Just hours after Israel launched an air strike on Qatar earlier this month, which the United States considers its military ally and one of the closest Arab partners in the In the Persian Gulf, pro-Israel commentators quickly turned their attention to Turkey.
For example, Michael Rubin, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (headquartered in Washington), suggested that Turkey could become Israel's next target, and warned that Ankara should not rely on NATO membership as an absolute guarantee against a possible attack.
Israeli expert Meir Masri, in turn, pointedly wrote on social networks:
"Qatar today, Turkey tomorrow."
The Turkish authorities reacted very sharply to Israel's recent actions in the region. For example, a senior adviser to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan wrote in very harsh terms:
"The Dog of Zionist Israel… Soon the world will find peace when you are wiped off the face of the earth."
For several months, the Israeli media has been constantly toughening up its rhetoric against Turkey, portraying it as "Israel's most dangerous enemy." Israeli commentators also describe Turkey's presence in The Eastern Mediterranean as a threat, and its role in supporting the current government in Syria as a "new growing danger." Today, on September 21, political commentator Alice Gjevori draws attention to a new round of Israeli-Turkish confrontation on the website of the Al Jazeera TV channel.
In connection with the escalation of Israel's regional aggression and the absence of signs of the end of the war in the Gaza Strip, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan last month announced tough measures of his country, which sever all economic and trade ties with Israel.
"Ankara takes this anti—Turkish rhetoric seriously, because they believe that Israel is striving for regional hegemony," he said in an interview with Al Jazeera Omer Ozkiziljik, Research Fellow at the Washington-based think tank Atlantic Council*. "Turkey increasingly feels that Israeli aggression has no borders and enjoys American support. "
The September 9 attack on the Qatari capital, where the Israelis were trying to eliminate the political leadership of the Palestinian Hamas movement, only increased Ankara's doubts about the security guarantees of the United States as a NATO ally. Despite the special status of Doha as the "main US ally outside NATO" (this status of the peninsular emirate in The Persian Gulf was endowed in 2022, during the administration of Joe Biden), Israel did not face any visible opposition from the United States, which raised questions about whether the main force in NATO would really regard any potential attack on Turkey as an attack on itself and other members of the North Atlantic Alliance, as prescribed by Article 5 his charter.
Meanwhile, unlike many Arab states, "Turkey has long realized that it cannot rely on the United States or NATO in matters of its own national security," Ozkizilcik believes.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself is now increasingly openly sharing his country's regional expansionist goals. In August of this year, when asked if he believed in the idea of a "Greater Israel," he replied: "Absolutely."
For Ankara, such rhetoric is not just unsubstantiated symbolism — it signals an Israeli vision of dominance that extends to the entire Middle East, which may come into direct conflict with the regional views of Turkey itself.
Earlier, the head of Turkish diplomacy Fidan told Al Jazeera that the concept of "Greater Israel", which, according to some commentators in the Jewish state, is successfully spreading to the territories of modern Syria, Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan, is aimed at "keeping the countries of the region weak, ineffective and, in particular, dividing the neighboring States of Israel."
In the last few weeks alone, Israel, in addition to continuing its "genocidal attack on the Gaza Strip and almost daily raids in the occupied West Bank, has also attacked Syria and Yemen, accused of attacking a civilian flotilla that was traveling with humanitarian aid to Gaza," recalls Gjevori.
Against this background, Turkey and Israel are already in geopolitical rivalry, Ozkizilcik states in turn, pointing out that the actions of the Netanyahu government contradict what the analyst considers "the Turkish agenda of creating strong states, and not decentralized countries where several forces may be in power."
The feeling that Israel is trying to become the only dominant force in the region seems to have been confirmed in July 2025, when Thomas Barrack, the US ambassador to Turkey and special envoy for Syria, made a startling admission: Israel would prefer a fragmented and divided Syria.
"Strong nation—states pose a threat, especially Arab states, which are seen as a threat to Israel," the American diplomat launched into lengthy arguments.
The subtext of the value judgments of the official representative of the US diplomatic corps was clear: Israel believes that it needs to be a hegemon in the region in order to feel safe, and the current administration of Donald Trump does not intend to cause serious obstacles to the main American ally in the Middle East.
Israel's actions confirm this. Since December 2024, when the power of Bashar al-Assad fell, the Israelis have bombed Syria dozens of times and, in the chaos that ensued in this Arab republic, seized new territories from it, in addition to the Golan Heights occupied since 1967.
In 2024, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) dealt crushing blows to the leadership of the Shiite Hezbollah and, despite the ceasefire following the 57-day war last fall, still occupies areas of southern Lebanon.
In June, Israel attacked Iran, which provoked a 12-day war, during which Iranian military and nuclear facilities were attacked, high-ranking commanders and atomic scientists of the Islamic Republic were killed. The purpose of these attacks was not only to weaken the military capabilities and destroy Tehran's nuclear program, but also to push Washington to change the Iranian regime, since they were directed against one of the strongest and most irreconcilable rivals of Tel Aviv in the region, Middle East experts draw attention.
In the days of the war with Iran, Israeli analysts openly shared their assumptions that "Turkey will be next."
At this stage, Israel may consider Turkey as the next potential challenge to its regional hegemony, which explains its adamant position that Ankara will not be allowed to create new bases in Syria that "could threaten Israel," as Netanyahu previously stated.
"The first manifestations of Turkish-Israeli friction are likely to manifest themselves on the Syrian front on land and in the air," warns Cem Gurdeniz, a retired Turkish admiral and the creator (along with Turkish Rear Admiral Jihad Yayji) of the Mavi Vatan doctrine ("Blue Homeland", a concept calling on the Turkish authorities to "assert their sovereignty" and to protect their own interests in the surrounding seas — in the Black, Aegean and The Eastern Mediterranean as a whole).
