Sao Paulo
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told his country’s parliament on Wednesday (25) that the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas is not a terrorist. In doing so, the leader can seal the end of a relationship with profound consequences for the stability of the Middle East.
“Hamas is not a terrorist organization, it is a liberation group, mujahideen waging a battle to protect their land and their people,” he said, using the Arabic word for “holy warriors,” those who fight for their faith, which received enormous response. in the Islamic world.
Erdogan sparked outrage in Tel Aviv, with the Foreign Ministry rejecting his speech “with all its might.” In doing so, the Turk consolidates his critical position towards Israel in the crisis and adopts the reading of Vladimir Putin that is common in the Arab world, Iran and Russia, a country with which he has one of the most complex relationships: it is a rival and an ally at the same time .
However, relations with Tel Aviv are complicated. Turkey was one of the first countries to recognize Israel in its first year of existence. Encouraged by the United States, which needed Turkey as an ally in the Cold War against the Soviet Union due to its important strategic location on the southern flank of the communist empire, relations between the two countries gradually deepened.
In 2008, the relationship reached its peak when thenPrime Minister Erdogan, already the most important politician in Turkish history since the secular state’s founder in 1923, Mustafá Kemal Ataturk, brokered a solution over the status of the Golan Heights from which he annexed Syria became Israel in 1967.
This year, for the first time, the Gaza Strip was located between Ankara and Tel Aviv. An Israeli attack on the territory, carried out without consulting the Turks, was sharply criticized by Erdogan. Two years later, the partnership collapsed when Israeli commandos attacked a ship carrying Turkish humanitarian aid to Gaza, killing 10 people.
The Arab Spring of 2011 also weighed on the differences. Erdogan, a politician associated with Islamic conservatism, had ties to Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood a fundamentalist group that gave rise to radicalized versions such as Hamas and that briefly held the presidency of the Arab country, only to be overthrown in a coup that year 2013.
Israel had a peace agreement with the Egyptian dictatorship since 1979 and watched with fear as fundamentalist elements rose in its neighbor. This was resolved with the rise to power of General Abdel Fattah alSisi, who continues to preside today, but distrust of Turkey’s role only grew.
The Turks also opposed the Israelis in a regional dispute over gas exploration in the eastern Mediterranean, centered on the Cyprus region, an island split between allies Ankara and Athens.
But the changing structure of the Middle East, with the rise of Iranian influence, the Syrian civil war and the rise and fall of the Islamic State, ultimately opened a new opportunity for a rapprochement focused on economics.
The 2020 peace agreements between Israel and Arab countries, particularly the United Arab Emirates, sparked a new dynamic of trade partnerships that were positively received in Ankara. Last year, Israeli President Isaac Herzog visited Turkey and last month Erdogan met Benjamin Netanyahu for the first time in the United States.
Everything pointed to a new chapter of mutual interest. In addition to economic exchanges between countries with complementary sectors, Turkey viewed Israel as an important partner to contain Tehran’s ambitions. There has already been indirect cooperation in this area, with Tel Aviv supplying military materials to Azerbaijan, Erdogan’s ally in the Caucasus.
The weapons played a key role in Baku seizing control of the Armenian enclave of NagornoKarabakh this year. Turkey’s focus is not only on the possibility of gaining influence in a region dominated by Russia for 200 years, but also on creating an attraction for the 25% of Iranians who are ethnic Azerbaijanis, and could lead to internal instability in the Islamic Republic.
Now the crisis in Gaza is once again endangering everything, especially due to the strong religious rhetoric of Erdogan, who is aware of the impact of the image of Muslims killed by Jews on his electorate.
But the national trauma of October 7 will not be erased from Israeli collective memory, and this is a moment when even rational considerations of the proportionality of retaliation in Tel Aviv are seen as tantamount to defending the Holocaust.
It may be up to the US, which is already trying to calibrate the dosimetry of actions against Gaza while supporting Israel’s war in the regional context by sending aircraft carriers and fighter jets to the region, to seek alignment between Ankara and Tel Aviv in the future .
Turkey remains central to Washington, which integrated it into NATO in 1952 and stationed nuclear missiles there, which served as a bargaining chip in the crisis with the Soviets in Cuba ten years later. Today, half of the hundred American nuclear bombs in Europe are located at the Turkish Incirlik base, which was used in several US air strikes in the Middle East.
For Erdogan, chess has even more pieces. In this corner of the board he is playing with Putin, who is his presumed rival in the Ukraine war since Turkey supports Kiev, but with whom he has agreed on the new division of the Caucasus by Azerbaijan, tearing Armenia apart in the process.
Before the Russian invasion, the military relationship was intense, with the delivery of antiaircraft systems from Moscow to Ankara. There, the divide between Erdogan and Washington weighed heavily after thenPresident Donald Trump refused to extradite the cleric accused by the Turk of inciting the coup that he defeated in 2016.
In addition, the Turks and Russians have a variety of joint energy agreements. To make matters worse, Putin is also an ally of Tehran and has bases in Syria, where he coordinates with the Turks to support rival groups in the civil war in this case, Erdogan is less concerned with defeating the dictatorship and more concerned with it to fight the Kurds from the north of the country, allies of the minority in Turkey.
The network of relationships only makes it difficult to reorder peace. It is another tactical victory for Hamas and Iran in this crisis, which have already managed to put Israel’s rapprochement with the moderate Arabs on hold due to the situation in Gaza.