Ankara vs. Tel-Aviv: A Power Hardening as It Wears Thin

A split illustration showing Erdogan and Netanyahu facing off, connected by a central oil pipeline, symbolising rising Turkey-Israel tensions over Gaza and energy flows.

Article by Anthony TRAD, MENA geopolitical analyst and Founder of Stradegy Advisory (12 September 2025). Read here in french: https://www.lorientlejour.com/article/1477169/la-rupture-dankara-avec-tel-aviv-ou-lart-dun-pouvoir-qui-se-durcit-quand-il-suse.html

“Peace at home, peace in the world,” Atatürk once declared. A century later, Ankara is closing ports to Israeli ships, cutting trade, and screening its skies, turning thunderous rhetoric into action. Gaza’s devastation has become a lever for leadership across the Muslim world. Yet Israel and Turkey know each other too well to be surprised anymore. One-time allies turned best of enemies; they are as skilled at talking as they are at punishing. The question now is no longer what Ankara proclaims, but what it can sustain.

On August 29, Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan set the tone from the floor of the Grand National Assembly: “We have completely cut our trade with Israel.” In short order, Ankara clarified that the ban targets government flights and cargoes carrying arms and ammunition to Israel, while commercial transit overflights remain permitted. It’s Ankara’s now-familiar two-step: the sweeping gesture, then the technical adjustment.

Israel, for its part, has already hit back by weaponizing tariffs. The 1990s free-trade agreement is scrapped, and duties on Turkish imports are raised to 100 percent. Déjà vu? Looks like punitive tariffs have become the megaphone of choice for capitals everywhere.

Here is the core. External hardening answers internal fragility. Speak loudly abroad, hold the line at home. Can this endure without cracking the economy? Does it serve a moral pulpit, or the need to close ranks? Laid bare is the strategy of a power that hardens as it wears thin.

Erdoğan: Champion of the Ummah Abroad, Wear and Tear at Home

For months, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has cast himself as the “protector of Jerusalem” (Al-Quds). The language has hardened (“genocide,” “butcher of Gaza,” “apartheid”). The Organization of Islamic Cooperation has been mobilized; public rebukes of Western allies have multiplied. The aim is twofold. Externally, to seize the symbolic initiative from Riyadh in a rivalry of legitimacy more than capability. Internally, to answer a public inflamed by Gaza and battered by the cost of living after an unprecedented defeat in the 2024 municipal elections.

For years, Erdoğan governed as if he could jolt history forward while keeping the bill under control. Over the past year, the bill has come due. The statesman who keeps expanding his arsenal of external levers now shows, at home, the signs of a power tensing up to hold on. The March 2024 local elections marked a turning point. For the first time since 2001, the AKP (Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party) did not finish first. The CHP (Atatürk’s Republican People’s Party) captured or consolidated the major metros (İstanbul, Ankara, İzmir) now anchoring the country’s demographic and economic majority. In İstanbul, Ekrem İmamoğlu won comfortably, cementing his status as a credible national rival. Erdoğan acknowledged a “defeat” and pledged to “correct mistakes.” One thing was clear that night: the aura of invincibility binding his clientelist-ideological coalition cracked.

Politically, by spring 2025, the judicialization of competition turned frontal. İmamoğlu’s jailing pending trial, followed by new indictments and sweeps targeting opposition officials, sparked the largest protests in years and a market jolt (the lira slid, bonds came under pressure, emergency interventions followed). Many saw an attempt to neutralize the president’s natural rival; polls showed İmamoğlu gaining, while markets probed the strength of Turkey’s macro narrative. Do courts moving against the opponent move the currency too? Likely, and it would not be a first in the Middle East.

The drift to the right did the rest. A slice of the Islamist-conservative electorate peeled off to Yeniden Refah (YRP), the moral heir to Milli Görüş, angered by inflation, soaring prices, and Ankara’s perceived ambiguity on Gaza. Modest nationally but decisive locally, that siphon was enough to flip strongholds. Verdict? Erdoğan’s base is no longer monolithic. It is now bargaining.

