https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/israeli-tourist-couple-freed-after-8-days-illegal-ari-lieberman/
An Israeli couple, illegally detained for eight days by Turkish authorities on spurious charges of espionage and spying, was released yesterday and returned to Israel following intense back-channel diplomatic efforts to free them. Their detention highlights the extent to which Turkey, under the leadership of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has descended into a moral abyss with arbitrary arrests and detention being the norm rather than an aberration.
The saga involving the couple – Mordy and Natalie Oknin – began late last week when they were arrested by Turkish police ostensibly for taking photos of Erdogan’s Istanbul palace. Their guide was also arrested. The couple – both employees of the Israeli Egged bus company – claimed that they were unaware of the prohibition on taking photos but irrespective, the subject area, which is a common tourist attraction, had been photographed thousands of times in the past by thousands of tourists.
Cognizant of the minimal nature of the transgression, Turkish police were originally inclined to releasing the two and deporting them from the country. Even that action would have been draconian but what occurred next appeared to be taken from a chapter straight out of Orwell’s 1984. Turkish prosecutors, almost certainly acting on orders from higher political echelons, elected to charge the pair with “political and military espionage,” prompting the notoriously corrupt Turkish judiciary to extend their detention by at least 20 days.
At that stage, Israeli officials still hoped that the issue would be resolved swiftly because no high-level Turkish official publicly addressed the matter. Hopes were quickly dashed, however, when to Israel’s dismay, Turkey’s interior minister, Suleyman Soylu, called the Israelis spies.
