Analysing the role of Turkey in Israel’s post-2011 regional vision through the lens of identity-security: challenger or bystander?

Abstract

Turkey’s engagement in Middle Eastern politics, significantly since the Arab Uprising, has continuously changed the direction of decades-old Turkey–Israel relations. The existing literature elaborates on several aspects of destabilising or normalizing relations between these two countries, but the dimension of Israel’s identity-based threat perception is yet to be revealed, despite Israel having long tried to balance identities in the region. By asking whether Turkey challenges Israel’s identity-based regional vision or plays a bystander role, this study presents a two-layered analysis of Israel–Turkey relations. While discussing the cognitive essence of Israel’s post-2011 regional perspective that transformed the ‘identity-based threat’ perceptions in an uncertain environment, it locates Turkey’s engagement in the region into Israel's regional understanding. Within this aim, the paper is organized as follows. First, the current literature on Israel–Turkey relations is summarized to see not only the short history of relations but also the major trends in studying Israel–Turkey relations. Second, the changing threat perceptions of Israel after the Arab Uprisings are examined to identify the continuities and changes. The third part locates Turkey in Israel’s regional vision by discussing the Egyptian and Syrian experiences of the Arab Uprisings. In the final part, the commitment policies of regional actors regarding the Palestinian issue are comparatively analysed to make sense of Israeli normalization with the Gulf States and re-normalization with Turkey. By going beyond the challenger/bystander spectrum, this study claims that Turkey’s position in all cases shows the characteristics of the ‘disobedient bystander’.