After months of deliberations, Israel has finally announced that it will offer no apology to Turkey for the 2010 raid on the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish ship participating in an international flotilla to break the Gaza blockade. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lobbied hard, according to press reports, for an Israeli apology in order to enable reconciliation between Jerusalem and Ankara. Her effort was misguided: Not only was Israel well within its rights to stop the Islamist activists from supplying Hamas, but had Israel apologized, it would have emboldened and empowered Turkey’s increasingly adversarial prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the man who instigated the crisis in the first place.
Defense Minister Ehud Barak who lobbied for the apology should have known better. He was prime minister during the killing of 12-year-old Muhammad al-Dura incident during a shoot-out between the Israeli Defense Force and Palestinian gunmen. A French cameraman caught the terrified youngster crouching behind his father moments before he was killed, and also caught the aftermath. The video spread like wildfire and al-Dura became an iconical figure for the second Intifada, indeed propelling and prolonging that uprising at the cost of millions of dollars and hundreds of lives. Barak’s government apologized almost immediately for the killing. The only problem was that the Israeli Defense Force hadn’t been the ones who fired the fatal shots. Physically, it wasn’t even possible for them to do so. Years later, an online French media watchdog chronicled how the French camera crew edited the footage to blame Israel and exculpate Palestinians. Yet, because of Barak’s rush to apologize, Israel suffered irreparable harm.
Likewise, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton should know better than to apologize. Madeleine Albright, secretary of state during her husband’s second term, made headlines by apologizing to the Islamic Republic for the U.S. role in the 1953 coup against Prime Minister Muhammad Musaddiq. Putting aside the irony of apologizing to the clerical class that opposed Musaddiq even more fervently than the United States, the Iranian leadership responded by demanding reparations and repercussions, complicating efforts at rapprochement rather than furthering them.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s administration has had its share of self-inflicted wounds. Thankfully, appeasing Turkey’s Vladimir Putin will not be among them.
