Couple’s ongoing detention likely means Turkish intel still fishing for Israeli

Turkey’s arrest and detention of an Israeli tourist couple last week, and its insistence on treating them as supposed spies, would appear to run counter to the direction of the country’s foreign policy over the past year.

Having spent most of the last decade picking fights with regional rivals like Greece and Egypt — and, of course, Israel — Ankara has found itself increasingly isolated of late, with Joe Biden, a personal adversary of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, now in the White House.

As he did with Europe and Egypt, once it was clear Biden was going to be the next United States president, Erdogan decided he’d better change his tune toward Israel.

“Our heart desires that we can move our relations with them to a better point,” the Turkish leader said in December. Reports have since emerged that Turkey could return its ambassador to Tel Aviv.

In July, Erdogan congratulated Isaac Herzog on being sworn into his new role as Israel’s president, and noted the importance of relations between the two countries for the sake of regional stability. A spokesman for Erdogan’s AKP party said that in the wake of the call, a “framework emerged” to improve ties between Ankara and Jerusalem.

And yet, Turkey is now holding two Israeli bus drivers, couple Mordy and Natali Oknin, on suspicion of espionage, for photographing Erdogan’s palace in Istanbul last week.

No part of the Turkish claims seems likely. Israel has far more sophisticated ways of attaining photographs of landmark buildings — which doesn’t seem like an especially pressing intelligence priority — than sending two Israeli citizens to openly take pictures in front of them, while speaking Hebrew and posting details of their trip on social media.

Even if Turkish authorities were initially suspicious, the fact that they didn’t release the couple — or at least expel them from the country — after an initial interrogation points to this episode being a piece of a larger puzzle.

President of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdogan gestures at a press conference in Ankara, Turkey, on September 21, 2020. (Adem Altan/AFP)

“The incident contradicts Turkey’s on-and-off overtures to Israel since mid-2020, which were met positively — yet also with skepticism — on the Israeli side,” said Selin Nasi, London Representative of the Ankara Policy Center.

Searching for a bargaining chip

The arrest could have been orchestrated by elements in Turkey’s security establishment that are trying to make it harder for Erdogan to repair ties with Israel.

But the most compelling explanation for Turkey’s behavior ties the detention to an incident in October in which Turkey claimed it had arrested 15 Mossad agents — none of them Israelis — in the country.

“It seems that in exchange for the release of the 15, Turkey demanded something,” posited Hay Eytan Cohen Yanarocak, a Turkey scholar at the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security. “And Israel apparently ignored them,…