The Turkey-Israel Fault Line and the Future of the Middle East

The United States and Israel's joint military campaign against Iran is upending the strategic order of the Middle East in ways that extend far beyond Tehran. The strikes have killed Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, targeted Iran's military and nuclear infrastructure, and triggered retaliatory Iranian attacks across the region. As the war enters its second week, a second and potentially more consequential shift is taking shape. With Iran's role as the dominant pole of regional opposition to Israel now in question, a new rivalry is hardening between Israel and Turkey, one that carries different stakes, different risks, and a far more unpredictable trajectory than the confrontation the current war was designed to resolve. Understanding this emerging fault line requires examining both the structural forces pushing the two states apart and the domestic political dynamics that risk turning competitive rhetoric into irreversible confrontation.

For decades, Turkey and Israel maintained a pragmatic, if uneasy, relationship built on military cooperation agreements in the 1990s and sustained trade ties well into the 2000s. That relationship began unravelling with Israel’s Operation Cast Lead against Gaza in 2008, accelerated through the Mavi Marmara flotilla killing in 2010, and effectively collapsed under the weight of the Gaza war following Oct. 7, 2023. By May 2024, Turkey had imposed a comprehensive trade embargo on Israel, the first time Ankara had deployed such extensive economic measures against another country for purely political reasons. What had once been managed competition had hardened into structural antagonism, and the ongoing war against Iran is now accelerating that process considerably.

As Iran’s capacity to project influence through Iraq, Syria, and the Levant comes under sustained military pressure, Turkey finds itself elevated by default as the most capable non-Arab Muslim power adjacent to multiple strategic theatres simultaneously, spanning the Levant, the Caucasus, the Eastern Mediterranean, and the Horn of Africa. This shift in Turkey’s relative weight does not require Ankara to take any particular action; it is a consequence of one regional pole being struck while Turkey’s geography, NATO membership, and military capability remain intact.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett recognized this dynamic explicitly when he declared at the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations in February 2026 that “Turkey is the new Iran,” warning that “Erdogan is sophisticated, dangerous, and he seeks to encircle Israel.” Bennett also accused Turkey of “nourishing the Islamic Brotherhood monster,” drawing a direct parallel to Iran’s support for armed proxies across the region, and raising the prospect of a Sunni axis anchored by Turkey and nuclear-armed Pakistan that could pose a challenge the Iran-led Shia axis never managed at the same level of international integration.

Moreover, Israel’s concerns are not purely rhetorical. Turkey maintains a significant military presence in Somalia and Libya, and has thousands of troops embedded in northern Syria following the fall of Bashar al-Assad. Its Blue Homeland maritime doctrine asserts expansive claims across the Eastern Mediterranean, directly challenging Israeli-backed energy corridors that Tel Aviv views as strategic lifelines to Europe. Israel, in turn, has deepened defence agreements with Greece, Cyprus, and India, moves that Ankara reads as deliberate encirclement from the north and east. Both states are reacting to the other’s positioning, and both are making the other’s fears more justified in the process, a textbook security dilemma in which defensive moves are indistinguishable from offensive ones.

Nowhere is this structural competition more visible or more dangerous than in Syria. Following Assad’s fall, Turkey consolidated influence across northern Syria, embedding troops and cultivating local governance structures aligned with Ankara’s interests. Israel has simultaneously intensified operations in southern Syria to prevent any hostile consolidation near its northern borders. A fragile deconfliction arrangement has emerged between two states that distrust each other deeply yet cannot afford direct confrontation. The ongoing war against Iran now threatens to unravel even that arrangement, and the mechanism through which it could do so is the Kurdish question.

The Kurdistan Workers’ Party, known as the PKK, is designated a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States, and the European Union. Founded in 1978, the PKK has waged a decades-long armed insurgency against the Turkish state with the stated aim of establishing Kurdish autonomy in southeastern Turkey. The group maintains rear bases in the Kandil Mountains of northern Iraq and operates an affiliate network across the region, including the Kurdistan Free Life Party, known as PJAK, which is active inside Iran along the country’s western border. For Turkey, any external power that arms, funds, or provides air support to PKK-affiliated groups is directly threatening Turkish national security, regardless of the stated justification for doing so.

