Turkey Is Increasingly Becoming A Threat To Israel
The rising chorus of anti-Israel statements from Turkey, particularly when it comes to the toxic blending of religious and extreme nationalist rhetoric from the ruling party, is becoming an increasing threat to Israel and regional stability.
After Turkey announced that it would turn the museum of Hagia Sophia back into a mosque, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that Ankara would next “liberate” Al-Aqsa. In recent months, Turkey’s religious affairs ministry and other voices in the government have repeatedly pushed a message claiming they want to “unite the Islamic community” against the State of Israel.
Ankara’s rhetoric increasingly is a reminder of how Iran’s anti-Israel rhetoric began in the 1970s and later turned into a potential existential threat of a nuclear nature. Iran’s religious leadership, like the Muslim Brotherhood-inspired leadership of the AK Party in Turkey, view the world through a binary lens. There is the “Islamic ummah” and then everyone else. For both Iran and Turkey’s current leaders, the rise in religious extremism points toward a desire to mobilize the region against Israel.
For years, the leading narrative was that while Iran is a threat to Israel, Ankara and Jerusalem have historic relations. But those relations took a radical turn for the worse after the 2009 war in Gaza. Since then, what was once a flowing relationship in the 1990s, has become increasingly hostile on multiple levels. There is antisemitism in Turkey and the active spreading of Jewish-Israel conspiracy theories.
Read More: Jerusalem Post