It’s hard to write about something like this. Events are moving very quickly, and it’s difficult for us mere mortals to stay on top of it all.
Turkey’s Foreign Ministry put out a condemnation of Israel’s attack against what is, after all, a neighbor of Turkey. Erdoğan also tweeted out a statement saying that he condemned the attack, framing it as a foreign intervention in the region. I do think that these statements reflect Ankara’s genuine stance on the issue. Ankara is deeply uncomfortable with any Israeli show of force, and certainly with something as major as this. Islamist elites see Israel’s strikes as part of a larger plan that is ultimately aimed at Turkey.
There’s also a lot of moving parts to this sort of thing. Already the strikes have had an impact on the Turkish economy, which is very susceptible to high oil prices. If the war grows and Iran is destabilized, it could also cause refugee flows whether there’ll be refugees heading towards the Turkish border, which won’t make anyone happy. There could also be opportunities for Turkey of course, the most obvious being on the Azerbaijan-Armenia border.
Aside from that, on a very basic level, I think Israel’s abilities have spooked Turkey’s elite. The fact that they’ve infiltrated Iran’s institutions and borders very deeply, and that they’re capable of pulling off these operations seems to be putting people on high alert. I’d be surprised if they weren’t working furiously to tighten counterintelligence measures right now.
It also seems that Erdoğan was hopeful that Trump was distancing himself from the Israel lobby, so he must have been disappointed. They talked on the phone recently, and I’m sure that Erdoğan beat the horse again about the illegitimacy of all this, and the need for regional stability.
Turkey and Israel are irrevocably opposed to each other on the question of Palestine, and will be confronting each other over Syria for the foreseeable future. Everyone is steeling themselves for a tough time ahead. I keep hearing about how this is a new era, it’s the law of the jungle, and that Turkey has to maintain a strong defense sector. If the regional war ramps up, I think that domestic politics is going to take a back seat, even among serious economic problems that this would involve.
Turkey’s opposition on Israel
Let’s stay on that topic for a bit. People sometimes ask me where the pro-Israel Turks are. They say that Turkey and Israel used to be on very good terms, and that surely there’s a political base for that kind of a relationship. I don’t think that holds up on the Turkish side, and it doesn’t hold up on Israel’s side either.
On the Turkish side, the Kemalist/pre-AK Party elite was generally pro-Israel, but there wasn’t really a popular basis for that foreign policy orientation. It was just an elite alignment, and since that elite is now out of power, and their descendants completely wiped out from politics, that political orientation doesn’t exist any more. Turkey’s opposition is deeply critical of Israel, as of course, are Islamist elites. There are a very small number of right-Kurdish figures who are pro-Israel. The Turkish left tends to be anti-Hamas, but they’re still firmly anti-Israel roughly in the way the Spanish or the Italian left would be.
Second, Israel has changed significantly since the 1990s in ways that are familiar to us. The more secular, leftist elements are out of power, and the people who are increasingly in charge are either hard core nationalist or religious fanatics. Israel has buried the two-state solution and is clearly conducting itself very aggressively across the region. Whatever sympathy there is towards Israel is therefore truncated and relegated to the cultural or economic realm.
I think this is related to the idea that Iran also used to be pro-US/Israel, and that if its present regime falls, it could flip again. I’m obviously not as familiar with Iran as I am with Turkey, but I suspect that this is just as unlikely. The neocon imagination keeps thinking about Germany and Japan after WWII. They did before Iraq as well. It’s so ridiculous that I’m not sure if that’s a genuinely held position, or if it’s just some pretext to bomb countries that are giving them a hard time and figure things out later.
Reading the news
When big things happen, I habitually go through some of the columns of journalists I know are deeply connected with the Erdoğan palace. One of those guys is Okan Müderrisoğlu. So I turned to his most recent column, and found that it’s just become a kind of comic book, where there’s a paragraph, followed by a photo, then another paragraph, and so on. The the paragraphs read like this:
In the detailed risk classification conducted in Ankara, the following points regarding Iran stood out: From now on, developments will be shaped by the decisions taken by the Iranian leadership and the stance of the public. Iran may enter a period of strengthening self-sufficiency policies by isolating itself from the outside world (the most likely scenario).
Due to declining trust in the regime and growing demands for freedom, the possibility of a domestic uprising in Iran (moderate probability) and, depending on how events unfold, even civil war (low probability) may arise. Iran could enter a period of conciliatory foreign policy (low probability), or it may officially declare war on Israel or carry out direct military retaliation (which it is currently doing).
In the past, these guys would call up their government contacts, talk to them, and write columns accordingly. I think at some point they just started getting memos or whatsapp messages, and wrote based on those. Now it looks like they’re just copy-pasting the memos that are forwarded to them. Maybe it gets put through some kind of chatgpt thing, but it’s all the same really. I’m actually not sure how long it’s been like this. I guess I’m kind of used to these websites being very shitty.
There’s plenty of people who still write their own columns of course, but I thought this was still notable. It probably means that the guys at the very top are unsure how they’re going to position themselves, and they’ve yet to pass down clear talking points. Zapping through the channels now, all I could see was reporters reading their twitter feeds, reporting on the latest hit in Israel or Iran.
Selim Koru is an analyst at the Economic Policy Research Foundation of Turkey (TEPAV) and a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI). He has written on Turkish politics for publications such as the New York Times, War on the Rocks, and The Atlantic, and is the author of New Turkey and the Far Right: How Reactionary Nationalism Remade a Country.
This article was first published on Selim Koru’s Substack.
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