Israel is not Turkey's enemy. It is Turkey's alibi

Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan accused Israel on Monday of seeking to make Turkey its "new enemy », the latest salvo in an increasingly theatrical confrontation between Ankara and Jerusalem that reveals far more about the fragility of Erdogan's domestic position than about any genuine geopolitical rivalry.

The latest flare-up began when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused Erdogan of "coddling the Iranian terrorist regime while massacring his own Kurdish citizens." 

Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz sharpened the blade further, describing Turkey as a "paper tiger that failed to react to Iranian missile strikes on Turkish territory », a devastating reference to Ankara's conspicuous silence when Iranian missiles crossed Turkish airspace earlier this year.

Ankara responded with its customary theatrics. Fidan declared that Israel "cannot do without an enemy," accusing the Netanyahu government of deliberately constructing Turkey as a new strategic threat. Presidential communications director Burhanettin Duran branded Netanyahu a "criminal wanted by arrest warrants" who "drags the region into chaos as a political survival strategy."

Istanbul's prosecutor joined the performance, filing symbolic charges, genocide, crimes against humanity, pillaging, against 35 Israeli officials, including Netanyahu, Katz and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, over last summer's interception of the Gaza-bound Freedom Flotilla.

It was loud, dramatic and almost entirely meaningless.

Domestic Politics Dressed Up as Foreign Policy

Strip away the diplomatic noise and the picture snaps into focus. This is not foreign policy. It is electoral theatre, scripted in Ankara, performed for a Turkish audience, and calibrated to distract from a domestic record that Erdogan can no longer defend on its own merits.

Since the Hamas massacres of October 7, 2023, the Turkish president has ratcheted up his anti-Israel posture with remarkable consistency, and remarkable convenience.

His AKP base, battered by years of economic mismanagement, crushing inflation and a cost-of-living crisis that has devastated Turkish households, needed a unifying cause. Israel, conveniently, provided one.

The formula is as old as it is cynical: when domestic performance collapses, manufacture an external enemy and perform righteous indignation at scale. 

The louder Erdogan shouts about Israeli crimes, the quieter the conversation becomes about the lira's freefall, AKP's crumbling poll numbers, the jailing of opposition mayors and the systematic dismantling of Turkish democratic institutions.

The spectacle of Turkey positioning itself as the global champion of Palestinian rights and international law would be almost comic under any circumstances.

Coming from a government that has conducted decades of military operations against its Kurdish population, imprisoned journalists by the hundreds, weaponised the judiciary against political opponents and locked up Istanbul's elected mayor on transparently fabricated charges, it is breathtaking in its audacity.

Erdogan's Turkey lecturing Israel on human rights is not moral leadership. It is moral cosplay, a performance designed for domestic consumption and social media virality, utterly divorced from any principled foreign policy position.

Katz was not wrong to call Turkey a paper tiger. For all the fire-breathing rhetoric emanating from Ankara, not a single meaningful action has followed. 

Trade between Turkey and Israel, suspended with great fanfare, has quietly continued through third-party channels. The Istanbul prosecutor's charges against Netanyahu are legally farcical, symbolic gestures that will never be enforced, but will be replayed endlessly on Turkish state television.

A Scapegoat, Not a Strategy

The Turkish anti-Israel narrative is well-worn and visibly fraying. Erdogan has been playing this card for years, and the returns are rapidly diminishing.

The AKP base remains deeply restless. The economy has not recovered. The opposition, despite systematic repression, continues to win hearts and minds. And the international community has largely seen through the posturing.

There is no Turkish foreign policy vision here. There is no principled stand. There is only a leader running out of arguments, reaching for the oldest tool in the populist playbook, find a villain, stoke the outrage, and hope the noise drowns out the questions you cannot answer.

Israel is not Turkey's enemy. It is Turkey's alibi.

And an alibi, by definition, only works when nobody looks too closely.