Israeli hospital official visits Turkey to counter Gaza publicity, gets a cool reception

Israeli’s media campaign in Turkey

ISTANBUL — A brief visit by an Israeli hospital official was meant to counter tensions over new efforts to break the Gaza blockade, and help to revive damaged ties between Turkey and Israel, both close U.S. allies.

But the cool reception from Turkish media indicated the relationship is a long way from repair, four months after Israel’s deadly raid on a Turkish aid ship.

“It’s still raw here,” said Eli Ovits of The Israel Project, a non-profit group based in Washington that organized the trip to coincide with the arrival in Turkey of a Gaza-bound road convoy from London.

On Tuesday, in another case, the Israeli military said it took control of a boat carrying nine Jewish activists heading toward the Gaza Strip, encountering no resistance as they escorted it to shore.

Turkey, seeking the role of mediator in Middle East peace efforts, had sought to capitalize on its unique position as a predominantly Muslim ally of Israel and a friend to its traditional foes in the region. But relations hit a low when nine Turkish activists, including a dual Turkish-American citizen, were killed in May 31 clashes with naval commandos who boarded an international flotilla heading for Gaza.

Turkey seeks an apology and compensation for the families of the slain men, conditions that Israel has said it will not meet. The U.N. Human Rights Council is investigating.

With the governments at an impasse, Lea Malul, spokeswoman for the Barzilai Medical Center in Ashkelon, an area near Gaza that is prone to rocket attacks by Hamas militants, tried her hand as a private citizen. She held a dozen interviews Monday to counter negative perceptions about Israel, saying the hospital treats Israelis and Palestinians alike, and that Israeli civilian security was in peril.

“Nobody in the world would accept living under these kinds of conditions,” Malul said in a meeting room of a highrise hotel. At one point, she heard the dim wail of a siren in the street below and said it took her an instant to realize she didn’t have to run for cover.

“We’re trying to break down the stereotypes and start a dialogue,” Ovits said. While “people aren’t necessarily willing to even have a different perspective at the moment,” he said, the Turkish journalists were generally willing to listen and some expressed sympathy.

The Israel Project says it is not government-linked, though it has tight relations with the government, frequently sponsoring meetings for foreign journalists in Israel with top Cabinet officials. There was a sense among Turkish journalists, however, that they were being fed the Israeli government line by a hospital official who was ostensibly on a private visit.

“She was very aggressive in the way she spoke to me and I didn’t like it at all. That’s the reason I started to suspect the truthfulness of the information she gave me,” Mustafa Yilmaz, a writer for Today’s Zaman newspaper, said Tuesday.

“I challenged her during the interview, but she sometimes referred to some verses in the Torah, trying to make a foundation for her argument.”

The fact that the Israelis could visit Turkey and meet major media groups — an impossibility in most of the Middle East — was a sign of routine contact between the two countries, which share daily air connections and growing trade. Ovits and Malul, however, said some journalists told them that some of their statements could not be published because they did not conform with the Turkish government line.

Turkish media, a cacophony of views on most issues, have been uniformly critical of Israel over the flotilla incident.

By contrast, on Tuesday, a 50-vehicle convoy led by former British lawmaker George Galloway and bound for Gaza drove through Istanbul; some activists waved Palestinian, Turkish and peace flags. The group visited the cemetery where some of the Turkish activists killed by the Israeli commandos were buried, and prayed for them.

Despite the stream of interviews with the Israelis, coverage of their visit was sparse. The English-language Hurriyet Daily News quoted Malul as saying that aid convoys to Gaza were hurting peace prospects because of their support for Hamas, which does not recognize Israel.

Sami Kohen, former editor of Milliyet newspaper and a columnist on foreign policy, said Malul told him about her hospital’s work during a telephone conversation. He maintained that the opinions of Israelis, especially moderate ones, should be heard in Turkey.

“The media should be more objective. It should give space to other views as well,” he said. Though right now, he said, “no one is ready to hear the other words.”