Ankara’s revisionist foreign policy thrives on uncontested space, fed by a Western complacency that consistently ignores Turkish expansionism. This aggressive posture materialized in November 2019, when Turkey signed a maritime memorandum with Tripoli’s authorities, carving out a corridor across the Eastern Mediterranean that effectively denied Greek islands such as Crete and Rhodes their lawful maritime zones. While Greece, Cyprus, Egypt, Israel, and the European Union rightly rejected the deal as legally void, Ankara has moved aggressively to enforce its fabricated borders. Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan’s recent outreach to Khalifa Haftar’s camp in Benghazi is the latest phase of this campaign—a calculated move to coerce eastern Libya into validating a revisionist map that directly upends the regional security architecture.

Ankara’s Mediterranean power grab demands an immediate, asymmetric response from Jerusalem, which can no longer afford strategic blind spots on its maritime flank. To blunt Turkey’s Neo-Ottoman expansionism, the Jewish state must finally secure its own waters. In 2017, current Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz proposed a bold counter-strategy: an artificial “Separation Island” off the coast of Gaza to house a commercial port and desalination infrastructure under strict international oversight. Yet despite former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett ordering an IDF feasibility study in........

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