Israel’s new Syria dilemma: Netanyahu’s Russia playbook faces 'Turkey test'

 

ANKARA IS seeking to entrench itself in Syria for strategic and economic reasons, but Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s broader ideological and historical ambitions are putting Turkey on a collision course with Israel, the writer argues. Russian President Vladimir Putin and Erdogan.

(photo credit: Kristina Kormilitsyna /Pool/AFP via Getty Images)

Israel awoke to a fundamentally changed Middle Eastern reality on September 30, 2015: Russian fighter planes streaked through the skies over Homs, carrying out Moscow’s first combat sorties in the Middle East since the end of the Cold War.

President Vladimir Putin had arrived to save Russia’s key Middle Eastern ally, Syria’s then-president Bashar al-Assad.

 

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Nine days earlier, on September 21, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – who had good intelligence about Russia’s plans – flew to Moscow on a lightning visit. He was accompanied not by the press but by then-IDF chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot and then-head of the Military Intelligence Directorate Herzi Halevi – unusual for a foreign trip.

There, Netanyahu and Putin discussed establishing a deconfliction mechanism to prevent Israeli and Russian pilots accidentally confronting each other over Syrian skies. By 2015, Jerusalem had already approved scores of attacks against Hezbollah and Iran’s efforts to build a launchpad against Israel.