No one in the Israeli establishment expects the destabilization of Recep Tayyip Erdogan's regime in Turkey. True, there may be weak glimmers of secret hopes and dreams, but the Israeli system — the diplomatic and defense establishments as one — tries to maintain a strong grip on reality, and it knows that Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is still powerful and enjoys the fidelity of most of Turkey's public. It will take time until his grip on government institutions and sources of power will truly deteriorate. "What is happening there now," says a diplomatic Israeli source, "is not expected to undermine Erdogan's rule, but can definitely rock his self-confidence."

This assessment should not be belittled, because many people feel that Erdogan's self-confidence is the evil root in his dealings with his surroundings in general, and Israel in specific. Erdogan's growing appetite has become truly swinish and planted in him the messianic belief that he was sent directly by the Divine Presence to return Turkey to its days of glory and rebuild the Ottoman Empire. This was viewed by many as the main source of Erdogan's megalomania that is now absorbing a strong, unexpected blow from the masses in Istanbul's squares, who call him "tyrant" and "dictator." Until only recently, Erdogan used exactly these same epithets for his eastern neighbor, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. It is truly a small world.

According to Israeli evaluation bodies, the protest in Istanbul's Taksim Square will not resemble the developments in Cairo's Tahrir Square (a process that is still unfolding, and far from its finish line), nor to what took place in other sites of the Arab world. According to current analyses of Israeli sources, the Taksim Square protest actually bears more similarity to the tent protest in Tel Aviv's Rothschild Boulevard in the summer of 2011, a protest that, at its height, drew half a million Israelis to the squares. (In relative terms, half a million Israelis is equivalent to 5 million Turks on the streets.) The protest in Israel did not bring down the government but it undermined it and led to the fact that in the ensuing elections, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lost a significant proportion of his power.

The Israeli protest also created something else: a process in which the masses take increasing political power into their own hands, thus terrifying the politicians. A tangible example of this can be viewed in the fact that the Israeli government is very wary of making a decision regarding the percentages of natural gas to earmark for export, in regard to the gas that was discovered in the bowels of the Mediterranean Sea, fearing a harsh reaction of the street. Protest activists demonstrate every week near the home of the appointed minister (Energy and Water Resources Minister Silvan Shalom). The web roils with protest, the press provides [the protesters with] a tailwind, and the government trembles with fear.