Erdoğan: ‘We don’t need Israeli tourists’

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said Tuesday that Turkey is not looking to repair its relations with Israel.

“We do not need Israeli tourists. We have succeeded to fill their places, and, in the past year, 31 million tourists visited Turkey,” he told the Maariv daily, during the regional World Economic Forum summit in Istanbul.

Erdoğan added: “The crisis over the matter of the occupation and relations with Israel is not harming the Turkish economy.”

During a reception in the gardens of the Dolmabahçe Palace during the WEF conference, Erdoğan told Maariv that normalizing relations between Turkey and Israel is conditional on three steps: “First and foremost, Israel must apologize for the raid by Israeli soldiers on the Mavi Marmara ship two years ago. Also, Israel must pay reparations to the families of the victims. The third condition is that Israel end the naval blockade on the import of goods into the Gaza Strip.”

His country would not compromise on those conditions, the Turkish prime minister clarified, even if the crisis between the two nations deepens.

Erdoğan delivered the keynote at the WEF meeting on Tuesday, focusing on both Turkey’s economic growth and what he termed human rights violations in the Gaza Strip.

Without ever uttering the word Israel, Erdoğan accused the Jewish state of “killing innocent people, children, babies, women and the elderly in masses” in aerial bombardments and by keeping people “in the largest open-air prison in the world,” referring to the Israeli blockade of Gaza.

Erdoğan opened the World Economic Forum despite having pledged not to return to the conference after a public altercation with Israeli president Shimon Peres at the 2009 WEF conference in Davos.