Israeli Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, has said that the Turkish government headed by Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan is completely uninterested in a diplomatic rapprochement between Ankara and Tel Aviv.
In a statement to Radio Israel following the Turkish government’s insistence on its demand that Israel apologize for last year’s Freedom Flotilla incident as a pre-condition to the normalization of Turkish-Israeli relations, Lieberman said, “It is clear that this person [Erdogan] is not looking for accommodation, peace or normalisation, but wants to humiliate the State of Israel; reduce its international standing, and harm our status in the region,”
Israel has completely refused to apologize for storming the Gaza-bound Turkish ship; the Mavi Marmara last May.
The Israeli Foreign Ministry had approached Ankara with a request that it demonstrates more flexibility toward ending the flotilla crisis through a ‘redeeming formula’ which aims at improving the level of bilateral relations between the two states.