Economically, the government tried a return to “monetary orthodoxy”: a new central bank governor in early 2024 (Fatih Karahan), policy rates pushed to unprecedented levels, then a cautious easing by summer 2025. Inflation, which had peaked around 75 percent in spring 2024, fell to a still-high band in the low forties. Real progress, but not enough for voters crushed by living costs. So long as CPI sits above 30 percent, the AKP will reap no “social dividend” from discipline. It is less a victory than a constrained lull. Erdoğan’s dilemma is clear: loosen to spur growth, tighten to anchor credibility, at the risk, either way, of feeding fatigue.

The strategic question remains. Has Erdoğan lost control? No, that is overstated, but he has clearly lost some grip (paradoxical for a leader who prides himself on a firm hand): the ability to impose his agenda without counter-costs. He still commands the state apparatus, a dense territorial machine, and a core electorate suffused with ultra-loyalty. But the AKP is no longer the sole sun in the sky. The conservative coalition must now reckon with a shape-shifting nationalist right, a Kurdish vote that can crown kings, and a fickle urban youth. Hence governance on two crutches: a spectacular foreign policy (with Israel front and center) and an economy under constraint. If inflation keeps retreating without political shock, the AKP regains room to move; if, instead, the courts remain a political tool and the economy stalls, Ankara’s “man-system” will reach for the constitutional lever – the ultimate proof that the domestic arena has become his fault line. The palace’s wager boils down to one word: “results”, visible disinflation, a stabilized lira, a revival of credit, while keeping control of the symbolic agenda from Jerusalem to Gaza, up to military prestige. Failing that, erosion will benefit a heteroclite but patient opposition front.

This is where the much-abused “neo-Ottoman” label returns. Erdoğan doesn’t dream of empire; he weaves dependencies, from control of the straits to drone diplomacy, from Caucasus arbitration to the Eastern Mediterranean, all the way to shaping tomorrow’s Syrian state. Whether praised or feared, Ankara held Idlib for years, managed flows, and normalized a “Salvation Government” backed by HTS’s apparatus; that Turkish buffer made possible, in early 2025, the presidentialisation of Sharaa, ending fifty years of Assad rule. This pragmatic mesh serves the regime’s identity narrative as much as its political economy. Abroad, it burnishes the claim to protect the Muslim world. At home, it crafts stories of power that buy social patience for the sacrifices of disinflation. Once again, everything hinges on execution, not on slogans.

Ceyhan, the Spigot That Can Make Israel Cough

Beneath the declarations lies a simple truth: whoever controls the flows sets the tempo. You can filter official aviation, restricting Turkish airspace to Israeli state flights and arms cargoes, but oil determines endurance.

The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline starts at the Sangachal terminal near Baku, crosses Georgia, and empties into Ceyhan on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast. Azeri crude is then shipped to Ashkelon or Haifa. Depending on the period, that stream covers roughly one-third to two-fifths of Israel’s needs (fuel for tanks, jet fuel for fighters, bunker fuel for the fleet). Israel can diversify, but not without cost or delay. Turkish authorities stress that BTC is governed by international agreements and that this ecosystem cannot be reconfigured overnight. Still, a mere procedural hardening at Ceyhan is enough to slow the machine: tighter end-use and destination checks, paperwork ambiguities, lengthier inspections. The ratchet effect.

For Israel, the stakes are categorical. In wartime, and with a tighter circle of partners, every ton that doesn’t sail from Ceyhan must be replaced by a cargo coming from farther away, often pricier, sometimes heavier, almost always more uncertain. If Ankara were to extend its restrictions tomorrow to the most sensitive legs between Ceyhan and Israel, the shock would not show up in a press release but in the inventories of Israel’s refineries – vital to the war effort.

