Turks have often pointed to Israeli policy in the Gaza Strip, especially the blockade of the area, as a prime example of its problems with Netanyahu's previous government and the primary obstacle to better relations. This is a principled position, but Ankara seems to have its chronology incorrect. Israel's land closure of Gaza dates to June 2007 and the naval blockade was implemented in January 2009 -- both under the premiership of Ehud Olmert, who after leaving Likud to join Ariel Sharon in his breakaway Kadima Party has developed a reputation as a centrist. There was no way that Netanyahu was going to reverse Olmert's policies and there is a slim chance that that he would do so now even with Yair Lapid -- who is not actually all that to the left on foreign policy -- in his government.

Even if Israelis had given a resurgent Labor Party the most Knesset seats and its leader, Shelly Yachimovich, was tapped to form a government, Israel's land and sea blockade of the Gaza Strip would remain firmly in place. A left-of-center government simply could not be perceived as being soft on security and Gaza. The cliché "only Labor can make war and only Likud can make peace" was coined a long time ago, but it still holds today. Over the last two decades, Israeli prime ministers have consistently been brought down from the right often over some issue related to the country's security. Politics aside, there really is not much disagreement among the country's major political parties that Gaza poses a threat to Israel's security. If the Turkish demand that Israel must lift its closure of Gaza is serious, and there is little reason to believe that it is not, ties between Ankara and Jerusalem are likely to remain strained.

It is not just the Israeli politics of the Gaza blockade or the actual threat from Gaza that is the problem in Turkey-Israel relations. Those who see an opportunity to restore good ties with the emergence of a new Israeli government or who become positively giddy at every leak of high-level contact between Turkish and Israeli officials -- which the Turks invariably deny -- are not paying close enough attention to Turkish politics. Israel is not popular in Turkey and never really was despite the blossoming of strategic relations between Jerusalem and Ankara in 1996. Those ties served the Turkish General Staff's specific national security and, importantly, domestic political interests at a time when the officers' power was at its height. That was during an era before the rise of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) when public opinion mattered very little in Turkish foreign policy.

Prime Minister Erdogan, who is an astonishingly talented politician and has a keen sense of what makes average Turks tick, understands the political benefits that are derived from strained relations with Israel. To be sure, it took Erdogan some time before putting the bilateral relationship on ice. He visited Jerusalem in May of 2005 and invited his then counterpart, Ariel Sharon, to visit Ankara; but as he and the AKP grew more confident at home, relations with the United States improved, and Turkey became a player in the Middle East and wider Islamic world, it became easy to jettison ties with Israel with the approval of many Turks. Israel's only constituency in Turkey includes parts of the business community, but even as Turkish-Israeli trade has continued and even increased, there are few voices who want a resumption of the alignment of the 1990s. Turkey's opposition rebukes Erdogan and the AKP mercilessly on a wide-range of issues, but not on the quality of Ankara's relations with Jerusalem.