After Iran, Is Israel Now Targeting Turkey? Ankara Quickly Moves to Hedge Itself

Israel’s strategy in the Middle East is changing: the country is shifting from a targeted response to threats to a systemic containment of all regional players capable of challenging it. After Iran, Turkey has come into focus.

Once allies, Turkey and Israel are now emerging as rival powers whose regional ambitions are becoming increasingly difficult to reconcile. From Syria to the Eastern Mediterranean, their strategic theatres are overlapping while military signalling is becoming more explicit. After Iran, is Ankara becoming Israel’s next major regional adversary?

The answer is not yet a war. But the relationship is increasingly being shaped by what international relations theory calls a security dilemma: measures taken by one actor to increase its security are interpreted by another as preparations for aggression, prompting countermeasures that make both sides less secure.

In this theoretical framework, Turkey’s efforts to increase its security, such as strengthening its military presence in Syria, developing autonomous defence capabilities, and building new security partnerships, as the Mecca Defence Agreement, may be interpreted by Israel as threatening, prompting Israeli countermeasures that, in turn, reinforce Ankara’s perception that it needs greater security.

The danger is particularly acute because Turkey is not Iran. It is a NATO member, a major regional power, and an increasingly autonomous military-industrial actor. It also occupies a geopolitical position connecting Europe, the Middle East, the Black Sea, the Caucasus, and Central Asia.

The emerging confrontation is therefore about more than Gaza or rhetoric between Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Benjamin Netanyahu. It concerns the future structure of power in the Middle East.

Syria has become the fault line

For nearly three decades, Turkey and Israel maintained an unusually close strategic relationship. Both were non-Arab regional powers aligned with Washington, and both benefited from a regional order in which their strategic interests could coexist.

That order has now largely disappeared.

The fall of Bashar al-Assad transformed Syria from a buffer between competing powers into an arena for competing projects of regional order. Ankara sees Syria as central to its national security and its wider regional strategy. Israel, meanwhile, has sought to........

© New Eastern Outlook