The Turkey-Israel Proxy War in Syria - with Nadav Eyal

**Dan Senor** (0:00)
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**Nadav Eyal** (0:18)
You are listening to an Ark Media Podcast. Erdogan is trying to reposition Turkey as the main actor, the superpower in the region. And this, of course, invokes our history. Palestine, Eretz Israel, was controlled by the Ottoman Empire up to 1917, as was the entire region. As far as the Israelis are concerned, if they will not draw the red line now and stop the Turks from doing what they're doing, and we're not gonna allow Syria to become basically a military base of Turkey, then we will find Turkey on our border in the Golan Heights or physically, militarily in Damascus.

**Dan Senor** (1:15)
It's 7 a.m. on Wednesday, August 26th in New York City. It's 2 p.m. on Wednesday, August 26th in Israel. Before today's episode, a quick housekeeping note. On Thursday, October 22nd, just five days ahead of the Israeli elections, Call Me Back will hold a live taping at the Streikers Center in New York City, where I'll sit down with Dan Shapiro, Dahlia Scheinlin and Brett Stevens to discuss what's at stake in Israel's 2026 election and what its results will mean for the U.S.-Israel relationship. Tickets have just gone on sale, so if you want to join us, please follow the link in the episode description. Now on to today's episode. For nearly a year, Israel and Turkey have run what seems to have been an unspoken arrangement in Syria. Ankara gets political and economic primacy in Syria's north, Jerusalem keeps its freedom to strike in Syria's south, and neither side says so out loud. Well, that arrangement seems to have broke on August 18th, when Israel struck the Abu al-Duhara airbase in northwestern Syria, citing intelligence that Turkey was about to install radar and military infrastructure there. Israel's defense minister, Israel Katz, warned Ankara against what he called, dangerous adventures. It was the most direct Israeli-Turkish military friction in years. But many had warned about it coming, including on this podcast. 11 days earlier in Mecca, Turkey signed a mutual defense pact with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. To put this in context, Turkey is a NATO commitment-binding military power. Pakistan is a nuclear-armed state, and Saudi Arabia is the custodian of Islam's holiest sites.
This arrives at the moment that Iran is at its weakest position in 40 years. Its proxies gutted, its nuclear program set back, its regional corridor severed. This all raises an uncomfortable question. Is the vacuum left by Iran being filled not by American-brokered peace, but by a new Sunni power, Axis, led by Turkey, which is increasingly painting Israel, not Iran, as the region's destabilizing force?
Meanwhile, it's not clear what, if at all, is the US foreign policy agenda as it relates to Turkey. What we do know is that President Erdogan did convince President Trump to derail Israel's plan to activate Kurdish forces against the Iranian regime at the outset of the war with Iran. But what else is the US approach to Erdogan and Turkey? To understand what happened in Syria and what these developments mean for Israel and for the region, I'm joined by Ark Media contributor Nadav Eyal, who has been tracking this shift for over the past year, from Turkey's role in helping to end the Gaza War to its blocking of the Kurdish Gambit in Iran to the emergence of a new axis around Ankara, Doha and Islamabad. Are Israel and Turkey now on a collision course that Washington may not be able to or perhaps want to even stop? My conversation with Nadav Eyal right after this brief message.
This episode of Call Me Back is brought to you by the Jewish Communal Fund, JCF.
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Nadav, welcome back to the podcast.

**Nadav Eyal** (5:19)
Thanks for having me, Dan.

**Dan Senor** (5:20)
So, Nadav, for the better part of a year, Israel and Turkey have avoided direct confrontation in Syria, despite perhaps provocations, despite mutual suspicion. What was the thinking behind that quietly agreed upon status quo?