Reviewing David Govrin’s The Journey to the Arab Spring: The Ideological Roots of the Middle East Upheaval in Arab Liberal Thought (2014), Tzvi Mazel notes that already in the late 19th century there were Islamic scholars who sought “an appropriate internal religious response to the cultural and technological challenge posed by the West,” some of whom tried to find a theological basis for constitutional government. Their ideas gained little traction, and the recent “Arab Spring” has seen yet another failure of liberalism:

Under the leadership of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Ankara has become increasingly authoritarian, Islamist, and hostile toward Israel and the West more generally. The Turkish government has also indicated that it aspires to alter its maritime border with Greece, and even its border with Syria. Analyzing these changes, and what they term the country’s “bellicose foreign policy,” Efraim Inbar, Eran Lerman, and Hay Eytan Cohen Yanarocak examine the implications for Israel, and how the Jewish state might best respond: