(NEWS) Saying 'Tel Aviv' On The Streets Of Istanbul

"Israelis and Turks have a lot in common.

I was speaking to a bartender recently who responded to my telling him that I live in Tel Aviv by saying 'Ah, Falastine?' When I corrected him, saying that the area is not contested, though there are other areas that I hoped would one day be part of Palestine, he shrugged and said, 'I really don't know enough to comment.'

I met said bartender, secular, in his early thirties and from the south of Turkey, during a long weekend in Istanbul, after the most recent diplomatic breakdown between Israel and Turkey following the IDF's interception of a Gaza-bound flotilla last month, but before the Prime Minister’s Office Counter-Terrorism Bureau lifted a travel advisory which recommended that Israelis refrain from visiting Turkey."