Since 2010, Israel has made repeated attempts to patch up its alliance with Turkey. Benjamin Netanyahu even telephoned his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to apologize for the Israeli raid on a Turkish flotilla intended to break the blockade on Gaza. Not only did Erdogan decline to reciprocate, but, now as Turkey’s president, he seems bent on making things worse. Burak Bekdil writes:

Since Netanyahu’s apology, Turkey, both governmentally and publicly, has reached peak after peak in exhibiting anti-Semitism unseen before. . . . During Operation Protective Edge in July 2014, Erdogan commented that “Israel had surpassed Hitler in barbarism.” Erdogan . . . has both pragmatic and emotional reasons to challenge Israel publicly, and to maintain Turkey’s “cold war” with Israel. Emotional, because a holy struggle against Israel is a prerequisite for his pro-Hamas Islamism. And pragmatic, because the cold war and his explosive rhetoric around it have yielded a treasure-trove of votes in a country that champions anti-Semitism. The critical parliamentary elections scheduled for June 2015 will most likely be another setting for his new verbal assaults on Israel.

Israel will likely respond directly against Iran after yesterday’s attack, and has made known that it will calibrate its retaliation based not on the extent of the damage, but on the scale of the attack. The specifics are anyone’s guess, but Edward Luttwak has a suggestion, put forth in an article published just hours before the missile barrage: cut off Tehran’s ability to send money and arms to Shiite Arab militias.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. . . . In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometers off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometers from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeida in Yemen—a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again [on Sunday].