Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent apology to his Turkish counterpart Tayyip Recep Erdoğan for the 2010 flotilla incident came within a day of PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan’s declaration of a truce in his group’s ongoing conflict with Turkey. While these two developments are independent of each other, Kemal Kirisci writes both might be potential game changers within the wider Middle East, raising the prospects of an alternative Middle East where conflicting parties become capable of again talking to each other to resolve their differences.