The Turtle Needs No Visa
The official mascot of the United Nations climate summit in Antalya is a cartoon loggerhead turtle called Caretta. The organisers present her as an ancient traveller of the city’s shores and a small ambassador for climate action. It is a good choice. Loggerheads nest on the beaches of Belek and Patara, forage across the eastern Mediterranean and cross maritime lines that governments have spent a century disputing. They need no overflight clearance. They need none of the special visas Türkiye has created for the conference.
Israel looks set to be less fortunate. Ynet reported last week that the Environmental Protection Ministry had asked the security establishment to approve a joint delegation with the Foreign Ministry, and that approval had not yet been given. The ministry says the matter is being reconsidered and no final decision has been taken. Professor Colin Price, who heads Tel Aviv University’s Climate Initiative, expects the government will not be there, although some private companies may be.
The decline has been steady. At COP29 in Baku in 2024, Israel sent more than a hundred people and a pavilion showing twenty climate projects. At COP30 in Belém last year it sent two ministry officials, citing the diversion of resources caused by the war and the diplomatic campaign. When COP31 opens on 9 November, Israel may send no one at all.
The obstacles are real. Ties with Ankara are at their lowest since Türkiye became the first Muslim majority country to recognise Israel in 1949. Trade stopped in May 2024. President Herzog had to abandon the Baku summit after Türkiye refused his aircraft its airspace, and in August 2025 Ankara confirmed a ban on official Israeli flights. No security official would wave a delegation into that lightly.
Yet look at who else is going. Nikos Christodoulides, the President of Cyprus, said last week that of course he would attend, even though Türkiye does not recognise him as a head of state. Ankara reportedly kept Cyprus out of a COP31 briefing in New York earlier this year. Nicosia’s answer is to turn up anyway, on the sound principle that a host cannot unilaterally exclude a United Nations member state from the negotiations. A COP belongs to the parties to the climate convention, not to the government that lends out the exhibition halls.
There is a second point that ought to interest Jerusalem. The person holding the pen in Antalya will not be Turkish. Under the compromise struck in Belém, Türkiye hosts the summit and its environment minister, Murat Kurum, holds the presidency, while Australia’s climate minister, Chris Bowen, serves as President of Negotiations with exclusive authority over the talks. Kurum has spent the autumn insisting that the final decision rests with Türkiye. Bowen has said the two of them will bring the gavel down together. Whichever man is right, the negotiating rooms will be chaired by a delegation that answers to the rules of the convention, not to the Turkish foreign ministry.
Absence carries a price, and Ankara will not be the one paying it. Udi Avni of Greenpeace Israel made the comparison that should sting: “If this were Eurovision, things would look and sound very different.” He is right. Five countries boycotted the song contest in Vienna in May over Israel’s participation. Israel went anyway, because it understood that an empty stage is itself a statement. A climate summit sets the terms of the move away from fossil fuels, of adaptation finance and of funding for green technology. Those terms will reach Israeli electricity bills, water policy and the response to wildfire and drought whether or not an Israeli is in the room.
The commercial cost is just as plain. Price says foreign investment in Israeli climate technology has fallen sharply, and that investors in a startup he is involved with have simply stopped answering emails. The loggerheads of Belek need no introductions. Israeli founders do, and a summit is where they get them, in corridors and over coffee. Israel’s record in water and agricultural technology is one of the few arguments it can make in hostile company without raising its voice. An empty chair concedes that argument by default, and leaves the stage to a host that, according to Human Rights Watch this month, has been arresting environmental protesters even as it prepares to welcome the world.
Israel has done this before. In December 2023, two months into the war, President Herzog flew to COP28 in Dubai and used its corridors to press Gulf leaders on the hostages. Antalya need not mean a minister walking into danger. It could mean a small ministry team of the kind that went to Belém, joined by scientists like Price, who says researchers feel no boycott at all. They would work alongside the Australians who run the negotiating rooms and the Cypriots, who have shown that turning up is itself a form of argument.
Israel already knows how to work across contested water. Since 1999 the Nature and Parks Authority has run a sea turtle rescue centre at Michmoret, north of Netanya, nursing injured loggerheads and green turtles and releasing them with satellite tags. One study of fifteen tagged turtles found that two travelled more than three thousand kilometres. The tags record where the turtles go, not whose waters they pass through.
When the gavel falls in Antalya, the Expo Center will be full of delegates arguing about a sea that washes Israel’s shore as surely as Türkiye’s. In Vienna, Israel sang while five countries stayed away. In Antalya, the one staying away may be Israel. The turtle on the posters will have made the journey anyway.