Listen up! It's time to fan the fire of sedition in Turkey ...

I bet people in that big colony are hard at work to wiggle through the cracks...

Yigal Schleifer in the WPR/ here

"... In that sense, the current crisis -- while helping shape and define what may turn out to be a new regional role for Ankara -- could also serve to further expose and sharpen domestic political divisions within Turkey, some of which the AKP may find spinning out of its control.

A clash over Gaza between Turkey and Israel was, in many ways, an event foretold. Since the Gaza war in early 2009, Turkey has clearly pegged its relationship with Israel to the Palestinian issue -- or, to be more specific, to the situation in Gaza and the status of Hamas, as the West Bank and its Fatah leadership are rarely mentioned by Ankara. The Turkish formula has been simple: An improvement in the situation in Gaza will lead to an improvement in ties with Israel. Likewise, any deterioration in the Gazans' circumstances will lead to a further scaling-down of relations with Israel.

Although technically not a bilateral issue between the two countries, the situation in Gaza has in many ways become the defining issue in their relations. In that sense, although the Gaza aid flotilla was organized by a Turkish NGO -- the Islamist IHH -- and was not sponsored by the Turkish government, it was acting as a proxy for Turkish policy. Also, because the Turkish government had elevated the Gazans' cause to a level of such political importance, there was little room for it to work out a diplomatic solution to the impending crisis, lest it be accused by its opposition -- particularly on the Islamist right -- of abandoning the Gazans.

With a general election coming up in about a year's time, the AKP now faces a resurgent Islamist right that has gained renewed political clout because of the flotilla incident. Meanwhile, a reformed secularist opposition with new leadership is promising to go after the government where it is most vulnerable: over issues such as unemployment and corruption. As a result, the AKP could find it expedient to continue turning the heat up on the Israel front, taking an increasingly more populist line on the issue.

"This is now going to be part and parcel in the internal tug of war between the AKP and the other political parties in Turkey," says Gencer Ozcan, a professor of international relations at Istanbul Bilgi University. "In this case, [Prime Minister Recep Tayyip] Erdogan is not going to defuse the tension."

Speaking on Sunday, Erdogan already went after Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the new leader of the Republican People's Party, the main secularist opposition party, for his approach to the flotilla incident. "Some people speak in the name of Tel Aviv, advocate for Tel Aviv," Erdogan said. "They question our way of diplomacy."

But beyond electioneering, increased tension with Israel could also help the AKP make further gains in its ongoing effort to reduce the Turkish military's control over the state. As Israeli researcher and Turkey expert Anat Lapidot-Firilla recently put it, such an approach would emphasize "the support of the defense establishment and the Kemalist bureaucracy to immoral Israel and the lack of interest in the fate of their Muslim brethren in Palestine."

Nevertheless, using the flotilla incident as a domestic political issue could prove problematic for the AKP government. An increasingly pointed stance could ultimately allow the AKP to own the issue domestically and regionally, but at the cost of putting it at odds with Washington and other traditional allies, who would like to quickly repair the damage caused by the event.

In a sign that moderate Turkish Islamic circles might themselves be concerned about a rightward shift in Ankara's policy, Fethullah Gulen, a U.S.-based Turkish imam with a strong following in Turkey, criticized the organizers of the Gaza flotilla in an interview published in last Friday's Wall Street Journal. The organizers' failure to reach an agreement with Israel "is a sign of defying authority, and will not lead to fruitful matters," said Gulen, whose movement in Turkey controls several media outlets and business groups, and wields a high level of political influence.

At a time when Turks are being told to that their country has "zero problems with neighbors" and that it is now time to reconcile with Kurds, Armenians, Cypriots, Greeks, Arabs and all their other historical enemies, Israel seems to be emerging as the "replacement rival" for a country long used to having foes. This, combined with the long odds on any significant short-term progress on the Gaza front, will likely make the current tension with Israel a potent -- and volatile -- tool in Turkey's domestic political arena for quite some time."