. If he truly believes what he said, then this is proof that he has lost all contact with reality. Criticism must be based on facts.
It is true that Israel is acting in the diplomatic arena to try to get the West to understand that Egyptian military rule is preferable over the Muslim Brotherhood. Yet Israel only started doing this after the military coup had already taken place. Also, Israel's diplomatic effort is being conducted in light of the puzzling U.S. position on Egypt (which is harming the Egyptian generals in favor of religious fanatics). But Israel took no part in the coup itself.
This is the opposite of how Egypt acted when it coarsely intervened in the Syrian civil war and even used threatening language toward Syrian President Bashar Assad. Israel, on the other hand, has been careful to distance itself from the situation in Syria and avoid taking a stand. If this is how Israel acted regarding the conflict to its north, why would it act any differently on the unrest to its south-
During Morsi's reign, Israel watched with concern the rise of Islam in Cairo and anxiously monitored the fragile cooperation with the Egyptian military in fighting terrorism in the Sinai Peninsula. But Israel tiptoed around Morsi, as Israel had real reason to fear that any intervention on its part would exacerbate Morsi's anti-Israel hostility.
The Egyptian military did not share its plans with Israel. If I were Intelligence Minister Yuval Steinitz, I would look into (for the sake of learning lessons) what Israeli intelligence officials knew or did not know ahead of the coup, so we will not be surprised next time (if there is a next time).
There is not much to Erdogan's verbal outburst. Attributing the coup in Egypt to Israel is standard old-school anti-Semitism, which is typical of Erdogan.
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