What to know about the Turkish Israeli rivalry

Turkey and Israel have moved from cautious partners to open rivals, and their competition now stretches from Gaza and Syria to the Eastern Mediterranean and the Horn of Africa. What began as a diplomatic rupture in 2009–2010 has become a structural contest over who shapes the post-war order in the Middle East.

From recognition to rupture

The relationship has deep roots but a short history of genuine warmth. As Howard Eissenstat of Stockholm University points out, Turkey became the first Muslim-majority state to recognize Israel in 1949. Only in the 1990s did the picture change, when several developments, above all the Oslo peace process, made it far less costly, politically and diplomatically, for Ankara to treat Israel as a full partner.

That partnership proved fragile and the apparent stability of the relationship collapsed abruptly between 2009 and 2010. The first blow came at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where Recep Tayyip Erdoğan clashed publicly with Israel's Shimon Peres. The second, more damaging one was the Mavi Marmara incident, when Israeli forces raided a Turkish-backed civilian flotilla bound for Gaza and nine people were killed.

From that point on relations never truly recovered.

A decade of Turkish isolation

Ankara spent much of the following decade isolated in its own neighborhood due to its support for popular resistance movements during the Arab Uprisings made it admired among Arab publics, but it alienated most Arab governments.

Turkey stood with Qatar when Riyadh and Abu Dhabi moved against Doha, and it refused to accept the military takeover by General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi that ousted Egypt's President Mohamed Morsi. The killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul further strained Ankara's relations with the Gulf.

Israel, by contrast, gained ground. Shared Gulf anxieties about Iran worked in its favour, as did the Trump administration's drive, from 2016 onward, to fold Israel into the regional order. Efforts that ultimately culminated in the Abraham Accords of 2020.

Two visions of regional order

Beneath the day-to-day disputes lies a deeper clash over what a stable region should look like. According to Ali Murat Kursin, writing for War on the Rocks, Israel tends to regard nearly any growth in state capacity along its borders as a potential danger. Its preemptive strikes, he contends, end up crippling the very institutions that could bring stability to neighbouring countries.

This rests on a mistaken premise that a weak, fragmented buffer zone is safer for Israel than a neighbour with a consolidated national army. In his view, the approach does not resolve Israel's underlying security fears but instead keeps the cycle of conflict going and dismantles effective central governance capable of controlling borders and restraining armed militias.

On the other hand, Turkey's emerging regional strategy favors strong, rational state institutions that hold a monopoly on the use of force, rather than a patchwork of armed factions and proxy conflicts on its frontiers. For Turkish policymakers, defeating terrorist networks for good, stemming refugee flows and disarming militias all depend on rebuilding functioning states next door. Israel's preference for weak neighbours and Turkey's preference for strong ones is fundamentally incompatible.

Four fault lines

The Al Jazeera Centre for Studies identifies four main arenas in which the two states now compete.

First, Palestine is the oldest and most persistent source of friction. Turkish support for the Palestinians did not start with the Justice and Development Party (AKP), as is often assumed. It draws on the Ottoman inheritance and on the outlook of the early Republic's leaders, who saw Palestine as part of Turkey's historical and strategic surroundings.

Israel, for its part, increasingly casts Turkey as one of Hamas's chief foreign backers. It accuses Ankara of sheltering senior Hamas figures, easing the group's financial operations and delivering aid in ways that bolster its position in Gaza. As a result, Israel has resisted giving Turkey any meaningful part in Gaza's future security arrangements.

Syria after Assad is the second flashpoint. Israel was uneasy both about the rise of an Islamist-led government in Damascus and about Turkey's growing sway there. Israel has kept up military operations to contain perceived threats inside Syria, while Turkey has become one of the new government's closest partners, helping to rebuild its army and deepening defence ties.

Reports of Turkish training programmes, arms transfers and possible new bases have alarmed Israeli officials. They fear Ankara is building a lasting strategic foothold that could constrain Israel's freedom to act militarily.

The third arena is energy and connectivity. Turkey firmly rejects Israeli-supported plans to carry Eastern Mediterranean gas and electricity via Greece and Greek Cyprus that ignore Turkish Cypriot claims. Israel, meanwhile, sees Turkey's Development Road project with Iraq as a competitor to corridors that would link the Gulf to Israel's Mediterranean ports.

The rivalry has also reached the Horn of Africa. Turkey regards Israel's expanding relationship with Somaliland, and reports of a possible Israeli military presence near the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, as threats both to Somalia's territorial integrity and to Turkish interests in the area.

The fourth and fastest-growing issue is the overall balance of power. After its military gains against Hezbollah and mounting pressure on Iran, Israel set out to reshape the regional order to its advantage. Turkey answered by deepening ties with Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt and by championing a regional security framework anchored in the major Muslim powers.

Ankara frames this project as a guarantee of stability. Israeli decision-makers, however, increasingly read it as an emerging coalition designed to check Israeli influence and block Israel from becoming the region's dominant power.

Turkey and Israel have harboured mutual animosity for well over a decade, centred on the Palestinian cause and on competing maritime claims in the Eastern Mediterranean. Yet as Iran's influence continues to wane, the regional order is increasingly being reshaped by the Turkish–Israeli rivalry, a contest that ultimately places Washington in a precarious position.

The rivalry also pushes fragile states in close proximity to both powers, such as Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, onto its front lines. The tensions that have built up between the two countries over the years now appear to be coming to the surface.