Over the two past decades of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s rule, Turkey’s approach tow- ards Israeli-Palestinian affairs has been front and centre in its foreign policy. It is, in many ways, the key to Mr Erdogan’s vision of where he wants to take Turkey as a geopolitical player. As two of the non-Arab states in the region, Turkey and Israel have long been fascinated with one another and have enjoyed close ties for much of their 74-year relationship, iterates Bro- okings expert A. Aydintasbas. But under Mr Erdogan, relations have been marked by angst, most often re- flecting Israeli-Palestinian tensions. For example, Mr Erdogan walked out of a panel with Mr Shimon Peres in Davos in 2009 after accusing the former Israeli pres- ident of “killing children”. In 2010, a Turkish aid flotilla tried to break the blockade of Gaza, leading to a dead- ly Israeli raid and years of a cold peace between the two countries. It is against this backdrop that the renorma- lisation of ties between Turkey and Israel in 2022 has taken a dramatic downturn following the 7 October attack by Hamas and Tel Aviv’s ongoing military oper- ations in Gaza. President Erdogan has taken a hard line against Israel ~ the two countries have recalled their ambassadors ~ and his policy stance on the Isr- aeli-Palestinian conflict marks a clear departure from the earlier Kemalist period. The portents of Ankara’s position for the region are not encouraging. First, Mr Erdogan’s belief in the legitimacy of Hamas as a viable Palestinian actor, which is a natural outcome of his id- eological affinity for the Muslim Brotherhood, is prob- lematic. And as details of the brutality and torture by Hamas continue trickling in, Turkey’s Western ‘allies’ are realising he is playing a different game. Full mem- bership of the European Union is not an ambition Turkey will realise under an Islamist regime and the country’s leader knows it. He is, therefore, pushing the line that Hamas needs to be part of the political pro- cess to resolve the Israel-Palestine issue and seems to have convinced the Turkish establishment of that idea. Hamas, it should be noted, has had a presence in Tur- key and sent delegations there, after it ‘won’ the Pales- tinian elections in 2006. In fact, Hamas representatives were reportedly in Turkey at the time of the 7 October attack. Ankara now sees a pivotal role of the Palestinian issue in its aspirations for regional leadership, com- plete with Mr Erdogan’s use of rehashed Ottoman rhe- toric to sell that idea to Turkish voters. He has built his political platform on the theme of a rising Turkey with a ‘historic responsibility’ to protect the so-called dis- possessed Muslim populations in the region; primary among them being the Palestinians. A notion of Turk- ish exceptionalism is clearly discernible in Mr Erdo- gan’s foreign policy pronouncements and is at the core of his ‘Century of Turkey’ formulation. What makes the current situation particularly dangerous is that Ankara has assessed the Gaza War is an inflection point for the region and not just another flare-up. In making this assessment, Turkey has taken the cue from Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu who has vowed to eradi- cate Hamas, which his Turkish counterpart terms a “liberation movement.”

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