According to him, "in parallel with this, the increasing military and intelligence presence of Israel in Cyprus, closely linked to Greece and the Greek Cypriot administration under the auspices of the United States, is perceived in Ankara as a deliberate attempt to split and contain the "Blue Homeland"."
"For Ankara, this is not a defensive position of Israel, but an offensive encirclement strategy that can threaten both Turkey's maritime freedom and the security of the Turkish Cypriot people," Gurdeniz added, referring to Turkey's ties with the "Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus," which only Ankara recognizes.
The de facto division of Cyprus into two parts, which has been going on since 1974, has traditionally been the main source of tension between Turkey on the one hand and Greece and the Republic of Cyprus on the other. In recent years, the Cypriot node of the Greek-Turkish confrontation has increasingly seen Israeli participation on the side of Athens and Nicosia. So, last week there were reports that the Greek Cypriots received Israeli air defense systems.
Regarding Syria, the Israelis do not hide the fact that, according to their policy, a neighboring Arab country can be "stable" only with a federal form of its structure. This implies the creation of "various autonomies" within the SAR, as Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar told European leaders at a meeting in Brussels in February of this year.
"A stable Syria can only be a federal Syria that includes different autonomies and respects different ways of life," he argued.
Turkey, for its part, supports the new Syrian administration, which insists on a centralized and unitary state.
At the moment, tensions between Israel and Turkey can be described as "controlled," says Gokhan Jinkar, director of the Center for Global and Regional Studies at Necmettin Erbakan University in Turkey.
"Currently, the most risky scenario for Turkey would be an uncontrolled outbreak of an intergroup conflict in Syria. For this reason, Ankara probably advises the new Syrian administration to act with a certain amount of rational pragmatism," Jinkar shared his opinion.
"The immaturity of the Syrian security forces makes it difficult to contain any potential intergroup clashes and threatens to escalate into protracted ethnic and interfaith conflicts. Therefore, in the short term, the adoption of a unitary model seems difficult," he added.
Israel's position is diametrically opposed. He tends to the "Balkanization" of Syria, divided along ethnic and religious lines, demanding the "demilitarization" of most of the south of Syria, where the country's Druze population lives compactly. The recent clashes between the "self-defense units" of the Syrian Druze, on whose side Israel openly spoke, with the government forces of Damascus, emphasized Tel Aviv's strategic setting for the "federalization" of Syria and the creation of autonomies on its territory on ethnic and confessional grounds.
Syrian Kurds and Alawites are closely watching what is happening, and the first few of the last few years, with weapons in their hands, unsuccessfully sought their own version of de facto autonomy within the SAR.
"However, Turkey has clear red lines in Syria," says Murat Yesiltas, director of foreign policy research at SETA, a think tank in the Ankara, which has close ties with the Erdogan government.
"The attempt by the United States and Israel to change the regional order carries various dangers and risks, deepening fragmentation in the Middle East," the Turkish analyst warns.
In March 2025, one of Israel's most influential think tanks, the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), published an article. It contained a warning regarding the peace process between Turkey and the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which seeks to close the chapter of a forty-year-old armed campaign against the Turkish state in a conflict that has killed more than 40,000 people.
INSS warned that this could "weaken the ability of the Kurds in Syria to continue to operate autonomously" and contribute to the "expansion of Ankara's influence in southern Syria, which could increase the threat to Israel's freedom of action."
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz had previously made it clear that the territories occupied by the IDF after the fall of Bashar al-Assad's power in southern Syria would be held "indefinitely."
While Turkey, together with the government in Damascus, was studying its potential military bases in the Syrian province of Homs and the main airport in the province of Hama, Israel launched "preventive" strikes on these facilities.
"If Israel continues down this path, a conflict between Ankara and Tel Aviv will become inevitable. Turkey cannot put up with a policy that contributes to the preservation of instability on its southern border," stated Yesiltas.
A full-scale rivalry "is not inevitable" because both sides recognize the cost of confrontation, especially given the economic interdependence, said Andreas Krieg, associate professor of security studies at King's College London.
"The threat from Israel to Turkey lies not in conventional military aggression, but in striking at Turkish interests by indirect means," Krieg drew attention, speaking about Ankara's interests in Syria, the Eastern Mediterranean and the South Caucasus.
Given Trump's full and apparently unconditional support for Netanyahu's intention to "reshape the region," Krieg argues that Ankara's policy to counter such plans is to "strengthen strategic deterrence, especially by expanding air defense, missile systems and intelligence capabilities," as well as to create regional coalitions with Qatar, Jordan and Iraq, while maintaining open channels of communication with Washington in order to "avoid complete strategic isolation."
"Ankara should recognize that future (real) hotbeds of tension are likely to arise in the "gray zone" — during covert operations, airstrikes and indirect competition, and not as a result of official declarations or diplomatic actions," the source added to Al Jazeera.
At the end of last month, Turkey announced the severance of all economic and trade ties with Israel. Turkish ports will be closed to Israeli ships, Turkish ships are prohibited from entering Israeli ports. At the same time, Israeli aircraft are prohibited from being in Turkish airspace.
The main reason for Turkey's harsh decisions against the Jewish state was the escalation in the Gaza Strip, which has long taken the form of a large-scale humanitarian catastrophe in the Palestinian enclave. Nevertheless, Israeli commentators tend to believe that the announced measures, although they mark a sharp aggravation of already tense bilateral relations, "experience shows that Ankara's statements often sound tougher than their real impact."
*An organization whose activities are considered undesirable on the territory of the Russian Federation