Though Israelis and Palestinians get most of the limelight, much of the script is written elsewhere. The newest entrant in the larger drama is Turkey, where the flotilla was financed and put to sea. Ankara’s fierce response to the incident was a rallying cry to the region. Next to Iran, Nato member Turkey is now the biggest headache for the west. With Egypt sinking into torpor and Riyadh firmly ensconced on the fence between Washington and Tehran, Turkey has seen the leadership of the region up for grabs – and is going for it. It has drawn Syria into its orbit and has reached a nuclear deal with Iran, its rival for hegemony.
With Turkey's thousands of miles of un-police-able, porous borders with Syria, Iraq and Iran; with Hizbollah setting up shop in its mediaeval east; with its unashamed ethnic cleansing of Greeks from its Europe-facing west and determined but unmentionable siege of the Orthodox Christian Patriarch in his own city - the former Byzantium, mother city of half the Christian world; with its Islamist governing party quietly placing its people in key positions throughout the state machinery while of course proclaiming to Westerners that Turkey remains the secular state devised by Ataturk; with a front organisation (the IHH) for the islamofascist Muslim Brotherhood operating openly both in Istanbul and on the high seas under the Turkish flag, it is clear that Turkey is turning East.
Turkey remains, on the face of things, an enthusiastic applicant for EU membership but the realpolitik fact is that the French dream of Turkey in the EU (whatever that now is...), as a surrogate for France's beloved Arabia, is not shared by those now shaping the destiny of Turkey.
Boris Johnson, for all his talents, is a romantic fool to cling to Ataturk's failed dream, and indeed that of his own ancestors, a dream which envisages a future for Turkey as a cosmopolitan, tolerant and civilised secular state in which the classical virtues (as in Pergamum, Asclepieum, Smyrna, Sardis, Ephesus and Nicea) of learning and international conversation can thrive; a Byzantium-lite adornment to the European Union, while - purely incidentally - Turkey's membership of the brotherhood of European nations would demonstrate that Europe is in no way anti-Islamic.
Unfortunately for those who dream such dreams, Turkey, with its previously unthinkable but rapid proliferation of hijabs, niqabs and burkas, is now looking to Mecca and farther East for spiritual direction; to America and Israel for enemies against which to define itself; and to the EU (mainly to wealthy France, Germany and Britain) merely for lebensraum for its millions of illiterate, unemployable peasantry. Oh, and of course for economic handouts. But then there was, ironically for the Turks, Greece, of all things. Who says the ancient deities have no sense of humour?
Turkey is angry. Its application to join the EU has obliged it to discard its idiosyncratic and anachronistic customs, specifically those concerning justice and liberty, in favour of European principles which conflict head-on with its own rather brusque traditions and with the repressive and misogynistic practices of Islam, although of course open discussion of this difficulty is strongly discouraged by the European (and British) political class who choose to believe that Turkey will come around to acknowledging that our ways are superior to theirs and will happily adopt them in due course. And yet, and yet, Turkey's embrace in Europa's bosom is postponed again and again.
Not only is Turkey irritated by the cultural hurdles being placed in its path by Europe, flower-decked though they are by NATO to protect its vital interests (for now), but it is also true - and Turkey knows it - that the insulted, threatened and disgruntled peoples of Europe, while not allowed to say so aloud, are becoming ever more anti-Islamic and therefore, by association, disposed against Turkish membership of the EU.
Cyprus, which Turkey must resolve before it can be accepted into the EU (a mere theory - it won't happen) doesn't help.
Millions of individual and mostly secular Turks are leaving or have already left Turkey and set up home in places like North London and of course all over Germany. Their cousins back home have to be careful about what they say about politics and religion and to whom they say it, especially if they want a public sector job. Turks who don't like the direction Turkey is taking have already voted with their feet if they can, opting for the freedoms of Europe, such as they are and until our citizens are as suppressed as the Turks and for the same reason. Many, many more would follow them if they could.
The misty romantic view of Turkey glimpsed from Boris's window on the Bosphorus and from Norman Stone's ivory tower bears little relation to the political and cultural reality of the seething chaos that is the once-cosmopolitan, once-imperial, giant neighbour of Mesopotamia, Persia and Arabia, its head turning this way and that as it contemplates the choice between the East where it could play a powerful role and the West where it most definitely could not.
** UPDATE **
Christopher Hitchens is thinking related thoughts about [Turkish Prime Minister] Erdogan's long-term design to de-secularize Turkey...
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