The reality behind Erdoğan’s fiery rhetoric against Israel

Turkey, a NATO member state with the second largest military in the alliance after the US, is a complex regional actor in the Middle East, particularly when it comes to its relationship with Israel. Since 2003 the country has been headed by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, first as a prime minister and from 2014 as the country’s president. Under Erdoğan's leadership and over the past two decades, the Turkish-Israeli relationship has faced constant challenges and has deteriorated.

The relationship reached a low point last week when Erdoğan, addressing a crowd at a local political convention, referred to the possibility of Turkish military intervention in the Gaza war, saying “we must be solid so that Israel can't do these ridiculous things to Palestine. Just like we entered Karabakh, just like we entered Libya, we might do similar to them".

These unprecedented words sparked an immediate harsh response by Israel’s foreign minister and a series of speculations and assessments in Israel regarding whether Erdoğan was serious about the  probability of such a move. 

The consensus was that there was a considerable gap between the fiery rhetoric and the actual manifestation of the threat. Nevertheless, it is worth exploring the circumstances that have led a leader of a NATO member state that held diplomatic relations with Israel for more than 70 years to even raise such a possibility.

The main factor behind the deterioration in Turkish-Israeli relations is undoubtedly President Erdoğan and his Islamist, anti-Israeli ideology. Erdoğan founded the “Justice and Development” Party (AKP) in 2001 as an Islamist political party affiliated with the “Muslim Brotherhood” movement, which holds great influence across the Middle East.