If you were to ask people who read the newspapers of Israel about the “Turkish Betrayal”, you’d likely get a good conversation and a lot of opinions about what’s going on.  They’d almost be drowned out by the silence from the Israeli government and Washington, DC over what could be a harbinger of a shift in the Mideast.

It started last week, with the Washington Post column by David Ignatius, quoting “knowledgeable sources” who say Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan deliberately gave up the identities of Israeli intelligence operatives in Iran.  The ten Iranians had been meeting in Turkey with Israeli intelligence case officers.

While many in Israel are outraged at the quick deterioration of the Ankara-Jerusalem relationship, other accuse Turkish intelligence chief Hakan Fidan of being a fan of Iran’s Islamist form of government and long suspected him of engineering Turkey’s move away from the west.

Turkey condemned the report as a “smear campaign”.  But Israel is holding its cards closer to the vest.  And Washington – which didn’t muster more than a little criticism for Turkey’s thuggish crackdown on protesters opposed to Erdogan’s veering further and further from Turkey’s 90-plus years of secular government – hasn’t commented and according to Ignatius, didn’t even lodge a protest with Erdogan.

It comes at a time when Israel is feeling more isolated as traditional western allies reach out to Iran and its new more-moderate president.