Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January/February 1999, pages 47, 94

Special Report

Israeli-Turkish Alliance May Prove to Be New Destabilizing Factor in Middle East

By Nabil M. Kaylani

Israel and Turkey are steadily and quietly consolidating, each for its own reasons, a strategic partnership that carries far-reaching, and potentially ominous, implications for the Middle East. And the U.S. seems to be a quiet but enthusiastic partner in this problematic venture.

Initiated in 1994-95, and forged in earnest in 1996, the Israeli-Turkish nexus appears to have been a Turkish idea to which Israel responded with alacrity, and the U.S. embraced with evident satisfaction. For the Turkish military, the real driving force behind Turkish policy, the alliance with the Jewish state appeared to be a clever way out of mounting domestic and regional difficulties.

At home, the secularist Turkish military establishment is waging political warfare against a grass roots Islamist movement which threatens the Western orientation of the Turkish Republic founded by Mustapha Kemal Ataturk in 1923. In the country’s eastern regions, the Turkish armed forces have been increasingly frustrated and embarrassed by their failure to crush the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK) of Abdallah Ocalan, despite a costly military campaign which has claimed an estimated 35,000 lives since its inception in 1984.

Beyond its borders, Turkey finds itself increasingly at odds with its neighbors: with Greece over the island of Cyprus and the Aegean Sea; with Bulgaria over the status of the Turkish minority in that country; with Syria and Iraq over the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, both of which rise in Turkey; and with the Islamic Republic of Iran because of ideological issues and strategic orientation.

In addition, Turkey, a Muslim country whose ruling elite is seemingly alienated from its own culture and aspires to be European, has been repeatedly denied a coveted membership in the European Union (EU). To the Europeans, Turkey does not qualify for membership because of its poor human rights record, its repeatedly faltering democratic institutions, and its poor economic performance.

To the Turks, the repeated denial of membership projects the image of an EU that is in reality an exclusive “Christian club.” It was, therefore, natural for the secular, urbanized and pro-American ruling class in Turkey, a member of NATO, to reach out to Israel, which shares Turkey’s animosity with Syria and which is perceived as having a very strong, perhaps decisive, influence on U.S. Middle East policymaking.

Turkey would not have confronted Syria so aggressively had it not been for its alliance with Israel.

It is fairly obvious to see why Israel would enthusiastically and instantaneously respond to the feelers from Ankara. From a military point of view, an alliance with Turkey would give Israeli pilots access to the vast airspace of Anatolia where both Iranian and Syrian armies and air forces could be closely monitored. On the strategic level, an Israeli-Turkish axis would be a counterpoise to the long-standing Syrian-Iranian entente, with the inevitable concomitant of throwing the entire Arab world on the defensive.

The Syrian regime in particular, viewed by both Israel and the U.S. as difficult and recalcitrant, would feel pressured to accommodate Israeli demands for security if and when peace negotiations between Syria and Israel resume. This same pressure would also influence the situation in south Lebanon, where Israel is locked in a debilitating guerrilla war with the Iranian-backed, Syrian-sponsored Hezbollah.

Indeed, one of the earliest, and very alarming, results of such calculations was the war atmosphere that developed between Turkey and Syria in October, with the former threatening military action unless Damascus ended its support for the PKK and expelled Abdallah Ocalan from its territories.

The crisis was only contained through the active mediation of President Mubarak of Egypt, and the very conciliatory response by Syria, which acceded to Turkish demands to expel Ocalan. But the residual impact of the whole affair was clear: Turkey would not have confronted Syria so aggressively had it not been for its alliance with Israel.

In view of other long-standing disputes between Turkey and Syria, similar crises will occur in the future, possibly with greater frequency and intensity. Turkey has already widened the scope of its military campaign against the Kurds to include northern Iraq, and has raised the possibility of establishing a Turkish “security zone” there not unlike that controlled by Israel in southern Lebanon. And by threatening Syria with air strikes, the Turks appear to be embracing the same military strategy followed by Israel in Lebanon, and by the U.S. in Iraq.

For its part, Israel became alarmed in July when Iran successfully tested the Shahab-3 missile with an 800-mile range that could reach Tel Aviv. Added to the significant Syrian arsenal of Scud missiles, the enhanced Iranian military capability is making a security-obsessed Israel increasingly apprehensive.

Increased U.S. Commitment

It is for this reason that President Clinton was persuaded to sign a new agreement with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu which committed the U.S. to further improve Israel’s “defensive and deterrent capabilities.” Taken in conjunction with the $1.6 billion joint U.S.-Israel Arrow antiballistic missile program, this new agreement is a clear indication of Israel’s increasing vulnerability to long-range ballistic missile technology that is changing the strategic balance of forces in the Middle East.

All this does not augur well for the prospects of peace in that vital and troubled part of the world. The U.S., of course, could use its enormous influence to dissuade Israel or Turkey from capitalizing on their alliance to promote provocative and self-serving ventures. But this does not seem to be happening.

By holding joint military maneuvers with the Israelis and the Turks, the U.S. seems willy-nilly to be sending the wrong signals to all the parties concerned. And the clumsy attempt to involve a weak and vulnerable Jordan in these maneuvers could only compound the suspicions of Jordan among the adjoining Arab states.

The latter tend to see these moves as part of a larger and more complex strategy which includes the dual containment of Iran and Iraq, tightening security relationships between Israel and the U.S., and a faltering peace process that is giving the Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese little more than a modicum of their minimal demands.

If the situation continues to drift, public opinion in the moderate Arab states, such as Egypt, Jordan and the members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) led by Saudi Arabia, will be increasingly persuaded by the more radical arguments, widely heard in Syria and Iran, that the U.S. shares what they see as the malignant intentions of the Turkish military and the present Israeli government.

In other words, Arabs and Muslims, in their vast majorities, could easily come to believe that the U.S., in league with a hawkish Turkish military establishment and a hard-line Israeli government, is working to keep the Arab world in particular, and the Islamic world in general, divided and weak in order to perpetuate its global hegemony, and the regional domination of its chosen allies. If this actually happens, and there is every reason to believe that it will, then the long-range vital interests of the U.S. in the Middle East could be seriously undermined.