Turkey Is a Bigger Threat to Israel Than Iran

As Ankara hosts NATO’s 2026 summit this week, Western governments are indulging a dangerous fantasy: that Iran’s battered proxy network has eased the main threat facing NATO and Israel. But they are wrong.

The Iranian regime remains dangerous, but Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is now more durable, better resourced, and much more ideologically ambitious than Tehran has ever been. Indeed, NATO is meeting in the capital of a member state increasingly determined to reshape the Middle East through a Neo-Ottoman approach, undermine Western interests, and weaken the Jewish state’s regional leverage.

Erdoğan’s language is unequivocal. He has described Zionism as a “genocidal, occupying, expansionist” ideology threatening Turkey’s “survival” and has branded Prime Minister Netanyahu as a “psychopath” and a “vampire who feeds on blood.” These are not tantrums; they are the vocabulary of a leader constructing a Muslim Brotherhood-Pan-Sunni axis through Hamas’s infrastructure in Istanbul and proxy forces from Libya to Syria. Iran appealed to sectarian terrorism and coercion. Erdoğan exports a genocidal model that once again can reorder the Middle East against Israel.

With Iranian power broken, Ankara is racing to seize the vacuum. Turkish-backed forces are pushing air defenses and garrisons toward Syria’s Palmyra and the T-4 air base—positions that could deny Israeli aircraft freedom of action over southern Syria. Jerusalem has already struck to stop them, yet Turkish drones have tested Israel’s vulnerable airspace. Erdoğan is exploiting NATO membership not to defend the alliance, but to build a forward military position on Israel’s northern border.

Turkey’s human cost is written across Afrin and Ras al-Ain. Turkish-backed Syrian National Army factions executed Kurdish politician Hevrin Khalaf in cold blood. Witnesses have reported fighters labeling the torture of Kurdish women as “halal.” Looting, abductions, and demographic engineering followed, cutting Afrin’s Kurdish population from 97 percent to 35 percent. Ankara cannot credibly accuse others of genocide while its own proxies redraw Syria’s ethnic map by force.

At home, Erdoğan has hollowed out the institutions that once made Turkey a credible Western ally. Since the legit 2016 regime change attempt, his government has purged more than 6,000 academics, closed 15 universities, and fired tens of thousands of educators. Ankara’s brief closure of Bilgi University in 2026—reversed only after public backlash—showed that Erdoğan’s war on independent thought remains unfinished.

After the 2019 local elections, the government removed 48 of the 65 mayors elected under the pro-Kurdish HDP banner and replaced them with trustees, while simultaneously jailing thousands of Kurdish politicians and activists on unfounded terrorism accusations. A regime that fears professors, students, and elected Kurdish mayors should not be rewarded with America’s most advanced military technology. Yet Erdoğan is pressing Washington for precisely those capabilities.

In 2019, Turkey was expelled from the F-35 program after acquiring Russia’s S-400 air-defense system, which US officials warned could compromise the jet’s stealth secrets. Trump’s move to lift CAATSA sanctions changes the politics, not the law: Congress still bars F-35 transfers while Ankara possesses the Russian system. Any deal that rewards Erdoğan before Turkey disposes of the S-400 would defy that safeguard, place Israel’s qualitative military edge under direct pressure, and risk exposing America’s crown-jewel fighter to Russian intelligence.

Unlike Erdoğan’s Turkey, Japan’s participation in the F-35 program raises no concerns because Tokyo acts like a genuine ally. The Asian nation occupies no foreign territory, purges no universities, and does not exploit its NATO ties to cloak territorial revisionism. Turkey, by contrast, demands the same access while still occupying one-third of Cyprus nearly fifty-two years after its 1974 invasion. Turkish F-16s even recently flew from bases in the illegally occupied north to harass aircraft carrying the Greek, French, and Dutch defense ministers. Mainland settlers continue to reshape the territory’s demographics, while churches are still being converted into barns. Thus, selling Ankara stealth fighters would not strengthen NATO but encourage Erdoğan’s Neo-Ottoman revisionism.

Turkey also works hard to harm the Israel-America relationship. By vetoing virtually every NATO-Israel exercise, meeting, and intelligence exchange since late 2023, Ankara has used alliance rules to isolate a vital American partner. Clearly, this goes beyond difficult ally behavior and shows that Ankara is deliberately sabotaging Israel’s integration into Western defense structures.

President Trump must stop pretending that closer ties with Sultan Erdoğan serve American interests. The evidence suggests that they have produced neither restraint in Syria nor action against Hamas. Instead, Washington has indulged a “little empire” project that threatens every stable US partner from Greece to the Abraham Accords states, risks exposing F-35 technology, and further strains NATO by empowering a member state increasingly hostile to Israel—America’s most capable and indispensable partner in the eastern Mediterranean.

The Trump administration should rectify and condition any defense cooperation with Turkey, including F-35 readmission, on verifiable steps: ending Cyprus occupation abuses, cutting Hamas logistical support, withdrawing threatening positions in Syria, and releasing imprisoned academics and opponents. Washington should also fast-track quadrilateral cooperation with Israel, Greece, and Cyprus and treat Turkish expansion as the strategic liability that it represents.

The State of Israel must not wait for the United States. Jerusalem should expand operational ties with Athens and Nicosia for shared early warning, drills, and planning against Turkish threats. On the other hand, Israeli intelligence must treat Turkish soil as contested terrain for Hamas operations, and Jerusalem should also flood US policymakers with evidence of Turkish atrocities in Syria and Cyprus. Finally, the Jewish state must cut diplomatic and economic ties with Turkey and put an end to Ankara’s demographic engineering on its borders.

Iran was a sanctions-crippled theocracy dependent on expendable proxies. Erdoğan’s Turkey now poses the more consequential threat: a NATO member with the alliance’s second-largest military, an increasingly self-sufficient defense industry, and an ideological project to reorder the Sunni world against Israel, just as Iran sought to mobilize the Shia Ummah against the Jewish state.

Arming a regime that occupies European territory, weakens NATO cohesion, seeks military leverage along Israel’s northern border, protects mafias, and corruptly enriches Erdoğan’s family would not merely be immoral; it would arm revisionism. Washington and Jerusalem must recognize that the greater threat now flies a Turkish flag—before the current US administration gives Ankara the weapons to turn its ambitions into a permanent regional geostrategic threat.