What’s at stake for Turkey as Israel heads to the polls?

A widening rivalry between Turkey and Israel is fueling fears that the two US allies could stumble into an "accidental" military clash. Tom Barrack, the US ambassador to Turkey and presidential envoy for Syria and Iraq, aired just such fears on Oct. 20 at a security forum in Doha, saying, “What we are all terrified about is an unintended accident that happens along this road.”

Turkey’s Islamist president and self-fashioned champion of Gaza, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has been in power for more than two decades. Benjamin Netanyahu, a right-wing populist, has governed Israel on and off for almost 19 years. Both are die-hard pragmatists and consummate risk-takers whose escalating war of words over Gaza and Hamas has seen Erdogan call Netanyahu “even worse than Hitler” and Netanyahu label Erdogan an “antisemite dictator” and Turkey a “new Iran.”

The conventional wisdom has long held that until one or the other is out of power, Turkish-Israeli relations will continue their downward spiral. Left unchecked, this could eventually result, as Barrack warned, in some kind of physical confrontation, with first-order effects for the entire region.

The theory will be tested when Israel goes to the polls on Oct. 27 to elect a new parliament. Recent surveys suggest that neither Netanyahu’s Likud-led bloc nor the main opposition alliance led by Gadi Eisenkot, a former chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, is assured of a parliamentary majority. This leaves the door open for Israel’s veteran premier to build yet another coalition that keeps him in power — or not.

Some believe that, depending on whom he potentially teams up with, Eisenkot might moderate some of Netanyahu’s more extreme policies, particularly on Gaza and perhaps even on Iran. This would help de-escalate tensions with Turkey. These took an alarming turn on Aug. 26 when Israel bombed a Syrian air base only 70 kilometers (43 miles) southeast of the Turkish border on the grounds that Turkish troops would be taking it over.

"There is some chance of a softening of tone, if Eisenkot or Bennet emerge as prime minister," Alan Makovsky, a veteran observer of Turkish affairs and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, told Al-Monitor. Naftali Bennet is a former tech entrepreneur who briefly served as prime minister in a unity government in 2021. "In addition to a clash of national interests, a part of the problem between Israel and Turkey has been personal between Erdogan and Netanyahu," Makovsky said.

But few expect things to change overnight should Netanyahu lose. 

“Eisenkot is still a security hawk. His main promises have to do with managing the religious right and de-escalating in the West Bank,” noted Howard Eissenstat, Laurentian associate professor and chair of history at St. Lawrence University. “The regional posturing, the willingness of both countries to assert themselves beyond their borders, and Israel's own sense that, after Oct. 7, a forward defense is necessary” all point against a significant shift, Eissenstat added.

Syria emerges as flashpoint

Others agree that, regardless of who takes charge, structural rivalry between the former allies is too deeply ingrained to be easily reversed.

“For years, Turkey's problem with Israel was mainly about Palestine. Syria changed this,” Evren Balta, a Turkish academic, told Al-Monitor. She was referring to the December 2024 toppling of the Assad regime by Ahmed al-Sharaa, a former Islamist militant whose northern fiefdom in Idlib was long shielded from regime and Russian attacks by the presence of Turkish forces on the ground.

“Israel increasingly reads Turkey as the ‘new Iran,’ mainly because it sees a regional power that could build allied actors and military infrastructure around its borders. And Ankara now sees Israel as a direct threat to the post-Assad order it is trying to erect,” Balta said.

“Turkey wants a strong centralized government in Syria. Israel sees this as an existential threat,” Gonul Tol, director of the Middle East Institute’s Turkey program, explained, adding that such reasoning is shared by Israel’s security establishment writ large.

The geopolitical rivalry extends to the Eastern Mediterranean, where Israel is cultivating deepening defense ties with Turkey’s historic enemies, Greece and Cyprus. Turkey, similarly, is pursuing security arrangements with Egypt and, in August, signed the Mecca pact with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. In the Red Sea and the Horn of Africa, Turkey and Israel are now racing for military and economic dominance. Turkey’s largest overseas base, Camp TURKSOM, is in Somalia. “Somalia is the backbone of Turkey’s Horn of Africa ambitions,” Tol noted. Israel, with tacit support from the United Arab Emirates, another Turkish rival, is pushing back through its recognition of the breakaway Republic of Somaliland. “Turkey sees itself as being encircled while Israel feels threatened by Turkey’s expanding indigenous defense industry,” Tol added.

Erdogan’s continued support for Hamas’ political wing, coupled with Israeli settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, further fans the flames.

However, Syria remains the most immediate flashpoint for a collision — accidental or otherwise.

Can diplomacy avert a clash?

Azerbaijan, a close ally of both Israel and Turkey, brokered a deconfliction deal between them last summer, while Barrack led separate efforts to institutionalize a similar mechanism that could help avert conflict. But Israel’s August attack on the Abu Duhur base exposed the limits of diplomacy.

“It could have been another Russian incident. [Turkey] could have very quickly sent its jets, and all of a sudden, we’re in another situation,” Barrack told the Doha security forum. The envoy was referring to Turkey’s 2015 downing of a Russian fighter jet that crossed into its airspace, thereby sending relations between the two countries into a tailspin.

The Trump administration’s efforts to secure an agreement whereby Israel and Turkey remain within their unwritten zones of influence are complicated by Israel’s ongoing occupation of, and systematic forays beyond, the buffer zone in the Golan Heights. The United States came close to sealing a deal between Syria and Israel that called for enhanced intelligence sharing against Hezbollah, the Islamic State and other malign actors. However, Netanyahu’s refusal to move Israeli forces out of the buffer zone to the positions they held prior to Assad’s overthrow has derailed the process.

Not all are so gloomy about the future of Turkish-Israeli ties.

“The fundamental pieces of the relationship remain intact,” Namik Tan, a former Turkish ambassador to Israel and a lawmaker for the opposition New Party, noted. Trade, albeit via third countries, continues apace, while Azerbaijani oil — which helps supply the Israeli fuel market, including the supply chain serving the Israeli Air Force — flows through a pipeline running across Turkish territory to loading terminals on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast. Even after Israeli forces killed nine activists, including eight Turkish citizens and one Turkish-American, during their May 2010 raid on a Gaza-bound aid flotilla, bilateral ties remained intact. “Erdogan is an infinitely pragmatic man,” Tan told Al-Monitor. It would therefore be unsurprising if a new cold peace were reestablished.

Barrack echoed similar views about Israel. “Israel is way too smart to actually pick a fight with [Turkey], and [Turkey] is way too smart to accede to the verbosity of those threats,” Barrack said.

That said, Israel’s deliberately provocative courtship of Syrian Kurdish groups linked to another rebel outfit, the Kurdistan Workers Party, which fought Turkey for four decades before renouncing its armed campaign for autonomy last year, will likely remain an irritant. However, Israel’s failure to come to the Kurds’ defense when they came under attack in January by Syrian government forces was a rude reminder that the support was more rhetorical than anything else.

With the regional balance of power still in play, Israel will remain an actor with whom the Kurds can strike an eventual partnership, Arzu Yilmaz, a political scientist specializing in Kurdish affairs, told Al-Monitor. “For now, the Kurds are hedging their bets,” Yilmaz said. More broadly, though, Yilmaz is among those who believe that any outcome that prioritizes US and European security interests renders an accommodation between Turkey and Israel necessary. “And for as long as Iran remains a threat to the region, compromise looks inevitable,” Yilmaz told Al-Monitor.