Turkey, Israel's new strategic rival?

For decades, Iran has occupied the center of the Israeli strategic imagination. But in recent months, a different debate has begun to emerge: what if the great regional rival of the future were Turkey? Relations between Turkey and Israel have gone, in less than three decades, from a strategic alliance to a rivalry marked by distrust. In the nineties, Ankara and Tel Aviv maintained close military and intelligence cooperation and shared similar concerns about Syria and Iran. Israel considered Turkey its main Muslim partner in the region. In fact, Turkey was the first Muslim-majority country to recognize Israel, in 1949, and Ankara, for its part, sought to strengthen ties with Washington through its relationship with Israel.But the arrival to power of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his party, the Justice and Development Party (AKP), in 2002 began to progressively alter this balance. A shift explained, above all, by the growing centrality of the Palestinian issue in Turkish foreign policy and by increasingly critical rhetoric towards Israel. The deterioration accelerated with the Gaza war of 2008-2009 and the Mavi Marmara flotilla incident in 2010, when an Israeli operation against a humanitarian aid flotilla bound for Gaza ended with the death of nine Turkish citizens. But the Israeli offensive on Gaza after Hamas's attacks on October 7, 2023, has brought tensions to their highest point in decades.Erdogan has repeatedly accused Israel of committing “genocide” in Gaza and has compared Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Hitler. He has also described Israel as a “terrorist state” and argued that its leaders should be tried for war crimes. Israel, for its part, accuses Ankara of providing political cover to Hamas, an organization that Turkey does not consider terrorist, and denounces the continued repression by the Turkish government against the Kurds, an ethnic group spread across Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran.“I would describe the current state of bilateral relations as a total collapse”, Alon Liel, former Israeli ambassador and former Director General of the Israeli Ministry of Economy, explains to ARA. “The two countries are hostile to each other. Relations have been completely emptied of content, and the only thing that still remains is the diplomatic link”.The Palestinian issue, however, is only one part of the problem. One of the other major points of friction is the new Syria after the fall of Al-Assad. Ankara and Tel Aviv have gone from having relatively parallel interests to defending almost incompatible visions about the Syrian future.Divergent interests in Syria

As pointed out by various analysis centers such as the Stimson Center or the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, Turkey is betting on a centralized Syrian state aligned with its sphere of influence, with the aim of reinforcing Syrian state control south of its border and limiting autonomous Kurdish structures. Israel, on the other hand, prefers a more fragmented Syria, with ample room for autonomy for Druze and Kurds, to limit possible threats to its northern border and contain Turkish influence. In this context, Israel has notably expanded its presence in southern Syria, has bombed Syrian military installations, and has offered support to Druze militias.“Neither Turkey nor Israel wants a direct military confrontation in Syria, at least in the short term”, Howard Eissenstat, professor of history at St. Lawrence University in the United States, and author of books on contemporary Turkish politics, describes to ARA. “But both have begun to see each other as potential rivals”. According to him, what is emerging is not so much an open war as “a kind of regional Cold War”, marked by attempts to demonstrate power without reaching a direct confrontation.In Tel Aviv, the possibility of Turkey emerging as the main Sunni regional power in a post-Iranian scenario is particularly concerning. In fact, some Israeli authorities are already openly stating this, such as former Prime Minister and opposition figure Naftali Bennett, who has gone so far as to say that “Turkey is the new Iran”. Nevertheless, analysts continue to qualify the comparison with relations with Iran. Turkey, for example, despite the rhetoric, continues to maintain important economic relations with Israel, with trade that has gone from 3 billion euros in 2010 to 7.4 billion in 2021, according to the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik.According to former Israeli ambassador Alon Liel, Turkey's real ability to become a strategic threat to Israel will depend primarily on Israel's international position and American support. "Turkey could only challenge Israel with the support of the United States. Without this support, it will not dare to do so," he concludes.