With a sense of impunity encouraged by President Donald Trump’s friendship with President Recep Tayyip Erdoǧan and U.S. ambassador Tom Barrack’s business dealings, the Erdoǧan regime has taken its anti-Israel vitriol to a new level.
Turgut Özal, prime minister and later president of Turkey between 1983 and 1993, masterminded tight military and diplomatic ties between Israel and Turkey. There was always solidarity between the two countries. In 1949, Turkey was the first Muslim-majority country to recognize Israel. Turks traditionally respected Jews because, of all the minorities who lived under the Ottoman Empire, the Jews were nearly alone to not rebel against Turkish rule.
[Turgut Özal] believed that, like Israel, Turkey’s future lay with Europe rather than the broader Middle East or Islamic world.
Özal believed Israel and Turkey faced common threats, both from terrorism and rejectionist Arab states. He saw Israel as a natural partner because he believed that, like Israel, Turkey’s future lay with Europe rather than the broader Middle East or Islamic world. Israel—in hindsight, shamefully—helped Turkey track down Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) founder Abdullah Öcalan, enabling a Turkish special forces unit to capture and render him in Kenya.
Turkey’s ties to Israel survived Özal, whose presidency was cut short by a fatal heart attack. Still, there were warning signs about the antisemitism and growing Islamist orientation of Anatolian Turks when, in 1997, Erdoǧan’s mentor Necmettin Erbakan sought to pivot Turkish foreign relations from Europe and Israel to Iran, Syria, and Libya instead.
Ultimately, Erbakan’s violations of Turkey’s constitution forced his ouster, and while Turkey’s mainstream parties sought to return Turkish foreign policy to the status quo ante, that ended with Erdoǧan’s rise. In hindsight, Turkish leader’s rhetoric assuaging Turkey’s Western partners was insincere, and he approached the leaders of American Jewish organizations as useful idiots whose naivete would help keep the American Jewish community in check until it was too late to reverse Turkey’s new Islamist orientation.
The break came in 2006 when the United States, Europe, and moderate Arab states sought to force Hamas to accede to the Oslo Accords in exchange for recognition of their Palestinian election victory. Erdoǧan promised German Chancellor Angela Merkel he would uphold the consensus, only to bring Hamas leaders to Ankara two weeks later. Over subsequent decades, Istanbul became as important a base for Hamas as Tehran.
Erdoǧan previously called Israel’s existence a “crime against humanity.”
Within Turkey, it was not just about a diplomatic pivot. Islamists nurtured antisemitism and anti-Zionism. While Erdoǧan depicts the late Fethullah Gülen today as a pariah and imprisons all who attended his schools or followed his Anatolian Sufi-colored teaching, prior to 2013, Erdoǧan and Gülen were once close friends and associates. Gülen joined in the Erdoǧan conspiracies, with one aide tweeting out endorsement of the conspiratorial Israel Lobby book. With Turkish subsidies, Mein Kampf became a best-seller. Turkish television and its media monopoly published increasingly bizarre antisemitic conspiracies as fact.
Erdoğan and his aides have blamed Jews or Israelis for everything from the protests in Gezi Park to the popular revolution against Muslim Brotherhood rule in Egypt. Turkish press said Jews used telekinesis to undercut Erdoğan and his allies, and Erdoğan and his wife have endorsed films that depict Jews as stealing Iraqis’ organs for black-market trade. When Erdoǧan faced protests over plans to allow his cronies to develop green space, he argued that olive trees were pro-Jewish and so should be destroyed.
On July 2, 2026, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, who as Turkey’s intelligence chief once coordinated Turkey’s ties to Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, made headlines when he called Israel “a burden to humanity.” Erdoǧan followed by accusing Israel of being rapacious and a threat to the entire region. Essentially, Erdoǧan now takes the Arab nationalist “Nile to Euphrates” conspiracy and expands it from Bursa to Baghdad.
None of this is new, however. Erdoǧan previously called Israel’s existence a “crime against humanity.” Turkey’s former transport minister likened Israel to Somali pirates. Blood libel, conspiracy, and antisemitism became standard fare for the Islamist media. Only two things changed. The first was the willingness of many diplomats, officials, and journalists to ignore it, and the second was its vitriol. As Erdoǧan ages and his health falters, he realizes his time to fulfill his Islamist dream of doing to Israel and Jews what his predecessors did to Armenians and Greeks is running out. That Trump and Barrack ignore his antisemitism gives him the opportunity to move.
Today, Turkey is a terror sponsor, an aspiring nuclear-capable state, and indoctrinated into Jew- and Israel-hatred to an extent that Turkey’s hostility toward Jews and Israel will likely outlast Erdoǧan. Put another way, just as Israel was in a multi-decade fight with Iran and its proxies, today Jerusalem is in a multi-decade fight with Ankara and its proxies.
Statesmen may want to return to the status quo ante and think tankers anxious to preserve their own access or donations from Erdoǧan-adjacent businesses may downplay Turkey’s noxiousness, but Israel can risk no such delusions.
While Kurds deserve support on moral and historical grounds alone, Israel should openly and actively support Kurdish separatism in Turkey.
Instead, it should calibrate its strategy toward Turkey to the tactics Turkey uses against Israel. While Kurds deserve support on moral and historical grounds alone, Israel should openly and actively support Kurdish separatism in Turkey. Kurds deserve a state, not a satrapy answering to Erdoǧan like Iraqi Kurdistan has become, as Masrour and Areen Barzani have sold out Kurdish national ambitions for Bugattis and Patek Philippe watches. While the PKK has formally disbanded, Erdoǧan’s cynical refusal to move the peace process beyond that means a likely return to fighting. Too often, Israel has treated the Kurds as Henry Kissinger did: a tool to wield insincerely and discard. That must end.
Israel should provide the PKK with weaponry and cash and should recognize Diyarbakir as the capital of a future Kurdish state. While Turkey will try to depict the PKK as terrorists, Israel should condition its assistance on the PKK acting as an insurgency that, unlike Hamas, refuses to target civilians. That Israeli officials have already recognized the two-state solution and only await Palestinian recognition that one of those states will be Jewish gives Jerusalem the moral high ground.
At some point, as active insurgency undercuts the tourist industry in Istanbul, Bodrum, and Antalya, Turks may negotiate a settlement. Israel and the West should demand nothing less than what Israel has agreed to with the Oslo Accords: a Kurdistan Authority and a roadmap to statehood. Simply put, Turkey has lost the right to exist in its current form, and the Kurds deserve their liberty and freedom from Turkish imperial rule.
