Will Washington pressure Ankara to reverse its anti-Israel actions? Turkey Turns Screws on Israel | Informed Comment |

Turkey's reluctance to move from rhetoric to action may be finally changing, however. Last week, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced that his country would sever all diplomatic ties with Israel, heralding a new phase of tensions between Ankara and Tel Aviv. At the same time, Ankara has now declared that it will close embargo loopholes and will lobby the UN for a global arms embargo on Israel (a move supported by Beijing and Moscow). Last week, Ankara reportedly blocked top jets with Israeli officials from entering its airspace.

More than a year into the war, with Israel now bombing seven majority Muslim nations--Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen, and Iran--Turkey's changing stance towards Tel Aviv reflects the immense pressure from the Turkish public, a majority of whom are adamantly opposed to Israel's actions in Gaza. But it also indicates that, should the war escalate further, Turkey would find it more and more difficult to avoid direct involvement--not least because of the huge number of refugees that would almost certainly be forced into Turkey should the bombing of Lebanon continue and plans for mass expulsions of Palestinians take effect. Given the intense socioeconomic tensions set off by the presence of 3 million Syrian refugees in Turkey, Erdoğan will be under enormous pressure as more Arab refugees move closer to Turkey's borders.

Turkey's severing of diplomatic ties with Israel is not just symbolic. Turkey is not Honduras, Brazil, or Bahrain, to list some of the dozen-odd countries that have likewise broken diplomatic ties with Israel. A NATO member with a critical geostrategic position in the region and one of the largest land armies in Europe, Turkey is also the conduit for as much as 40 percent of Israel's energy, piped in from Azerbaijan via Turkey. Should Erdoğan decide to cut off or restrict Azeri oil, then Israel's already flailing economy, along with its energy-hungry and increasingly disaffected military, could collapse.