Israel and Turkey are to set up a hot line for instant communications, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said yesterday during a visit by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Erdogan is to visit the Al Aqsa Mosque in the Old City of Jerusalem, Islam’s third-holiest site, built on the ruins of the biblical Jewish Temples.
The site, claimed by both Israel and the Palestinians, is one of the most explosive issues in the region.
In a gesture ahead of Erdogan’s trip, Turkey gave the Palestinian Authority the title deeds of lands and property in the West Bank and Gaza it had acquired during the nearly 400-year rule of the Ottoman Empire, the Turkish daily Milliyet reported yesterday.
Turkey hopes the 140,000 pages of deeds, covering the years 1500 to 1914, will help Palestinians defend their rights in local and international courts, the paper said.
Milliyet also reported that Turkey has sent 25,000 police uniforms to the Palestinian security forces.
Israel and Turkey, an overwhelmingly Muslim state, have long had strong military ties and important trade links. But relations grew strained last year when Erdogan, whose party has its roots in Turkey’s Islamic movement, strongly criticised Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.
The hot line between the prime ministers’ offices is to boost joint anti-terror efforts and other co-ordination.
”We learned from experience that even when you have close intelligence contacts there is great significance to contacts between leaders and between countries at the highest level,” Sharon said, noting that Israel already has such hot lines with the US, Britain, the European Union and Russia.
Turkey is one of Israel’s few friends in the Muslim world and the two have close economic and military ties.
Bilateral trade between the countries was estimated at 1.2billion dollars (£630million) in 2002, and Turkey has bought 3billion dollars (£1.6billion) worth of Israeli weapons since 1996. Turkey is also a top foreign vacation destination, visited by some 300,000 Israelis a year.
But relations between the two countries soured amid continued bloodshed between Israel and the Palestinians, with whom many Turks sympathise.
Erdogan called off a previous planned visit last year after Israel killed the leader of the Islamist Hamas militant group, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, in a missile strike.
Relations thawed after Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul visited in January, and Erdogan has expressed hope that Turkey could act as a mediator between Israel and the Muslim world.
Assalamun Aleykum,
More than 1,000,000,000 muslims around the world sitting and watching those who destroy Islam and it's people. I wonder when we wake up and act? I wonder if we ever put ourselves together again and lift up the flag of Islam from the ground. With fall of Ottoman Empire, Islam become leaderless, helpless and idled.
As a Tukish man I feel deeply sorry for what had happened to us muslim world. How jews and others break us into parts and put us into modern dream where technology, money and other joys become most important in ourlives and nobody really do anything about Islam.
I feel sorry for my own country where women can't even wear hijab at schools. How majority of people look at Islam as being old and anti-modern etc. Hopefuly things are changing even in Turkey. We realized that so called modern Turkish republic is not the way. Thousands of schools and tariqats are helping us young Turks to realize how we had been put asleep. InsaAllah one day soon we muslims will rule and be ruled with rules of Allah c.c.
We have hopes from Erdogan where he will make some changes for benefit of Islam in Turkey but things take time. We have been poisoned for many decades and nobody has a magic stick to touch and change things over night.
I pray for unity of Islam and Islamic Nation to rule and fight against west to protect our brothers and sisters right. Such nation to stop crime in Cacania, Iraq, Palestine, Afganistan and so on.
Assalamun Aleykum
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