Normal Diplomatic Relations between Turkey and Israel Have Become Impossible

Oct. 31 2014

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.

Read more at Gatestone

More about: Israel diplomacy, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey

Egypt Is Trapped by the Gaza Dilemma It Helped to Create

Feb. 14 2025

Recent satellite imagery has shown a buildup of Egyptian tanks near the Israeli border, in violation of Egypt-Israel agreements going back to the 1970s. It’s possible Cairo wants to prevent Palestinians from entering the Sinai from Gaza, or perhaps it wants to send a message to the U.S. that it will take all measures necessary to keep that from happening. But there is also a chance, however small, that it could be preparing for something more dangerous. David Wurmser examines President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi’s predicament:

Egypt’s abysmal behavior in allowing its common border with Gaza to be used for the dangerous smuggling of weapons, money, and materiel to Hamas built the problem that exploded on October 7. Hamas could arm only to the level that Egypt enabled it. Once exposed, rather than help Israel fix the problem it enabled, Egypt manufactured tensions with Israel to divert attention from its own culpability.

Now that the Trump administration is threatening to remove the population of Gaza, President Sisi is reaping the consequences of a problem he and his predecessors helped to sow. That, writes Wurmser, leaves him with a dilemma:

On one hand, Egypt fears for its regime’s survival if it accepts Trump’s plan. It would position Cairo as a participant in a second disaster, or nakba. It knows from its own history; King Farouk was overthrown in 1952 in part for his failure to prevent the first nakba in 1948. Any leader who fails to stop a second nakba, let alone participates in it, risks losing legitimacy and being seen as weak. The perception of buckling on the Palestine issue also resulted in the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s assassination in 1981. President Sisi risks being seen by his own population as too weak to stand up to Israel or the United States, as not upholding his manliness.

In a worst-case scenario, Wurmser argues, Sisi might decide that he’d rather fight a disastrous war with Israel and blow up his relationship with Washington than display that kind of weakness.

Read more at The Editors

More about: Egypt, Gaza War 2023