Turkish, Israeli companies engage in big diamond trade

Trade ties between Turkey and Israel increased even during times of diplomatic tension, and a developing diamond business is contributing hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars to this trade, according to Shai Cohen, Israel's outgoing consul general to Istanbul.

"The trade in precious stones, which is not calculated in the classical trade volume, is having very high growth," Cohen told the Hürriyet Daily News in a recent interview.

He said a delegation of 20 people representing Israel's top diamond and other precious stones businesses visited Turkey in May 2015 and a Turkish delegation repaid the visit a few months later.

"They started cutting deals and transactions began," Cohen said.

"When you speak about diamonds, it is hundreds of millions of dollars in trade," he said, adding that giving a concrete figure was not easy in the precious stone market.

Ties between Turkey and Israel suffered badly after the Mavi Marmara incident in May 2010, when Israeli commandos killed 10 people on board a flotilla bound for Gaza from Turkey.

"When the Mavi Marmara incident occurred we were at an approximately $2.8 billion in trade volume," Cohen said.

"Then everybody expected that the situation would deteriorate and trade would be frozen because of the political situation, but the opposite happened and by 2014 we had risen two fold to $5.6 billion. In spite of the Mavi Marmara incident, in spite of the of Gaza war in 2014, trade kept on growing," he added.

"Without the Mavi Marmara incident, we could have reached perhaps $8 billion or $10 billion in trade," he said.

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