Turkish–Israeli Relations: Two Societies Apart

In the 1990s, Turkey and Israel described their partnership as a strategic alliance. Their militaries trained together, their intelligence services shared information, their businessmen discovered each other’s markets, and hundreds of thousands of Israeli tourists made Antalya and Istanbul their favorite destinations. Three decades later, the same two states regard each other with suspicion bordering on hostility, and in some Turkish and Israeli policy circles the question is no longer whether the relationship can be repaired but whether the two countries are drifting toward confrontation. The conventional explanation for this transformation is personal and ideological: Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Islamism on one side, Benjamin Netanyahu’s maximalism on the other. I argue that this explanation, though not wrong, is insufficient. The more consequential change has occurred not in leaders’ rhetoric but in the sociology of the two societies. A new generation in Turkey has come of age with an image of Israel that is radically different from that of its parents, and a new Israel has emerged whose policies have eroded its image across the world. Even if governments change in Ankara and Israel tomorrow, it will take a generation to rebuild the ties that once bound these societies together.

A generation formed under the AKP

The Justice and Development Party has governed Turkey since 2002. An entire generation, now in its twenties and early thirties, has gone to school, watched television and formed its political consciousness under Erdoğan’s rule. For this generation, Israel is not the partner of the 1990s, the country that sold Turkey drones and modernized its tanks, but the state that killed nine Turkish citizens aboard the Mavi Marmara in 2010, that besieged Gaza for nearly two decades, and that, after October 2023, waged a war in which tens of thousands of Palestinians were killed and much of Gaza was reduced to rubble. The moral vocabulary through which this generation interprets Israel is not the vocabulary of interests and alliances but of colonialism, occupation and genocide. Many young Turks see Israel not as a permanent state with which one negotiates but as a settler-colonial project, a temporary settlement, a historical anomaly that will one day pass as the Crusader kingdoms passed. This is a profound change. A state that is seen as temporary is not a state with which one makes lasting compromises.

This perception did not emerge spontaneously. It was shaped by a political discourse that framed the Palestinian question as the central moral cause of the Muslim world and Turkey as its natural defender, by a media culture that dramatized the conflict nightly, and by popular television series that portrayed Ottoman sultans resisting Zionist conspiracies. Erdoğan’s walkout from Davos in 2009 with his famous “one minute,” his description of Hamas as a liberation movement after October 7, his comparison of Netanyahu to Hitler, and Turkey’s decision to join South Africa’s genocide case at the International Court of Justice all reinforced a narrative in which Israel appears as the embodiment of Western injustice against Muslims. In other words, the Turkish image of Israel is no longer a matter of foreign-policy disagreement; it has become part of the moral identity of a generation.

Israel’s image in the world

However, it would be a mistake to attribute this transformation to Erdoğan alone. The image of Israel has eroded everywhere since the Gaza war, including in places where its legitimacy once seemed unassailable. In Europe, governments that had long defended Israel recognized the State of Palestine, suspended arms exports or called for sanctions. United Nations experts and commissions, human rights organizations and many genocide scholars have characterized Israel’s conduct in Gaza as genocidal, and the International Court of Justice has found the claim plausible enough to adjudicate. Even in the United States, Israel’s most important ally, public opinion has shifted dramatically: surveys since 2024 have recorded a historic decline in sympathy for Israel, above all among younger Americans, and, for the first time, more Americans holding unfavorable than favorable views of the country. The war in Lebanon and the strikes on Syria and Iran have reinforced the image of a state that seeks security not through compromise but through permanent military predominance.

This broader context changes the explanatory sequence. It is not simply that Erdoğan turned Turks against Israel. It is rather that Israel’s own transformation, from a state that at least rhetorically accepted a two-state solution into one governed by coalitions that reject Palestinian statehood and celebrate settlement expansion, produced a global reassessment, which Erdoğan then mobilized for domestic and regional purposes. Turkey is one case of a worldwide shift, though it is an especially intense one.

When criticism becomes anti-Semitism

Yet there is a crucial difference between the Turkish case and much of the global criticism of Israel. In Turkey, the new anti-Israeli sentiment has become intertwined with an older anti-Semitism. Since the late Ottoman period, and especially in the writings of Necip Fazıl Kısakürek, Turkish Islamist thought has tended to collapse three distinct categories, Jews as a religious community, Zionism as a political ideology and Israel as a state, into a single civilizational enemy. In this worldview, the contradictions of modernity are not explained structurally but are personalized and moralized: capitalism becomes “Jewish finance,” secularism becomes a “Jewish conspiracy,” and Westernization becomes “Jewish cultural domination.” The failures and anxieties of Muslim societies are thereby externalized onto the Jews, preserving the moral integrity of the Islamic self.

This mode of reasoning is anti-structural, essentialist, conspiratorial, and morally absolutist. It is not unique to Turkish Islamists; one finds its mirror image on the American right, where anxieties about cultural and demographic change are likewise projected onto Jews. But in Turkey it has acquired a new and dangerous legitimacy because the moral outrage over Gaza gives it a seemingly respectable cover. When legitimate criticism of Israeli policy slides into the language of Jewish conspiracy, it ceases to be political critique and becomes bigotry. The shrinking Jewish community of Turkey, which has lived in Anatolia for more than five centuries, pays the price. Turkish society needs to confront this problem honestly. One can and should criticize the Israeli government’s conduct in Gaza, but the moment that criticism targets Jews as Jews, it betrays both reason and the best traditions of Ottoman and Turkish pluralism.

