Back

Israel vs. Turkey: The Intensifying Middle-East Power Struggle

The Wall Street Journal - Friday, December 20, 2024 by Yaroslav Trofimov and |

Turkey and Israel are the main strategic beneficiaries of the collapse of the Syrian regime, an event that has capped the dramatic decline of Iranian influence in the Middle East.

But now these two American allies, whose already poisoned relations have been strained to the breaking point since the war in Gaza began last year, are on a collision course of their own, in Syria and beyond.

Managing this rivalry is likely to become a priority for the incoming Trump administration, adding to pressure on the network of America’s alliances in Europe and the Middle East.

“Turkish officials want the new Syria to be a success so that Turkey can own it, and they feel that the Israelis might just ruin everything,” said Gönül Tol, director of the Turkey program at the Middle East Institute.

Hostility between Israel and Turkey doesn’t compare with the long and bloody conflict between Israel, Iran and Iranian proxies. The ruling clerics of Tehran seek to wipe the Jewish state off the map, and the two countries engaged in direct missile strikes on each other this year, an escalation of the decadeslong struggle between Israel and the Iranian-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon.

This month’s breakup of the Iranian-led “axis of resistance,” which used to run from Iran and Iraq via Syria to Hezbollah, represents an immediate and significant security boon for Israel.

Yet Israeli officials have said they are alarmed that a new Turkish-led axis of Sunni Islamists could become an equally grave peril over time, especially given Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s public support for Israel’s sworn enemies such as the Palestinian movement Hamas.

While the de facto leader of the new Syria, Ahmed al-Sharaa, widely known by his nom de guerre, Abu Mohammed al Jawlani, says that he isn’t interested in conflict and wants to focus on rebuilding the country, he and many other senior personalities in Damascus used to hold key roles in al Qaeda and Islamic State, both American-designated terrorist groups. The U.S. still maintains a $10 million bounty on Jawlani, who has traded fatigues for a suit and has been meeting European diplomats in Damascus this week.

As the order in Syria takes shape after the fall of Bashar al-Assad, Turkey has emerged as by far the dominant power in Damascus. This brings Erdoğan closer than ever to reaching his ambition for a sphere of influence that stretches across former Ottoman lands, all the way to Libya and Somalia. It is an approach that has involved competing with Iran as the most vocal defender of the Palestinian cause.

“The relations with Turkey are definitely in a bad place, but there is always potential to deteriorate more,” Yuli Edelstein, chairman of the Israeli parliament’s foreign and defense affairs committee, said in an interview. “It’s not that we are threatening each other at this stage, but it could develop into clashes as far as Syria is concerned, clashes with proxies that are inspired and armed by Turkey.”

President-elect Donald Trump, in remarks at Mar-a-Lago on Monday, described Assad’s ouster as “an unfriendly takeover” of Syria by Turkey. Erdoğan highlighted his own vision of Turkey as a leading power in the Middle East two days later. “Every event in our region, and especially Syria, reminds us that Turkey is bigger than Turkey itself,” Erdoğan said. “The Turkish nation cannot escape from its destiny.”

Except for Qatar, which is closely allied with Turkey, other American partners in the region, such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Jordan, have qualms of their own about Turkey’s new sway. Officials there fear that a revival of political Islam spreading from Damascus might undermine their nations’ security.

Turkey, which in 1949 became the first Muslim country to recognize Israel, still maintains an embassy in Tel Aviv, even though Erdoğan blasted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as “the butcher of Gaza” after tens of thousands of Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces there, and imposed economic sanctions on Israel.

“There are still channels of communications between the two countries, and Turkey is still an ally of the United States, so issues between them can be bridged,” said Eyal Zisser, chair of contemporary Middle East history at Tel Aviv University. There is no doubt that a Turkish-dominated Syria is far better for Israel that an Iranian-dominated Syria, he added.

“Turkey doesn’t covet the destruction of Israel, doesn’t develop nuclear weapons, doesn’t provide Hezbollah with an impressive arsenal of missiles, and doesn’t send tens of thousands of militias into Syria,” Zisser said.

It is too alarmist to talk about an imminent Turkish-Israeli confrontation in Syria, agreed Ömer Önhon, a political analyst who served as Turkey’s ambassador to Damascus until the embassy was closed in 2012. It reopened in recent days.

“It’s the policies of the Netanyahu government that Turkey is against, and if the policies are changed then the relations could go back to normal once again, as they have been throughout history,” he said.

Turkey’s own foreign and defense policies have long irked successive American administrations, which chafed at Erdoğan’s military and nuclear-energy cooperation with Russia, and at what U.S. officials at the time described as covert Turkish aid to Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. “Turkey for quite a while has been something of a rogue state within the Western alliance,” said Jonathan Schanzer, executive director of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a Washington think tank that supports Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan.

