TURKEY and Israel are to announce an agreement on the normalisation of bilateral ties, ending six years of a freeze in relations, after a series of talks in Switzerland.
eporting on Tuesday, Turkey’s Hurriyet daily said the two sides would make the announcement during final talks on the issue on June 26, with an agreement to be signed in July.
In September 2010, Turkey suspended its military ties with Israel and expelled the Israeli envoy from Ankara over Tel Aviv’s refusal to apologise over its killing of ten Turkish nationals aboard the Mavi Marmara aid vessel that was seeking to break the siege of Gaza.
Ankara conditioned the normalisation on an Israeli apology, compensation for the victims, and Tel Aviv’s lifting of its siege of the Gaza Strip. Israel has reportedly met the first two demands and has said that it wants to take moves aimed at easing the plight of the Gazans.
Turkey and Israel see eye-to-eye on the conflict in Syria and are determined to topple President Bashar al-Assad. This position is supported by the Jordanian and Saudi monarchies and the Gulf caliphates. Turkey has been allowing terrorists safe passage into Syria over its border, both ways, while Israel has set up hospitals near the border with Syria on the Golan Heights to treat terrorists injured in fighting with Syrian troops.
Meanwhile, imperialist interventions into Syria are increasing after the threats by US Secretary of State Kerry that he had run out of patience with President Assad and his Russian allies. Four US soldiers have already been injured in Syria on June 9th, when ISIS attacked the US forces with an anti-tank rocket.
The Pentagon is refusing to publicly address the reports of US troops supporting Kurdish forces in northern Syria. This support involves hundreds of special forces who are working closely with a collection of various armed groups that are trying to topple the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
The US has also been supplying the militants with ammunition and anti-tank missile systems. Pentagon statistics show that 15 US troops have been killed in non-combat situations as part of the so-called US-led coalition’s military effort against the ISIS terror group.
The conflict is now being spread into Jordan. At least six Jordanian soldiers were killed and 14 wounded after a car bomb exploded near the country’s border with Syria on Tuesday, Jordanian officials said. The attack early on Tuesday in the al-Rukban district, opposite a Syrian refugee camp which houses about 70,000 people, was part of a coordinated attack involving multiple vehicles.
Meanwhile Israel, which possesses hundreds of atomic bombs, says it is not yet ready to ratify a UN pact on banning nuclear tests adopted nearly 20 years ago. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Lassina Zerbo, the head of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) organisation, on Monday that Tel Aviv’s ratification of the pact ‘is dependent on the regional context and on the appropriate timing,’ the Israeli daily Jerusalem Post reported.
Senior Russian senator Frantz Klintsevich commented on Tuesday that if the United States indeed had learned any lessons from the 2003 invasion of Iraq then Washington would have given up its attempts to topple Assad. ”I’m not sure that the US indeed learned any lessons from the intervention in Iraq. In this case, they would have abandoned any attempts to remove Syrian President Bashar Assad and allowed people to choose the fate of the current authorities themselves,’ said Klintsevich.
Far from learning any lesson the US, UK, Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Israel are getting ready for a new assault on Assad and his allies in the Hezbollah movement in the Lebanon. In fact, senior Israeli commanders have vowed to turn Lebanon into a ‘nation of refugees’.
Faced with this renewed threat to the Syrian people, workers in the West must warn their governments that any new attack on Syria will be met with general strikes to overthrow them and aid the victory of the Syrian people.
