PATurkey looked long and hard to find an article which best explains the aftermath of the historic visit to Ankara by Israeli President Yitzhak Herzog. Amidst all the bloated expectations and unrealistic claims of a rapid thaw, the article below represented the most balanced outlook. Its message: Don’t expect much in terms real progress until next Turkish elections.
In recent months, the phone lines between Ankara and Tel Aviv have been unusually busy. In November, following the release of an Israeli couple that had been detained while vacationing in Istanbul, Israeli President Isaac Herzog rang his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, thanking the leader for his role in resolving the crisis. Shortly after, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett followed suit in what was the first official conversation between Turkish and Israeli heads of government since 2013. On January 20, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu phoned his Israeli counterpart, Yair Lapid, wishing him well following his recovery from COVID-19.
Amidst all this chatter, the two sides have decided to move beyond the long-distance phone lines and speak in person. On March 9, Herzog will reportedly fly to Ankara to meet with Erdoğan, the first Israeli presidential visit to Turkey since 2007. A pair of senior Turkish officials have already visited Israel to lay the groundwork for the Herzog-Erdoğan meeting.
Yet, these renewed contacts and resuscitated diplomatic channels should fool no one: deep, structural limitations in the Turkish-Israeli relationship will keep a more profound rapprochement off the table for the considerable future. In the short term, domestic political considerations may preclude meaningful outreach from either side. Erdoğan would need serious concessions from Israel in order to make normalization palatable to his base while Tel Aviv has little reason to throw him a lifeline ahead of the 2023 Turkish presidential elections. In the long term, the atrophy of close institutional ties and broader loss of shared experiences and trust will hamper a return to the multifaceted cooperation of decades past. Additionally, geopolitical transformations that have taken place in the Middle East over the past decade have rendered rapprochement less urgent for Tel Aviv while also giving Erdoğan no shortage of regional relations to repair. As such, it will take much more than a new government in Ankara for a full-fledged rehabilitation of Turkish-Israeli ties.
Missed Opportunity: Turkey-Israel Relationship
Out of Crisis, Opportunity?
Despite the longstanding diplomatic freeze, many analysts still believe that a rapprochement is of interest to both sides. A number of political scientists point out that the two countries share an interest in natural gas exploitation in the Eastern Mediterranean; harbor mutual concern over continuing instability across their borders in Syria; and recently came together to provide logistical, technical, and operational support to Azerbaijan during the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war, which even led to repeated offers by Baku to mediate their détente. Other analysts also note robust links in transportation and tourism, with Turkish Airlines the most popular foreign carrier operating in Israel. At the same time, economic cooperation has remained unaffected by the decline in bilateral relations, with trade levels skyrocketing from $3.8 billion in 2008 to $6.5 billion in 2020.
Though no doubt less influential than the concerns of realpolitik, these links have always provided a solid foundation for warmer ties. Not only can they help make rapprochement more palatable to the masses, but these cultural connections are also often exploited by politicians seeking to engage in subtle diplomacy. This latter dynamic was put on full display in December when President Erdoğan met with members of Turkey’s Sephardic clergy and other regional Jewish leaders for Hanukkah. Many analysts, including Nazlan Ertan, an Izmir-based journalist who covers Turkish politics and culture for Al-Monitor and has written extensively on the country’s Sephardic community, interpreted the meeting as a signal to officials in Israel. Ertan told FPRI that “Erdoğan tries to ‘balance’ his attacks on Israel with good ties with Turkey’s Jewish community,” noting that his engagement with the group, and his repeated vows to combat anti-Semitism, are always of symbolic importance to Turkish-Israeli ties.
Election Season in Turkey
Turkey: A Historic Manifesto from Opposition for Democratization
Erdoğan’s true opinion on such ties will be clarified in the coming eighteen months: Turkey’s next presidential elections are scheduled to take place on June 18, 2023 (though they may well be pushed to an earlier date). As in other electoral democracies during election season, the foreign policy decisions of incumbent leaders become prisoner to their domestic political considerations—this is no different for Erdoğan and the AKP.
This policymaking structure brings with it severe obstacles for Turkish-Israeli rapprochement in the short term. With the AKP’s approval ratings at an all-time low and a significant number of its supporters still on the fence about granting Erdoğan another term in power, the president will be loath to make moves that could further diminish his popularity. A thaw of relations with Israel would be risky, given that Erdoğan has made a career out of employing anti-Zionist remarks and retains broad support for his scathing condemnations of Israel and its treatment of the Palestinians.
