The Turkish position as Israel wants the US to dismantle Iran, too

Six hitmen working for Israel who had been put to sleep in different European countries, were woken up two days earlier and sent to Tunisia. The day before, two ships of the Israeli navy, one of them a submarine, and a helicopter carrier disguised as a civilian freighter had been stationed off the coast of Tunisia. That night they infiltrated a deserted beach in Tunisia in rubber boats. The Shayatet-13 naval commandos were led by Yoav Galant, the future Minister of Defense who launched the operation to destroy Gaza in response to the October 7, 2024 attack by Hamas. On the morning of April 16, 1988, the joint operation of the commandos and the assassination squad began.

The target was Khalil al-Wazir, code-named Abu Jihad, one of the founders of Fatah, the backbone of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), a member of its Central Committee and head of its military wing. He was on Israel’s death list, blamed for the Palestinian intifada a year earlier.

An assassination squad backed by commandos, armed with 9 mm Uzi automatic guns, killed Abu Jihad in the house where he had been hiding and leading the organization for two years, and returned home by sea.

Now why am I telling you this? Let me try to explain.

A long term strategy

The assassination of Khalil al-Wazir marked the beginning of the end for both Fatah, led by Yasser Arafat, and the PLO. In the same year, the rise of the politically Islamist HAMAS movement, which had been established some time earlier, and the split in the Palestinian liberation movement began.

Let’s count from the Maghreb to the Mashreq the countries in the Middle East that were united against Israel at the time of Israel’s Tunisian operation: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt (despite the Camp David Accords), Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iran. In the 1990s, Türkiye was the only country in the Middle East that was not hostile to Israel and for this reason it was then condemned by Islamic countries, especially Arab countries.

Today, there is not a single country in the Middle East other than Iran that is hostile to Israel, or (as in the case of Iraq and Syria) has not exhausted its capacity to do so.

Speaking yesterday, April 12, at the Antalya Diplomacy Forum (ADF), US economist Jeffrey Sachs reminded us of the US “7 countries in 5 years” plan of the early 2000s.

Israel in a hurry

What Sachs was referring to is the plan announced by US NATO Commander-in-Chief General Wesley Clark in 2001, in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks by al-Qaeda. According to the plan, first revealed by Newsweek, it was to start with Iraq. Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran were on the list.

At the present stage, Libya, Somalia and Syria have seen bloody civil wars followed by changes of government – in which Turkey has had some involvement – while Iraq is still recovering from the 2003 US invasion and Lebanon and Sudan are in the grip of instability.

It can be seen that Israel is trying to get the US to attack Iran, especially before Iraq, Syria and Libya have recovered. Binyamin Netanyahu wants to take advantage of the chaos before the new world order is established. Sachs’ assertion at the ADF session on Syria that Israel would not be able to fight a single day without US support is in fact the majority view.

Trump, Netanyahu, Erdoğan and Iran

This is why Israel now seems to be pushing the Donald Trump administration fight Iran, not to negotiate with it. Trump, however, thinks that he can deter Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons; not  without a war, but with the threat of war. This does not suit Israel.

The talks between Trump’s Special Envoy for the Middle East Steve Witkoff and Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Arakchi, mediated by Oman on April 12, will continue. On the one hand, Netanyahu is trying to expel the Palestinians at gunpoint from Gaza, their homeland of thousands of years, and hand it over to the Trump administration as a “real estate for the sea” project, while on the other hand, he is struggling with the growing influence of Türkiye in Syria.

The talks between Türkiye and Israel, mediated by Azerbaijan, on de-escalation lines in Syria – similar to the previous one with Russia – can probably be seen as an entry to a US-brokered Israeli-Turkish reproachment to help regional de-escalation ideas.

Türkiye is against Iran’s return of influence in Syria and Lebanon, against Iran’s strengthening of its power in Iraq, but it is also against a war against Iran.

If President Tayyip Erdoğan can make this clear to Trump when they meet, so much the better; otherwise, the region will become more troubled.