Israel seeking support from Turkey, better ties

On her first overseas trip as the foreign minister of Ehud Olmert's newly formed government, Livni met Yigit Alpogan, general secretary of the National Security Council, before talks with her Turkish counterpart Abdullah Gul.

Relations between the two neighbours cooled in February when Turkey invited officials of Hamas to Ankara after the radical Islamist movement's victory in Palestinian parliamentary elections, sparking a furious response from Israel.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Islamist-rooted government defended the talks as part of efforts to put pressure on Hamas to renounce violence, but Israel warned that bilateral ties might suffer.

Ankara also said that the Hamas delegation was not a guest of the Turkish government but of Erdogan's ruling Justice and Development Party, which has its roots in a banned Islamist movement but now defines itself as "conservative."

Livni said in a weekend interview that the dispute was now in the past.

"I am not coming to discuss this little incident in the past, but to hold talks that will strengthen our ties, which are founded on common values," Livni told Turkey's liberal Milliyet daily newspaper on Saturday.

"Turkey and Israel share the same opinion that Hamas must change its views," Livni said. "The discussion between us arose from a difference in tactics."

Media reports said that during her talks here -- the highest-level contact between the two allies since the Hamas crisis -- Livni will also seek Ankara's support for Olmert's controversial unilateral disengagement plan from the Palestinian territories.

Turkey has close ties with both Israel and the Palestinians, and Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas was in Ankara in April to seek ways of resuming direct financial aid to his administration, cut off by the United States and the European Union after Hamas' election victory.

Muslim Turkey, which has a strictly secular political system, has always maintained diplomatic relations with Israel and has been its main regional ally since 1996, when the two countries signed a military cooperation agreement, much to the ire of regional Arab countries and Iran.

"The fact that the minister chose Turkey for her first official visit reflects the importance which we attach to our relations with Ankara," an Israeli foreign ministry spokesman told AFP.

Livni, who began her visit in Istanbul on Sunday, is scheduled to meet later Monday with Erdogan and President Ahmet Necdet Sezer and to hold a press conference after her talks with Gul.

Sezer is expected to visit Israel from June 6 to 8.

While in Istanbul, Livni kept a low profile, dining with a few senior journalists and visiting the Neve Shalom synagogue, one of the targets in a series of November 2003 suicide bombings in Istanbul, blamed on Al-Qaeda linked local extremists, which claimed more than 60 lives in all.

She is scheduled to leave Turkey in the evening.

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