Israelis and Turks Meet To Prevent Military Conflict in Syria, as Trump Touts His Ties With Their Leaders

Days after President Trump promised to “work out” the ever-escalating tensions between Turkey and Israel, representatives of the two countries met at Baku, Azerbaijan, in an effort to prevent military clashes between the sides in Syria. President Erdogan “is politically losing in Turkey. He can’t go into elections, and people are calling for elections,” the Turkey-born publisher of Envoy magazine, Razi Canigligil, tells the Sun. Turks are angry with Israel over Gaza, he adds, so normalization between the countries is unlikely. Yet, “Trump loves Erdogan, and Erdogan loves Trump,” he says, so some Ankara-Jerusalem thaw might be possible. Turkey is the top backer of the interim president of Syria, Ahmed al-Sharaa. Following the ouster of President Assad by groups of jihadis led by Mr. Sharaa, the Turkish military increased its influence in the country and prepared to take over military bases that belonged to the previous Syrian regime.Israelis are increasingly concerned that a permanent Turkish presence would threaten its air superiority over Syria. When the Turkish military made plans to deploy troops and drones to a major air base near Palmyra last week, Israeli jets struck the facility, known as T-4.“All of the parties on the ground need to respect the sovereignty and the territorial integrity of Syria,” a United Nations spokesman, Frahan Haq, told reporters Thursday. Yet, will Turkey and Israel end up agreeing to lines of control and effectively divide Syria’s territory between them?“I don’t think so,” the founder of Alma, a northern Israel-based center researching Lebanon, Syria, and the environs, Sarit Zehavi, tells the Sun. “More likely,” she says, “Israel and Turkey will establish a mechanism like the one that existed between Israel and Russia.”Before Mr. Assad’s ouster, his ally Russia, which had a heavy military presence in Syria, maintained a hotline with Israel, resembling the Cold War-era “red phone.” Quiet messages between the militaries were exchanged to prevent dogfights between Israeli fighter jets and Russian MiGs. Prime Minister Netanayhu’s office and Turkey’s foreign minister, Hakan Fidan, confirmed on Thursday that representatives of the two countries met in Azerbaijan to establish a similar line of communication. Baku maintains good military and diplomatic ties with both Jerusalem and Ankara, and President Aliyev is on good terms with both.“A political-security delegation led by National Security Adviser Tzachi Hanegbi” met Wednesday night with a parallel Turkish delegation, Mr. Netanyahu’s office said in a statement Monday, thanking Mr. Aliyev. “Any change in the deployment of foreign forces in Syria, in particular the establishment of Turkish bases in the Palmyra area, is a red line,” the statement warned. “While we are conducting certain operations in Syria, there needs to be a deconfliction mechanism with Israel, which flies aircraft in that region, similar to mechanisms we have with the U.S. and Russia,” Mr. Fidan told CNN Turkey. Yet, he stressed that Ankara will not renew formal relations with Jerusalem.A major backer of Hamas, Turkey severed all diplomatic ties with Israel last November. “Just as Hitler was stopped by an alliance of humanity 70 years ago, Netanyahu and his murder network must be stopped by an alliance of humanity,” Mr. Erdogan told the UN General Assembly a month earlier. “Normalization with Israel will not happen until there is a cease-fire in Gaza,” Mr. Fidan said Thursday. In the region, he added, “there will be resistance as long as the occupation is there. That’s why Israel wants to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians in Gaza.”Don’t expect Messrs. Netanyahu and Erdogan to bro-hug any time soon, then. The Israeli premier raised the growing feud with Turkey with Mr. Trump when they met at the White House Monday. “We’ve had neighborly relations with Turkey that have deteriorated, and we don’t want to see Syria being used by anyone, including Turkey, as a base for attacking Israel,” Mr. Netanyahu told reporters at the Oval Office. Mr. Trump “has a relationship with the leader of Turkey. We discussed how we can avoid this conflict in a variety of ways. I think we can’t have a better interlocutor than the President of the United States.”Mr. Trump seemed eager to help. “I happen to like him, and he likes me,” he said of Mr. Erdogan. “I told the prime minister, I said, maybe if you have a problem with Turkey, I really think I’m going to be able to work it out.” He added: “I think we’ll be able to work it out. So I hope that’s not going to be a problem.”While preventing a military clash in Syria might not reduce the mercurial Mr. Erdogan’s ire over the defensive war in Gaza or revive the golden age of Israeli-Turkish relations, it could mitigate the danger of a hot war between the Jewish state and a NATO member.

Israelis and Turks Meet To Prevent Military Conflict in Syria, as Trump Touts His Ties With Their Leaders

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