In the Eastern Mediterranean, the moral is simple. Symbols matter, customs can shout, but oil decides. When Ceyhan slows, or worse, stops, Israel breathes less easily.

Friend of Trump, Foe of Netanyahu

It is one of Ankara’s most discussed paradoxes: close to Donald Trump, whom the Turkish president readily calls a “friend”, Erdoğan presents himself at the same time as a resolute adversary of Benjamin Netanyahu. Since Trump’s return to the White House, the two have multiplied signs of transactional rapport: choreographed phone calls, splashy gestures, talk of deals, even a meeting in Saudi Arabia where Trump announced the lifting of U.S. sanctions on Syria, a high-value boost to Ankara’s regional agenda. That move consolidates a zone of influence in which Turkey casts itself as guarantor of order – a file that, indirectly, increases Ankara’s weight in any bargaining with Israel. This is American-style realism: it lets Turkey speak directly to Washington while putting deliberate friction in the relationship with Israel. Far from incoherent, it is classic Erdoğan balancing – Israel becomes the variable he dials up or down within a broader posture stretching from Ukraine to Syria and across the straits.

With Netanyahu, by contrast, the relationship has hardened into antagonism on principle. Tensions had already mounted, ambassadors expelled, public invective, reciprocal sanction, but the halt in trade and the airspace filters have cemented a sanction logic. The mood soured further last month when Netanyahu, for the first time, recognized the Armenian genocide – a red line for Ankara, which sees it as memory politics weaponized against Turkey. The symbolic charge was considerable. In a single interview line, the Israeli prime minister touched one of Turkey’s deepest taboos while feeding reciprocal one-upmanship. In Turkish public opinion, this split, “American friendship” on one side, “Israeli rupture” on the other, is not viewed as a contradiction; if anything, it validates the image of a president who speaks loudly in the Levant while bargaining in Washington.

What Now?

At home, all eyes on the 2028 presidential race. Three paths stand out.

• Managed continuity (likely). If disinflation holds, the lira stays calm, and the opposition is contained, a new “technical” term – either in person or via an heir-apparent – looks more probable. An old Ottoman maxim says the state outlasts men. The question is: at what cost?

• Constrained opening (plausible). The coalition frays; the AKP cobbles together majorities, cuts deals with Kurdish or centrist forces and remains first without yielding the executive.

• Destabilisation (unlikely). A security, seismic, or banking shock re-aggregates the opposition around a single figure, say, İmamoğlu, and turns the race into a toss-up.

Three years out, the constants counsel caution: inflation still high, an opposition hemmed in by the courts yet very much alive, and a president who never tires on the stump.

Abroad, the Turkey-Israel file. Three scenarios emerge.

• Short-term selective inertia (likely). Turkish ports stay closed to Israeli ships (with reciprocal measures), airspace is filtered for official flights and arms cargoes, but scheduled transit continues. Israel can manage the cost via detours and substitutions. Credibility will be judged by enforcement – inspections and the hunt for re-exports.

• Gradual tightening (plausible). At Ceyhan, wider scrutiny of sensitive cargoes and tougher documentation. Energy shock in Israel, tariff and legal friction, and a domestic bill for Ankara.

• Transactional de-escalation (low to medium). A Gaza truce, Turkish humanitarian air corridors via Jordan, then case-by-case reopenings. U.S., European, and Gulf pressure if the economic tab climbs too high.

  
  

In the end, Turkey’s equation fits in one line: win the battle of symbol without losing the war of coherence. Closing ports is a decree; shutting supply chains comes with a price. If Ankara truly tightens the Ceyhan valve, Tel Aviv will cough. If it settles for selective lock-in, it preserves leverage without breaking its macro. Between Trump and Netanyahu, Anatolia has chosen: talk to the former, sanction the latter. What remains to prove is that, in the corridors of the skies and oil, as in the corridors of power, controlling the flow still means controlling the narrative, provided they bear the cost and persevere over time.