As US President Donald Trump visits Ankara for the annual NATO summit, Israel is doing what it can to convince the White House not to provide Turkey with advanced military hardware that would drastically improve its air force.

During a Friday phone call, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly urged Trump not to sell Turkey fighter jet engines or allow Ankara back into the F-35 program.

In a Monday interview with Fox News, Netanyahu called Turkey “a regime infected by the Muslim Brotherhood, an extreme movement that hates America and chants ‘Death to America.’”

“I don’t think they should be given F-35s or engines for their fighter jets,” he declared.

Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar has also joined the rhetorical campaign, accusing his Turkish counterpart of incitement to genocide after he called Israel a “burden that humanity can no longer bear” and said it was a “problem” for the world.

Israeli leaders’ statements aren’t a backhanded attempt to undermine another regional power. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has indeed positioned himself as a leading critic of Israel, and his government openly backs and hosts Hamas.

Yet despite Erdogan’s dismantling of Turkish democracy, extreme anti-Israel rhetoric, and support for a terrorist group, Jerusalem is unlikely to succeed in driving a wedge between Washington and Ankara. Hosting world leaders for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization confab, Turkey is consolidating its position in the region and beyond, while Israel is trending in the opposite direction.

“It’s symbolic, but it also says something about the status of Turkey,” said Nimrod Goren, president of Mitvim – The Israeli Institute for Regional Foreign Policies.

And, indeed, at a joint press appearance with Erdogan in Ankara on Tuesday, Trump said “we would consider” selling F-35s to Turkey, and noted “we have a better relationship with Turkey, and Turkey has been in many ways much more loyal, than other countries.”

For much of the decade after the Arab Spring protests erupted in 2011, Turkey pursued an aggressive policy in the eastern Mediterranean that antagonized regional powers and pushed its rivals to ally with one another.

Erdogan backed the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt after the group was ousted from power in Cairo in 2013. The rivalry between the two Sunni Muslim powers metastasized into other areas and split the Middle East, with Turkey and Qatar leading a pro-Islamist faction, and Egypt siding with Saudi Arabia and the UAE in a pro-Western camp.

In the Mediterranean, Egypt aligned itself with Greece and Cyprus, which accuse Turkey of illegally drilling for natural gas in their exclusive economic zones. Together with Israel, the countries formed the EastMed Gas Forum, headquartered in Cairo, and conducted joint military exercises.

Ankara also faced worsening ties with Europe. Erdogan, who has stoked Islamist sentiment, infuriated French and EU officials by stating that President Emmanuel Macron needed “mental treatment” for condemning the beheading of a teacher who had displayed a picture of the Prophet Muhammad.

Refugees were also an ongoing sticking point, with Erdogan threatening to let migrants fleeing from Africa and the Mideast across its border into Greece if the EU did not keep its end of a 2016 refugee........

© The Times of Israel