Speaking to his ruling party in his hometown of Rize on July 28, 2024, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan threatened to intervene militarily in Israel. “We should be very strong, so that Israel cannot do this stuff to Palestine,” Erdogan said. “Just like we entered Karabakh, just like we entered Libya, we can do similar to them,” he promised. Israeli officials responded angrily. After Israeli Foreign Minister Yisrael Katz suggested Erdogan’s comments were akin to late Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s, the Turkish Foreign Ministry doubled down. “Just as the genocidal Hitler met his end, so will the genocidal Netanyahu,” it tweeted.
Many Israeli academics and analysts seek to contextualize the threats. Generally, they, alongside many American analysts, downplay Erdogan’s threats. Erdogan is prone to polemic, still trades with Israel, and maintains a Turkish embassy in Tel Aviv. Erdogan is also under fire from his own base for his ineffectiveness. Meanwhile, the Turkish lira continues to hemorrhage value and inflation chafes at ordinary Turks.
What to Make of Erdogan’s Israel Threat?
Still, it may be a mistake not to take Erdogan at his word. Erdogan makes no secrecy of his anti-Semitism or his hatred of the Jewish state. He welcomed Hamas to Ankara more than 18 years ago and has since bestowed the group with diplomatic passports to ease their movement, allowed them access to Turkish banks, provided them with intelligence, and even allowed them to plan terrorist operations from Turkish soil. Erdogan has long allowed neo-Ottomanism, the belief that he might leverage Ottoman history to restore Turkey’s influence across the Middle East, North Africa, and the Balkans, to color his thinking. To date, his neo-Ottoman ambitions failed for the simple reason that Turks have a much fonder remembrance of the Ottoman Empire than its subject peoples do. Erdogan especially seeks to restore Turkish influence over Jerusalem and its Islamic holy sites and believes that Palestinians and Arabs would fall in line to answer his call. American policymakers should never forget that ideology can be a drug that clouds judgment and enables delusions of grandeur.
What History Teaches Us
Too often, the State Department rationalizes racism, downplays hate, and writes off direct threats. Thirty-four years ago, Saddam interpreted Ambassador April Glaspie’s lack of concern after his threat to invade Kuwait as a green light to attack his southern neighbor. Ambassador Yuri Kim, the April Glaspie of the current decade, essentially repeated the mistake in her dealings with Erdogan and Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev before Azerbaijan’s ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh last year. Her whispered defense that Aliyev had assured her that he would not invade reflects only her credulity, not wisdom, and it certainly is not exculpatory.
To date, Erdogan’s neo-Ottoman ambitions failed for the simple reason that Turks have a much fonder remembrance of the Ottoman Empire than its subject peoples do.
The true scandal, however, is that if Turkey were to act against Israel, it likely would do so with American weaponry. Certainly, Turkey has its own domestic military industry, largely built on cribbed and stolen American technology, but Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan pushed through Congress a significant upgrade of Turkey’s airpower, essentially rewarding Erdogan’s NATO extortion. Sullivan thought the deal sophisticated and Kissinger-esque, but in actuality, it reflected his ignorance of Erdogan’s true motivations and his failure to understand that Kissinger’s legacy was a net-negative in the Eastern Mediterranean. Certainly, Israel’s F-35s trump Turkey’s F-16s, but the avionics upgrades Biden blessed still mean Turkey has significant lethality. Rewarding Erdogan’s antics rather than tying military relations to an end to Turkey’s northern Cyprus occupation also gives Turkey a forward pad from which to launch its drones or missiles. Indeed, Turkey has already bragged that Geçitkale, as it renamed the occupied Lefkoniko Air Base, will be a drone base from which it can strike all of Israel.
Turkey cannot win a war with Israel, especially given Israel’s nuclear deterrent, but the Turkish military can nevertheless do significant damage. Israel is also vulnerable to a partial blockade, as the Houthis interfere with shipping through the Red Sea and Turkey could do likewise with the Eastern Mediterranean.
As diplomats scramble, they should also recognize that wishful thinking costs lives. Erdogan’s persona today is not a sudden creation but the result of long evolution coupled with the arrogance that comes from believing the West is weak. That he threatens to attack Israel on behalf of Hamas shows his true character. He does so by using weaponry sold and transferred during the Biden administration, which shows Biden, Blinken, and Sullivan’s true characters.
