Why Türkiye Must Deter Israel by All Means
Israel’s aggression will not end in Syria. Unless Türkiye imposes tangible costs, Israeli forces may eventually reach its borders. Diplomatic restraint alone cannot deter a state that interprets caution as weakness. Türkiye must establish credible deterrence before Israel advances further.
It is clear that Israel, under its current Religious Zionist leadership, has become a real and immediate danger to the entire region, not merely to some countries and not others.
No state in the region is exempt, not even those bound to Israel by long-standing peace agreements or diplomatic relations, such as Egypt, Jordan, and Türkiye.
The new Israeli order shaped by the Religious Zionist movement since the government was formed in 2022 has completely changed Israel's strategic security doctrine and effectively tied it to this movement's hard-line religious vision. Netanyahu himself shares this vision. At heart, he does not believe in coexistence with the surrounding region, as he made clear more than thirty years ago when he first published his book “A Place Among the Nations”.
He also empowered this movement through his 2022 alliance with the Smotrich-Ben-Gvir duo, about a year before the events of October 7. He then exploited the genocidal war on the Gaza Strip to proclaim, for the first time, his religious-spiritual vision, openly declaring his spiritual and personal commitment for the vision of “Greater Israel”.
All these facts point to one conclusion: post-2022 Israel is not the Israel the world knew for more than seventy years. It has become a new state, driven by the vision of the ruling Religious Zionist movement.
That movement quickly began turning itself into a deep state by taking control of the various arms of government, particularly the security institutions whose leadership it now dominates: the army, the police, and the General Security Service (Shin Bet). Only the judiciary remains beyond its grasp.
This new Israel is an aggressive entity that sees everything around it as an existential threat. In Türkiye's case specifically, it now views Türkiye as a looming strategic threat in the fullest sense of the term. The incitement campaigns saturating Israeli media and echoing Israeli politicians, especially Netanyahu and his foreign minister, Gideon Sa'ar, make that plain.
Contrary to what some observers believe, I do not think this Israeli campaign against Türkiye, which has intensified over the past weeks, is driven by Israel's election season. It is not in Israel's interest to open a broad front against Türkiye during an election, even if, for example, Netanyahu were seeking to cancel the elections by opening a new front.
He is unlikely to risk a confrontation with a power the size of Türkiye at this point unless he is embarking on genuine political suicide. Opening a front of this magnitude for short-term electoral purposes would be political folly of the first order, and Netanyahu may not be foolish enough to go that far.
At the same time, Israel's attempt to provoke Türkiye by harassing it on the Syrian front rests above all on its confidence that the new Syria does not want to enter any confrontation that could drain it at this stage. The current Israeli leadership therefore appears convinced that it can continue and intensify these provocations in an effort to deter Türkiye, not Syria alone.
It interprets the absence of a response as proof that the other side has been deterred. That only encourages Israel to advance further and may persuade it that the time has come to move beyond deterrence and toward imposing sovereignty and control across the region. That is precisely the central danger Israel poses.
Türkiye must therefore work to deter Israel in real terms by imposing facts on the ground in Syria. It must raise the stakes against Israel and demonstrate that Türkiye does not fear confrontation, without driving Netanyahu into an open war that would amount to political suicide for him, as noted above. Such a Turkish approach must be extraordinarily precise - as precise as a surgeon's scalpel. At the same time, Turkish decision-makers must understand that the Israeli mindset can be restrained only through calculated escalation.
Türkiye has many pressure points it can use to hurt Israel as it raises the stakes and builds a steel wall of deterrence in Israel's path. One is Jerusalem, which Israel treats as a purely internal matter. The Turkish parliament could pass a law declaring Jerusalem part of the Turkish nation's heritage and an internal Turkish issue, on the grounds that Istanbul was the last Muslim capital to rule Jerusalem before it fell to British occupation in 1917.
At the same time, such a law should reaffirm and support Jordan's special role in Jerusalem's holy sites. This would reopen the battle over Israel's legitimacy in Jerusalem after Israel believed it had closed that front following the first Trump administration's recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital in 2017 and its relocation of the US embassy there in 2018.
The Eastern Mediterranean is another pressure point for Israel. The Turkish Navy currently asserts its presence there, which can shatter Israel's sense that it enjoys absolute freedom of action in that arena.
International legal action, building on Türkiye's existing arrest warrants for Israeli war criminals such as Netanyahu, Katz, and Ben-Gvir and pressing for their enforcement through Interpol and international courts, would also demonstrate Türkiye's weight on the regional and international stage and its determination to pursue these war criminals.
Perhaps one of the most important steps for practically deterring Israel on the ground is for Türkiye to support the Syrian army openly and unequivocally, making clear to Israel that Syria does not stand alone in confronting it. Harnessing the Makkah Defence Alliance could be a cornerstone of this equation.
Every step of this Turkish posture in Syria is met with the same Israeli accusation: that Türkiye's presence there amounts to “expansionism”, a charge that inverts the record entirely. Türkiye is filling a security vacuum on its own border. In fact, Israel is the one seizing new ground in Syria: its air force bombs Syrian territory at will, its army has pushed past the 1974 disengagement line into fresh Syrian land, and its own defense minister, Katz, has publicly declared that his forces are not withdrawing.
Tel Aviv even claims it has the right to determine which forces may operate inside a sovereign neighboring state. A hostile violent regime advancing its own army deeper into someone else's country every few months has no standing or right whatsoever to call the country resisting that advance the aggressor. That is not analysis; it is propaganda dressed as strategy.
Israel understands only one language; calculated escalation forces it to recognize its true size and retreat. Hesitation, retreat, and soft language, by contrast, are read in Israel only as signs of weakness that invite further advances and provocations. This is a rogue state that cannot be allowed to act with such arrogance and impunity.
Otherwise, we will see the Israeli army advance step by step toward Damascus through Syrian territory and deep into Lebanon along the Mediterranean coast, until it stands directly on Türkiye's borders.
This cannot be taken lightly or treated as a problem to be resolved through soft diplomacy. Soft diplomacy works with rational actors. It does not work with lunatics and those obsessed with genocide.
Disclaimer: This is an opinion column. The views expressed are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Clash Report.
Abdullah Marouf Omer
Dr. Abdullah M. Omer is an Assistant Professor of Islamic History and Director of KUDAM, the Jerusalem Studies and Research Center at Istanbul 29 Mayıs University. He holds a PhD in Islamic Jerusalem Studies from the University of Aberdeen and specializes in cultural and historical research.
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