Is Bibi cruising for a bruising by trolling Erdogan over Syria?

Is Bibi cruising for a bruising by trolling Erdogan over Syria?

During a speech at the United Nations last week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu railed against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, calling him a “tyrant.” “Now he wants to take over Syria,” Netanyahu said. “Well, that's not surprising because he calls for Israel's destruction almost every single day.” The comments come amid growing tensions between Israel and Turkey. In August, Israeli warplanes struck the Abu al-Duhur Airbase in northwestern Syria, roughly 43 miles from the Turkish border. The strike left craters in the runway and, as with earlier attacks around T4 and Palmyra in the Homs province, was carried out without prior notice to Ankara. As Israeli aircraft approached the Turkish border, they were tracked by Turkish radar, bringing months of political and diplomatic tension between the two countries a step closer to direct military confrontation. The Netanyahu government presents these strikes as preventive, aimed at stopping a larger Turkish encroachment into Syria before it starts. Israel’s concern is Turkey, which, alongside the United States, has become one of the main military and political partners of Syria's post-Assad government. But Abu al-Duhur points to the opposite risk. In the absence of an immediate military threat, strikes aimed at preventing a potential future Turkish deployment may do more to raise the risk of a future conflict than to reduce it. An imminent threat? The Israeli prime minister's office justified the Abu al-Duhur strike by claiming it had intelligence indicating the base would be turned into a Turkish military facility. Ankara and Damascus firmly denied the claim. U.S. envoy Tom Barrack, a frequent target of Israeli criticism, had dined with Syrian Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shaibani in Istanbul on the eve of the strike and later said U.S. intelligence found nothing to support it. But even if Israel's claim is accurate, whether a possible deployment amounted to an "immediate threat" requiring military action is a separate question. According to retired Maj. Gen. Ateş Mehmet İrez, a former chief of operations in the Turkish Air Force, the reported Turkish visit to the base would, in operational terms, be a reconnaissance or assessment mission and would not necessarily indicate a desire to deploy troops there. Turning a site survey into an operational deployment would take months in war-damaged Syria, İrez said. A radar may be physically installed within days, but power supply, communications, calibration, command-and-control integration and the sustainable deployment of personnel would take much longer. "The picture described in Israel's justification, namely a permanent radar and air-defense network capable of restricting Israel's freedom of movement in Syrian airspace, is a matter of months, and most likely more than a year, rather than weeks," İrez told RS. The real time pressure for Israel, he argued, lay elsewhere. "Once Turkish personnel are physically present at an airbase, any subsequent strike on that same facility carries the risk of hitting the troops of a NATO member," he said. "From that perspective, the closing window was political, not technical." The choice of target also supports that assessment. A runway is one of the fastest parts of an airbase to repair. If the objective had been to prevent the capability from emerging at all, Israel could have waited for harder-to-replace equipment to arrive. According to İrez, striking the runway and storage areas was aimed less at eliminating a capability than at establishing a precedent. A radar would matter even if Turkey never fired a shot. It would turn unrecorded Israeli transits into documented events, with time, altitude and route. "What radar changes," İrez said, "is not merely control but the risk of proof." From conduct to intent When Syria shot down a Turkish RF-4E reconnaissance aircraft in 2012, there was still a government in Damascus that, even if imperfectly, accepted responsibility and could be dealt with diplomatically. İrez, then the Turkish Air Force's head of operations, briefed the cabinet during that crisis. Today, he said, Israeli strikes since December 2024 have left Syrian airspace "effectively ownerless." Until recently, Israel even blocked night flights at Syrian airports. Among the most dangerous aspects of the Abu al-Duhur strike, in his view, is that Israel is shifting the threshold for a crisis from actual conduct to intent. "Classical deterrence responds to something the other side has done. Here, the response is to something that has not yet been done," he said. "By moving the crisis threshold to the level of intent, this logic also changes the basis of the rules of engagement. Rules of engagement are tied to observable behavior or a violation. A threshold based on intent leaves the two sides without a common standard." Unannounced Israeli operations near Turkey's border are not new. In 2007, Israeli jets crossed into Turkish airspace and dropped fuel tanks on Turkish soil during a mission to strike a suspected nuclear site near Deir ez-Zor. "The increase in precautions in the region actually began in 2007, despite the good relations at the time," İrez said. "Measures that began as temporary steps in those years have since been expanded and made permanent." The most recent of those steps came after Israel's strikes on T4 last year, when Ankara and Tel Aviv held technical deconfliction talks in Azerbaijan. A channel that one side (Israel) can bypass without warning is hardly a mechanism at all. Restraint, for now Turkey’s 2015 shootdown of a Russian Su-24 is still the most widely remembered case of Ankara enforcing its rules of engagement along the Syrian border, but it was not the first. After the RF-4E crisis, Ankara tightened those rules. Turkish F-16s then shot down a Syrian Mi-17 in 2013 and a MiG-23 in 2014 after airspace violations. At Abu al-Duhur, Turkey chose restraint. Turkey, İrez said, “tracked the flights and took precautions, but refrained from intervening despite the aircraft passing close to the border.” But Ankara's calculation is not purely military. In Turkey, the current tensions are widely attributed to Netanyahu's choices rather than to a permanent rift with Tel Aviv. Israel's election campaign, in which Likud has featured Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on its billboards, is being followed in Ankara and across Turkish media almost as closely as a domestic one. Part of Turkey's restraint reflects a concern that responding would mean taking the bait and handing Netanyahu a crisis to campaign on. That concern is shared inside Israel. When Netanyahu posed in front of a fighter jet to warn of pre-election attacks, the opposition accused him of using military bases as campaign props. Still, that does not mean Ankara's patience is unlimited. As İrez warned, "Operations in Syria based solely on anticipation are creating an atmosphere in which tensions can easily turn into a direct military confrontation." Nor do such strikes solve the problem Israel says it faces. Air power may delay the alleged future deployment, but it cannot stop the growing integration between Turkey and Syria. Ankara's role in Syria goes well beyond a single airbase. Turkey is helping rebuild the Syrian state in areas ranging from its army to its power grid. Syrian units train at Turkish army facilities, Syrian cadets study at Turkish military academies, and Syrian troops joined EFES, Turkey's flagship exercise, for the first time this year. Ankara has supplied armored vehicles, trains Syrian police, and its intelligence service works closely with Damascus. Just 12 days after the Abu al-Duhur strike, and despite Israel's warnings against Turkish moves toward the south, Turkish and Syrian forces completed their second joint floating bridge over the Euphrates in Deir ez-Zor. The rivalry between Turkey and Israel is unlikely to end in the near term. Keeping it from turning into a kinetic conflict in Syria, however, is achievable. Having chosen to give the new government in Damascus a chance, Washington now carries a continuing responsibility to help stabilize Syria and to keep two close allies out of an avoidable conflict. The U.S. has already said it is working on a trilateral deconfliction mechanism. The task now is to turn it into a direct political channel with clear rules on notification, so that future incidents can be managed before they spark a military confrontation.