JERUSALEM — Suggesting a new strategic alliance in the Middle East, the Israeli and Turkish navies, accompanied by a U.S. destroyer, carried out their first joint military maneuvers Wednesday, with a Jordanian admiral observing the search-and-rescue drill.
All four nations rejected Iranian and Arab charges that the exercise with five warships and more than 1,000 sailors in the eastern Mediterranean was aggressive, saying it was strictly humanitarian and had no military objective.
"There is nothing here directed against any other country in the region or elsewhere," Israeli Defense Minister Yitzhak Mordechai said after his helicopter landed on a participating Israeli ship. "There is no conspiracy. . . . The whole purpose is to create coordination and cooperation for the sake of saving human lives and to work together in the Mediterranean basin."
Still, the exercise, dubbed "Reliant Mermaid," might well have been named "Common Enemy." Security cooperation among Israel, Turkey and the United States clearly illustrated a new power axis in the Middle East and the axiom that "My enemy's enemy is my friend."
Israel, a Jewish state, and Turkey, a secular state with a Muslim majority, signed their first military cooperation agreement in February 1996 and have been forging ties at a rapid pace since. They share a common enemy in Syria, which is sandwiched between the two countries, and both see Iran and Iraq as potential threats.
Jordan signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1994 and sees the bilateral relationship as a card it might need to use one day if hostilities arise with its neighbors Syria and Iraq.
Meanwhile, Turkey, whose 27-year-old application to join what is now the European Union was rejected last month, has thrown its lot in with the United States, which has its own conflicts with Iraq and Iran. Israel is the main U.S. ally in the region.
"The maneuvers symbolize the new Middle East, a new balance of power in which Turkey and Israel cooperate and the United States supports this cooperation, despite Arab screams," said Efraim Inbar, director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar Ilan University in Tel Aviv.
"Turkey is taking care of its interests and has made a decision not to pay attention to [Arab and Iranian] complaints," he added. "Whatever the costs, they have made a clear decision that the benefits of an open relationship with Israel are higher."
