Israel should adopt a dramatically more aggressive policy toward Turkey, Yesh Atid party leader Yair Lapid said on Thursday in response to ongoing criticism from Ankara of the government’s recent actions on the Temple Mount, The Times of Israel reported.
While stopping short of calling for diplomatic ties to be cut, the opposition lawmaker said Jerusalem should recognize an independent Kurdistan and acknowledge the Armenian genocide, which Ottoman Turks committed a century ago.
“It’s time, generally speaking, to stop groveling before the Turks, who keep kicking us harder and harder,” Lapid told reporters during a briefing in Tel Aviv. “We will do the things we avoided doing as long as we had good relations with Turkey, because we don’t have any [now] and won’t have any [in the future],” he added.
The source reminds that many countries avoid acknowledging the events between 1915 and 1923, during which Ottoman forces massacred Armenian citizens in a systematically planned act of ethnic cleansing, as genocide out of concern for their ties to Turkey, which is a NATO member and an important Muslim ally of many Western countries.
To note, Lapid’s comments come amid increasing bilateral tensions over Turkey’s comments on Israel’s imposition of new security measures in the wake of a terror attack on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount.