Who in Turkey Knows the Value of the Now-Dead Alliance with Israel? The Foreign and Defense Ministries

By Barry Rubin

Kurdish terrorists attacking Turkey? The military uses drones made in Israel to defend the country.

As part of its demagogic assault on Israel, the Islamist regime has now claimed that Israel is fomenting a coup within Turkey. I can state for a fact that this isn’t true. There will be no coup for several reasons: the armed forces are intimidated by verbal attacks and arrests, its leaders don’t want to set off a civil war, and they know that no Western government—and especially the United States—would support them.

What’s really happening is a coup against the armed forces through lies, arrests, and political pressure by the Islamist regime. But that doesn’t mean the generals and soldiers are happy with the destruction of the republic created by Kemal Ataturk and of Turkish democracy in general.

Another discontented institution the regime wants to crush is the Foreign Ministry. Now several retired ambassadors have publicly complained about how demagogue-in-chief Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is pursuing against them. They watch in sadness as the Islamist regime throws away decades’-old connections with the West in pursuit of his effort to be Iran’s number-one ally.

“Foreign policy is a long-term and serious job,” reads the ambassadors’ statement. ” It’s a serious pursuit that requires knowledge, foresight and calm analytical abilities.”
In an oblique reference to the regime’s anti-Israel policy, the ambassadors stated:

“Foreign policy isn’t about bravery and adventurism. Those who claim to know history well need to remember the misfortunes brought to our country because of adventurous and imaginative cheap hopes`….The penalty for such free heroic acts being paid with the lives of our innocent people is a source of distress,”

Incidentally, it is well known in Turkey that the current foreign minister—who is feted in the West for his English-language speeches about Turkey being everyone’s friend—was put into place to capture the Foreign Ministry for the Islamists. He is author of a book about how Turkey should steer toward the Islamic world. Guess what? It’s only available in Turkish and finding a copy nowadays is tough. Someone should translate that work.

I’m not going to respond to all the terrible articles being written about Turkey lately but I will just remark that in more than 30 years I have never seen so much nonsense written about any subject proportionately—and that includes the Arab-Israeli conflict—as has been written about Turkey during the last month. Writers have sought every explanation except the correct one: The current regime is anti-Western and anti-Israel not due to recent events but to its ideology and what it wants to do to its own country.