The neo-Ottoman claim, the Turkic bloc, and the Baku test — why the Turkish threat aims not at Gaza but at the symbolic center

On June 28, the Israeli government unanimously approved a resolution recognizing the Armenian Genocide — a decision put off for decades precisely so as not to antagonize Ankara and Baku. The reaction was immediate. Turkey condemned the move harshly, tying it to the International Criminal Court warrants and Gaza. On June 29, Azerbaijan joined the Turkish condemnation — an ally of Israel, calling the recognition a distortion of historical facts and urging Jerusalem to reverse it. On July 16, the Knesset vote that would have made the recognition state policy was taken off the calendar before the summer recess. The chamber will not sit again until after the October 27 election.

Three weeks from cabinet decision to shelved bill. That arc is the subject of this article.

This episode is no diplomatic trifle. It exposes what the Dor Moriah mass and expert surveys recorded back in May: the chief Turkish threat to Israel lies not where Israel’s defenses are pointed. It is not a direct intervention in Gaza. Where the Turkish threat is genuinely military, it runs through Syria — through Turkish arms and a presence at Israel’s borders. But Ankara’s main bet is symbolic and ideological, and it is aimed at Jerusalem. And Baku’s turn shows how far the pull of Turkey’s claim to leadership in the Islamic world reaches — and where its limit lies.

Not territory, but status

Turkey’s quarrel with Israel does not reduce to a single conflict. Erdogan’s anti-Zionism, as his June speech showed, is embedded not in the frame of a “Middle Eastern dispute” but in the category of Turkey’s state self-preservation. It is a claim of ontological incompatibility between two projects — and both projects fight not over a plot of land but over status.

The Turkish project is assembled from two sources. The first is neo-Ottomanism: the reactivation of the imperial past as a matrix for regional policy, in which Turkey conceives of itself not as a nation-state but as the heir to a civilizational center. The second is the network of political Islam around the Muslim Brotherhood and the Turkey–Qatar axis — a supra-state identity in which Ankara takes on responsibility for the umma. Fused together, they yield the claim to “ride Islam” — leadership of the Sunni Islamic world.

And this claim has a geographic logic. Leadership of the Islamic world rests on the possession of holy sites: for Saudi Arabia these are Mecca and Medina on the Arabian Peninsula — Islam’s two foremost sanctuaries, which give the kingdom the standing of custodian. Turkey has no sanctuaries of that rank of its own. But there is one it can lay claim to in a pan-Islamist role — Jerusalem, Islam’s third holy site. In Ankara’s picture it is “the most important after Mecca and Medina,” and the contest for it is a way to wrest from the Saudis the title of custodian of Islam. This is precisely why the symbolic prize of Turkish leadership is Jerusalem.

That is why the Turkish presence concentrates not in Gaza, where Israel holds a hard military veto, but in East Jerusalem — through diplomacy, education, religion, the restoration of heritage. This is entry not by force but by........

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