Turkey has made great strides in meeting Kurdish demands for language and cultural autonomy and there are plenty of Kurds in the Turkish parliament. But like Hamas, the PKK wants the complete elimination of the Turkish state's right to control its internal and external borders and that is a concession no Turkish democratically elected politician can make.

Mr Cameron might also have quoted the new Turkish opposition leader, Kemal Kilicdaroglu. He is known as Ghandi in Turkey and there are high hopes that his leadership of the CHP secular opposition party may allow new space for non-Islamist politics in Turkey. He was critical of the Gaza flotilla which was a deliberate provocation aimed at creating precisely the violence which short-sighted Israeli military over-reaction turned into world headlines.

But Mr Kilicdaroglu has asked publicly why the Turkish government allowed this flotilla to set sail when it was clear it was designed to produce the result it did. To be sure, the death of nine Turkish civilians, the first time in decades Turkish civilians have been killed by foreign soldiers caused outrage in Turkey.

Israel might say sorry though it has taken the British government 37 years to apologise for the killing of 13 unarmed people in Derry during the IRA terror campaign. And Turkey has yet to say sorry for the deaths of Armenians at Turkish military hands in 1915. In the House of Commons, Mr Cameron's deputy prime minister recently described the Iraq intervention as "illegal" even if Mr Cameron and most Tories voted to remove  Saddam Hussein and uphold UN resolutions.

The junior partners in the coalition, the Liberal Democrats, are riddled with anti-Israeli MPs with at least one, now promoted to the House of Lords considered to be openly anti-Semitic by Britain's Jewish community. Mr Cameron went out of his way before the election to praise Britain's Jews and to express support for Israel. His language in Ankara may be put down to naivety or inexperience though Foreign Office officials have never looked kindly on Israel and the new Foreign Secretary, William Hague, insists the British diplomacy has to turn to Gulf states and the Muslim nations of north Africa.

Britain and the new prime minister should support Turkey's European ambition. But this is not the way to do it and lambasting Israel because Hamas keeps Gaza under its extremist control does justice to neither truth nor good politics.