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Why Netanyahu Is Crying Wolf on Turkey

Election politics give the Israeli leader an incentive to inflate the threat.

By Azriel Bermant , an associate researcher at the Institute of International Relations Prague.

Demonstrators hold placards with the spliced-together portraits of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan during an anti-government protest in Tel Aviv, on March 27, 2025.

Demonstrators hold placards with the spliced-together portraits of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan during an anti-government protest in Tel Aviv, on March 27, 2025. JACK GUEZ/AFP via Getty Images

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July 10, 2026, 6:29 AM

As the United States and Iran reescalate their fighting, curiously it is not Iran but Turkey that has topped the list of Israel’s talking points in recent days. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is deeply troubled by U.S. President Donald Trump’s hints that he may sell F-35 fighter jets to Turkey. These state-of-the-art aircraft could significantly erode Israel’s military advantage in the region. Netanyahu is clearly alarmed about Trump’s growing admiration for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Ahead of the NATO summit that took place in Ankara earlier this week, Trump even claimed that he was coming only because Erdoğan was hosting it.

In a recent interview with CNN , Netanyahu called Turkey “a regime that’s infected with the Muslim Brotherhood, which hates the United States.” During the interview, he confirmed that he explicitly told Trump that the sale of advanced fighter jets to Turkey would upset the power balance in the Middle East. The U.S. president has been dismissive of Netanyahu’s concerns, claiming that he personally persuaded the Turkish leader not to join Iran’s fight against Israel.

Netanyahu’s security concerns over the planned F-35 sale have genuine merit. The Turkish government’s rhetoric on Israel is increasingly extreme and inflammatory. The fragile relations between Israel and Turkey have deteriorated even further since the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre and Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza. In exceptionally malicious remarks in response to Israel’s regional actions, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan asserted on July 2: “These people have become a burden that humanity can no longer bear .”

It is not only Israel that is threatened by Turkey. Ankara is increasingly bellicose in its maritime claims in the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean, directly threatening Greece. At the same time, Erdogan has become increasingly repressive at home , jailing political opponents and journalists on trumped-up charges without compunction. If Russia’s trajectory is anything to go by, a regime that becomes hyper-repressive domestically eventually becomes very aggressive beyond its borders.

Then there is Turkey’s past misconduct as a member of NATO, including its purchase of a Russian S-400 missile defense system and its protracted veto of Swedish membership in the alliance. NATO member states may choose to overlook Turkey’s destructive tactics for the sake of unity, but this doesn’t mean that other actors don’t have to worry about Ankara and its regional ambitions.

Yet the geopolitical validity of Netanyahu’s warning is severely compromised by his own fight for domestic political survival . Ahead of an impending Israeli election, Netanyahu has a clear incentive to inflate the Turkish threat. It is no coincidence that just days before Trump’s Ankara announcement, Netanyahu’s coalition cabinet suddenly passed a resolution formally recognizing the Armenian genocide , a rightful step that Israel had cynically withheld for decades to protect its previous strategic alliance with Ankara. While it is easy to forget that Israel had enjoyed highly functional relations with Turkey for decades until the Mavi Marmara flotilla incident in 2010 (for which Israel duly apologized ) , the two countries do still maintain a semblance of diplomatic relations today. But for how much longer?

This sudden hawkishness toward Turkey exposes a glaring double standard in Israel’s broader regional strategy. Israel has a long-standing policy of opposing the sale of military hardware to potential adversaries that could upend the regional balance. Back in 1981, then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin lobbied furiously and intensively to prevent the Reagan administration from selling AWACS radar planes and F-15 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia. U.S. President Ronald Reagan wrote in his diary: “It must be plain to them, they’ve never had a better friend of Israel in the W.H. than they have now.”

Yet in recent years, Netanyahu’s opposition to the Trump administration’s plans to sell F-35s to Saudi Arabia has been conspicuously muted. Back in 2020, Netanyahu was perfectly content to maintain quiet security cooperation with Saudi Arabia while turning a blind eye to its nuclear ambitions , even defending the Saudi regime after the murder of Jamal Khashoggi because he was seeking to expand the Abraham Accords by normalizing ties with Saudi Arabia.

Yet today, Netanyahu appears on CNN to castigate Erdogan over locking up political opponents and journalists. That’s another conspicuous double standard: Russian President Vladimir Putin has been much more notorious than Erdogan for having his political opponents jailed, poisoned, and otherwise killed, but that has never prevented Netanyahu from touting his special friendship with the Russian leader.

Netanyahu also spoke during the CNN interview of Erdogan’s “aggressive aspirations,” claiming that he wants “to restore the Ottoman Empire.” Yet Israel’s critics see Netanyahu acting in an eerily similar manner. The Israeli leader has vowed to change “the face of the Middle East” and to “redraw” the map of the region, insisting that Israel will keep occupying parts of Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria. Meanwhile, his far-right coalition partners mirror that aggressive rhetoric: Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich declared at a Jerusalem Day rally in May that it was time for Israel to annex the entirety of the West Bank, while National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has openly expressed his ambition of establishing settlements in Lebanon.

The fact remains that increased tensions with Turkey serve Netanyahu’s political interests ahead of Israel’s election. A case in point was Netanyahu’s interview at the end of June on Israel’s Channel 14, a dependable pro-Bibi echo chamber. On being asked whether Israel’s various wars will soon be coming to an end, his response was telling : “The war will never end, do you want to live in the Middle East? Be strong.”

Israel’s international standing has cratered because its prime minister believes that his reelection prospects are strengthened by fostering a permanent us-against-them mindset . Netanyahu’ s political survival demands the preservation of his hard-line coalition at almost any price . A high-profile confrontation with Erdogan—whose bogeyman image, not just in Israel, is entirely earned—plays well with his base, allowing him to argue that only he can protect Israel’s vital interests against a hostile world.

Compounding this strategy is the fact that Netanyahu’s regional credibility has been shattered by the recent war with Iran. He has severely damaged his standing with the Trump administration over failed claims that the clerical regime could be easily removed from power. In his June 30 interview with Channel 14, he claimed without evidence that he personally authorized operations inside Iran to save Israel from atomic bombs that were “already in their hands.” Ironically, if it were actually true that Iran had obtained a nuclear weapon under his watch, it would be a damning, final indictment of Netanyahu’s lifelong pledge to prevent a nuclear Iran.

This leaves Israel caught in a dangerous variation of the dilemma illustrated in Hilaire Belloc’s famous 1907 poem, “Matilda, Who told Lies, and was Burned to Death.” In Belloc’s cautionary tale, a young girl continually fabricates emergencies for attention, only for her neighbors to ignore her desperate screams when a real fire breaks out, assuming it is just another one of her “dreadful lies.”

The potential sale of advanced F-35s to Turkey would mark a genuine change to the regional balance of power. Netanyahu is due to meet with Trump in the coming weeks and will spell out the threat as well as his long-standing anxiety over Iran’s nuclear program. Yet because Netanyahu has cried wolf so many times to score cheap domestic points, it is understandable if both his allies and detractors simply aren’t listening anymore. The more worrying reality for Netanyahu is that the Trump administration has stopped listening, too.

Azriel Bermant is an associate researcher at the Institute of International Relations Prague as well as the author of Margaret Thatcher and the Middle East and the Azriel’s Substack newsletter.

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