This is precisely why developments emerging during the first week of the Iran war have alarmed Ankara more than any other aspect of the conflict. As reported by Reuters, Israel has been coordinating with Iranian Kurdish militant groups for approximately a year, and since the war began, has been conducting airstrikes on western Iran in support of those groups’ plans to seize border towns including Oshnavieh and Piranshahr. Thousands of fighters are said to be gathering on the Iraqi side of the border, and the United States is understood to have asked Iraqi Kurdish leaders to support a cross-border offensive. President Trump initially encouraged this, saying it would be “wonderful” if Kurdish fighters entered Iran, before reversing his position within 48 hours and telling reporters “I don’t want the Kurds to go into Iran… the war is complicated enough as it is.”

Trump’s reversal almost certainly reflects Turkish pressure, as this scenario is a near-exact replay of the dynamic in Syria that produced lasting damage to the US-Turkey alliance. During the fight against the Islamic State in Syria, the United States partnered with the People’s Protection Units, or YPG, the Syrian affiliate of the PKK, providing them with weapons, training, and air support. For Ankara, arming a PKK affiliate under any banner is unacceptable, and the prospect of a Kurdish proto-state emerging from the chaos of a destabilized Iran along Turkey’s eastern border represents a direct threat to Turkish territorial integrity. Ankara has drawn the comparison to Syria repeatedly, warning Washington that a repeat of that experience on Iranian soil would be significantly more dangerous and would constitute a fundamental breach in the NATO alliance relationship.

Beyond the Kurdish dimension, Turkey faces serious national security risks from the war’s trajectory. A destabilized Iran could generate large-scale refugee flows along Turkey’s 530-kilometer shared border, arriving in a country already hosting millions of displaced people and struggling with years of economic difficulty. It could also create ungoverned space inside Iran that PKK-linked networks exploit to regroup and rearm, threatening Turkish security from the east while Ankara manages existing pressures on multiple other fronts. Ankara has been explicit that its objective is Iran’s territorial integrity, not because of any ideological alignment with Tehran, but because a fragmented Iran on Turkey’s border is a more dangerous neighbour than a contained one. As Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan stated publicly, Ankara believes the current crisis is “part of Israel’s bid for regional hegemony,” a framing that makes Israeli-backed Kurdish operations inside Iran not a side issue but the central test of whether Washington respects Turkish national security interests.

The domestic stakes on both sides compound the structural risks considerably. Both the Israeli and Turkish governments benefit politically from elevated mutual threat perception. Israeli leaders frame Turkey as an encircling adversary to mobilize support at home, while President Erdogan uses hostility toward Israel to consolidate his base among voters with strong sympathies for the Palestinian cause. This mutual instrumentalization of threat is not unique to either government, but it is particularly dangerous here because both governments are describing each other in existential terms in a region already at war. The rhetoric creates constituencies, hardens public expectations, and constrains future leaders from pursuing de-escalation without appearing weak. Former Turkish politician Suat Kınıklıoğlu warned explicitly that “such matters in this region have the potential to quickly spiral out of control,” and that responsible leadership requires not creating threats in public discourse that governments subsequently cannot manage.

The Iran war is not resolving the Middle East’s central tensions. It is redistributing them onto a new and more complex fault line. Israel is managing a rivalry with a NATO member that has a domestically built defence industry, the ninth largest military in the world, and energy transit routes that Israel itself depends upon. Turkey is navigating a war on its doorstep that risks empowering the very Kurdish networks it has spent decades fighting, while simultaneously trying to retain Washington’s attention before Israeli strategic counsel dominates American decision-making in the region. Washington, for its part, is shifting between restraining Israeli ambitions and enabling them, as Trump’s 48-hour reversal on Kurdish involvement shows. If this fault line is left unmanaged, the post-Iran order may prove more volatile than the order it is replacing, and the United States may find that in pursuing one regional objective, it is planting the seeds of a far more consequential confrontation.

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