Israeli policies that made things worse

Israel, for its part, has done little to help. Its governments have treated Turkey’s anger as a problem of Erdoğan’s personality rather than as a symptom of a deeper societal shift, and they have pursued policies that confirmed Turkish suspicions. Israel’s strategic alignment with Greece and the Greek Cypriot administration, institutionalized through regular trilateral summits, joint military exercises and energy projects in the Eastern Mediterranean designed to bypass Turkey, has been read in Ankara as a deliberate effort to encircle it. Reports in 2026 that Israel was exploring a military presence on Greek islands in the Aegean, which Athens denied, and its interest in naval exercises in waters that Turkey regards as part of its security perimeter, were perceived not as defensive measures but as provocations aimed at Turkey itself. These policies won Israel no friends in Turkey and lost it whatever goodwill remained among Turkish secularists and nationalists who had once been its natural partners.

Syria has deepened the rift. For two decades, Turkish–Israeli tensions were primarily political and normative, centered on Palestine. The Israeli strike on the Abu al-Duhur air base in August 2026, justified by Israel’s belief that Turkish forces might deploy there, a claim Ankara and Damascus denied, marked a qualitative change. For the first time, the two states’ military security spaces overlap directly, and Washington has had to work on a deconfliction mechanism to prevent an accidental clash. One might put it this way: Gaza delegitimized Israel in Turkish political discourse, while Syria securitized Israel in Turkish strategic thinking. The two countries now hold competing visions of Syria’s future. Turkey wants a centralized, territorially integrated Syrian state capable of controlling its borders, containing Kurdish militancy and allowing refugees to return. Israel prefers a Syria too weak to threaten it, leaving Israel free to strike whenever it perceives danger. Israel thus behaves as a revisionist status-quo power: it seeks to preserve its military superiority, but it does so by continually reshaping its surroundings, and in doing so it appears increasingly revisionist to its neighbors.

Turkey is not Iran

The most dangerous error in Israeli strategic thinking today is the tendency, visible among some former officials and politicians, to treat Turkey as the next Iran. The analogy is false. Turkey is a NATO member, with an army integrated into Western command structures. Its economy is tied to Europe, its trade with Israel grew from about $1.3 billion in 2002 to more than $7.5 billion in 2021, and even at the height of the Gaza war it avoided a complete strategic rupture. It does not sponsor militias across the region dedicated to Israel’s destruction; it does not deny Israel’s right to exist as a matter of state doctrine, and its intelligence services reportedly helped foil Iranian plots against Israeli citizens in Istanbul in 2022. Turkey and Israel also share important interests: both opposed the Assad regime, both are wary of Iranian expansion, and both are close partners of Azerbaijan, a relationship that has quietly linked them in the South Caucasus.

To treat Turkey as an enemy is to create one. Securitization is a self-fulfilling process: if Israeli planners prepare for a Turkish threat, Turkish planners will prepare for an Israeli one, and the rhetoric of each side will be cited by the other as proof of hostile intent. That spiral serves neither society. It serves only those, in both countries, whose politics thrive on enmity.

Why the two societies need each other

Reason should prevail over this spiral, because the two societies need each other more than their current leaders admit. Israel needs Turkey because it is the most powerful Muslim-majority country in its neighborhood, a NATO member, an economic partner and a potential guarantor of any durable settlement in Gaza and Syria. No regional order in the Eastern Mediterranean can be stable if it is built against Turkey. Turkey needs Israel because it is a technological power, an energy partner, an influential voice in Washington and a state whose restraint in Syria is essential for Turkey’s own security on its southern border. Both need stability in Syria, the containment of Iranian adventurism, and an end to wars that destroy the economies and the moral standing of everyone involved.

Rebuilding the relationship will require more than a change of governments. It will require Israel to recognize that its security cannot rest indefinitely on military domination and the denial of Palestinian rights, and that alliances designed to encircle Turkey will produce exactly the hostility they are meant to deter. It will require Turkey to distinguish clearly between criticism of Israeli policy and hostility toward Jews, and to confront the anti-Semitism that has found new life in its political culture. It will also require both societies to invest in the kind of contacts among students, scholars, journalists, businesspeople, and civil society that once made the relationship more than an alliance of generals.

Conclusion

The Turkish–Israeli relationship has been transformed at its sociological foundations. A generation of Turks educated under Erdoğan sees Israel as a colonial and genocidal project rather than a permanent neighbor, while Israel’s own policies have eroded its image across the world, from Europe to the American campus. In Turkey, this new anti-Israeli sentiment has merged with an older anti-Semitism that Turkish society must overcome. Israeli strategies of encirclement, from the Eastern Mediterranean to the Aegean and Syria, have only deepened Turkish distrust. Yet Turkey is not Iran, and the two countries remain bound by shared interests and mutual need. Even if governments change, the old ties will not return quickly; it will take a generation of patient effort to rebuild them. That effort should begin now, before the logic of enmity hardens into permanent hostility between two societies that have far more to gain from cooperation than from confrontation