The only ongoing violence in Syria now is an offensive by Turkish-backed militias, known as the Syrian National Army, against the Syrian Kurdish region in the northeast of the country that houses several U.S. military bases. Some of these fighters are ethnic Kurds from southeast Turkey who hail from the PKK Kurdistan Workers’ Party, an organization that both Ankara and Washington consider terrorist.

Washington’s support for the Syrian Kurdish armed groups has long been a major Turkish complaint. “What is happening at the moment is that one NATO country is backing a terrorist organization operating against another NATO country,” said Mehmet Șahin, a lawmaker with Turkey’s ruling AKP party, adding that he hoped Trump would drop that support.

Another Turkish lawmaker, Berdan Oztürk from the pro-Kurdish DEM party, said Washington had an obligation to the Syrian Kurds because of the blood jointly shed against Islamic State over the past decade.

“Turkey is now infringing on every basic human right,” he said. “Nobody is going to be allied with the U.S. if they betray the Kurdish people. If you have a partner, it’s really valuable, and you have to keep it stronger.”

In remarks that outraged Ankara, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar declared this week that Israel, too, should consider the Kurds, who he said are oppressed by Turkey and Iran alike, as its “natural allies” and must strengthen ties with them and other Middle Eastern minorities.

Despite such statements, it is unlikely that Israel would materially support Syrian Kurdish fighters against Turkey and its proxies, said Aydin Selcen, a former Turkish diplomat with long experience in dealing with Kurdish issues. “Israel would have lost its mind as a country if it decided to look for trouble against Turkey in Syria,” he said.

“Ankara is the winner and Israel is the winner in the recent developments. I do not see the possibility at all for an open conflict between Israel and Turkey. It just doesn’t make sense.”

Unlike the U.S., which has deployed some 2,000 troops in Syria, Israel doesn’t have an overt presence in Syrian Kurdish areas, which lie far away. “We have long relations with the Kurds, it’s part of our history, it’s part of their history. But Israel is not going to take on the American role in supporting the Kurds,” said ret. Maj. Gen. Yaakov Amidror, a former national-security adviser to Netanyahu and a fellow at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America.

In recent days, Turkey repeatedly demanded that Israel withdraw troops from the occupation zone around the Syrian Golan Heights, and accused Israel of trying to sabotage the transition after the fall of Assad’s regime. “By taking advantage of the current vacuum, Israel wants to continue its occupation policies. This is not a good thing for Syria or the region,” Șahin said.

In addition to seizing land in southern Syria, a presence that Netanyahu has said would last for at least all of 2025, over the past two weeks Israel has relentlessly bombed whatever is left of the Assad regime’s military infrastructure, making sure the new rulers of Syria would have no air defenses, navy, air force, or long-range missiles and rockets.

Replying to Ankara’s demand to pull out troops, Israel’s Foreign Ministry said that Turkey should be the last country to raise the issue of occupation in Syria because Turkish troops have been operating in that country since 2016, backing “jihadist forces” and extending the Turkish currency, banking and postal services in a large part of the country.

Jawlani’s organization, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, remains listed as a terrorist group by the U.S. The rebel commander has attempted to project a moderate image. He has repeatedly spoken up for the rights of minorities and said that a new Syria is interested in rebuilding after the devastation wrought by nearly 14 years of civil war rather than in opening a new conflict with Israel.

Those assurances, however, don’t convince many in the Israeli leadership. Jawlani, after all, endorsed the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas at the time. His nom de guerre refers to the origin of his family in the Golan Heights, an area that Israel seized from Syria in 1967 and has since annexed.

“HTS in the driver’s seat in Damascus, under Turkish patronage, raises the daunting possibility for Israel of hostile Islamists on its northeastern border. That predicament could become even darker if the Kurds are pushed back, making room for a resurgence by ISIS,” said Shalom Lipner, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council who served as adviser to several Israeli prime ministers. “Israel is in a deep defensive crouch.”

The potential threat from Syria isn’t immediate, given the weakness of the country’s new rulers, said Israel’s Edelstein, who served in a variety of senior cabinet posts under Netanyahu as well as a speaker of Israel’s parliament. Over the medium term, however, Islamist groups in southern Syria could endanger Israeli communities, he said, while in the long term a Syrian army rebuilt with Turkish weapons and assistance could once again pose the kind of conventional danger that Assad’s military presented in the final decades of the 20th century.

Assurances of good intentions coming from Syria’s new leaders should be taken with as much credence as the statements of Hamas that lulled Israel into a false sense of security before the Oct. 7 attack, Edelstein said.

“We all—not just Israel—should be very careful about trying to pretend that the new regime in Syria is normal,” he said. “We are not in the business of creating proxies in Syria, we are in the business of protecting our borders. But it so happens that many of the communities that are close to our borders are minority communities in Syria, and we have to make sure they are not overrun by Islamist militias and these places don’t turn into a military base for a future attack on Israel.”

Originally published in The Wall Street Journal.