Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan gave an interview to the Guardian today, and the throw-away final sentence is causing a small stir. Quote:
He insisted that the Turkey-Israel strategic alliance – which some AKP insiders have said privately is over – remains alive but chided the Israeli foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, who he said had threatened to use nuclear weapons against Gaza.
Which has led the Israeli press to fly into speculation about how it would impact Israeli-Turkish relations, and led Lieberman’s office to mock it as “nonsense.”
A shrewd political operator as well as a war enthusiast, Lieberman obviously would not have made blatant mention to Israel’s “secret” nuclear arsenal. But Erdogan didn’t just make up this claim either.
At the tail end of the Gaza War, Lieberman was harshly critical of ending the war, declaring instead “we must continue to fight Hamas just like the United States did with the Japanese in World War II” and going into detail about how the US nuclear strikes had “broken the will” of Japan.
Lieberman’s comments came in the context of an opposition figure capitalizing on the Israeli public’s enthusiasm for continuing the war, which killed over 1,400 Palestinians, a political move which swept him into power months later. Technically not a “threat” since he wasn’t in power at the time, yet also far from “nonsense” that Erdogan made up on the spot.