Abstract
In the evening of 28 August, 1958, after a meeting of the General Staff of the Israeli Armed Forces, David Ben Gurion, the first prime minister and founder of the Jewish state, changed into civilian clothes and left in an unknown direction.
Rumor within his entourage had it that he had gone to the Negev Desert to test a new secret weapon.
Before long, however, the Israeli prime minister’s car turned and headed for a military airfield where an airplane was already waiting with its engines running. A little later it took off and became air-borne, hovered over the sea, and then set course for the north. For many years Ben Gurion’s flight remained a mystery. At the time he met with leaders of a certain country and signed a treaty of friendship and cooperation, which came as a final chord in the formation of “cordon sanitaire”around Israel, on the perimeter of its borders with Arab states—a whole network of secret treaties in the Near and Middle East that came to be known as “periphery pact.”
The drastic changes that occurred in the Middle East in the late 1950s, related to the strengthen-ing of Soviet influence in the region and the de fac-to collapse of the Baghdad Pact (following Iraq’s withdrawal from it in the wake of a coup led by Col.
assem), forced Ankara to accede to Tel Aviv’s plans to build an anti-Arab alliance. It was for a secret meeting with Turkish leadership that David Ben Gurion flew on 28 August, 1958.
The event set the stage for the evolution of close contacts between the two countries, above all in the military-political sphere. Despite the ups and downs, sometimes even a cooling of relations, by the mid-1990s, their relationship began to acquire more substance and elements of a strategic partnership, giving many experts on Middle East security cause to talk about formation of a military-political alliance between Turkey and Israel. This has become a key factor in regional security at the con-temporary stage.
The present article will consider only the contemporary status and prospects for their military-political and military-technical cooperation as well as its impact on regional security problems.
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