Meanwhile, any trace of perceived hypocrisy could quickly be capitalized on by the Turkish opposition. This was made clear in September when the Turkish American National Steering Committee, a lobbying outfit with close ties to the president, was forced to withdraw from a declaration—signed only a day prior—that expressed support for the Abraham Accords. This backtracking was the result of a Twitter post by Metin Gürcan, a founder of the oppositional Democracy and Progress Party, who uploaded a photo of the declaration and noted that Erdoğan had previously labeled the accords a “treason to the Palestinian cause.” As rumors of a Turkish-Israeli thaw began circulating in February, Foreign Minister Çavuşoğlu was quick to reiterate that “any step we take with Israel regarding our relations, any normalization, will not be at the expense of the Palestinian cause, like some other countries… we will never turn back on our core principles.”
Despite the potential costs, Erdoğan still may determine that rapprochement offers significant benefits, namely, the ability to improve his standing with Washington. In doing so, he would be able to settle down banks and foreign investors whose lack of faith in his economic management has crushed the Turkish economy and tanked the lira. In return, the president might be willing to downgrade his relationship with Hamas. This relationship is a crucial point of contention with Tel Aviv, which believes the fundamentalist Palestinian group uses its Istanbul offices to organize attacks on Israeli territory. Though the move could lead the most devout AKP voters to defect to the Felicity Party, a hardline-Islamist outfit that opposes Erdoğan’s increasing authoritarianism, the large majority of Erdoğan’s base is more concerned with Turkey’s deepening economic crisis.
Israeli Indecision
Authorities in Jerusalem may be hesitant to offer the concessions the Turkish president seeks. Gabriel Mitchell, an Israeli-based expert on Eastern Mediterranean geopolitics at Notre Dame University, asks: “[Would Israel] be willing to throw Turkey a bone if throwing Turkey a bone means empowering Erdoğan at his weakest?” Many Israelis directly attribute the deterioration of Turkish-Israeli ties to the figure of Erdoğan, whose decision to downgrade relations was openly opposed by the head of Turkey’s main opposition Republican People’s Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi, CHP), Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu. With Kılıçdaroğlu possibly serving as the opposition’s unity candidate in the 2023 elections, it may well be in Israel’s interest to put a temporary hold on normalization.
Nevertheless, Dr. Gallia Lindenstrauss, a specialist on Turkish foreign policy at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, told FPRI that certain incentives may override domestic considerations. In the eyes of Dr. Lindenstrauss, “if [rapprochement] is presented as if there is a strategic imperative, for example, in the context of the struggle with Iran, there will not be too much domestic backlash.” Mitchell, on the other hand, questions whether such reorientation could happen: “This fragile government does not currently have the capacity to make full choices in foreign policy.”
Institutional Atrophy
In the long term, there remains a distinct possibility that Ankara may actively pursue a stronger relationship with Tel Aviv. Most anti-AKP voters would support such a direction if the opposition managed to assume power. Alternatively, if Erdoğan secures another five years in office, he will not face the same electoral considerations he does now. Yet, in either case, institutional transformations that have taken place over the past decade will continue to prevent the full-fledged cooperation that Turkey and Israel had grown accustomed to during the 1990s and 2000s.
Though important channels of communication have been maintained between Turkey’s National Intelligence Unit (Millî İstihbarat Teşkilatı, MİT) and Israel’s Mossad, Erdoğan’s decision to blow an Israeli-recruited Iranian spy network’s cover in 2012 significantly damaged the trust that once defined the two agencies’ relationship. MİT Chief Hakan Fidan has also purged his agency of pro-Israel operatives, a move that will hinder intelligence cooperation with Tel Aviv for many years to come.
Duncan Randall is a Research Assistant Intern at FPRI’s Middle East Program. He recently graduated from Dartmouth College, where he studied Turkish politics, minority communities in Western Asia, and Middle Eastern geopolitics. This is a short excerpt from the linked article
Follow our English language YouTube videos @ REAL TURKEY:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKpFJB4GFiNkhmpVZQ_d9Rg
And content at Twitter: @AtillaEng