Turkey Will Invade Israel, Cyprus, Greece, Liberate Jerusalem, and Reduce Tel Aviv to Rubble, Or So One Columnist Would Have You Believe

In the crowded field of wartime hyperbole, Turkish columnist İbrahim Karagül has never been content with mere exaggeration. His latest offering, published Friday in the conservative daily Yeni Şafak, reads less like political analysis and more like the fever dream of a medieval sultan who has just discovered Twitter. It is, by any sober measure, a remarkable document — and not in a good way.

Karagül opens with a triumphalist assessment of the US-Israeli military campaign against Iran that will strike most observers as detached from available evidence. In his telling, America and Israel have achieved nothing except bombing girls' schools and civilian infrastructure — while Iran, far from being weakened, has blinded Israeli radar systems, set American bases ablaze, driven a US aircraft carrier out of the region, and is now preparing "the largest oil shock in history" and targeting American banks across the Middle East. HSBC and Citigroup, he reports, have already begun withdrawing from the UAE and Qatar under the threat of Iranian retaliation.

Whether any of this constitutes a credible battlefield assessment or a curated selection of Iranian state media talking points is a question Karagül does not appear to have asked himself. The piece moves at such velocity — paragraph to paragraph, apocalypse to apocalypse — that the reader barely has time to notice that no sources are cited, no figures given, and no counterevidence considered.

There is, he assures us darkly, "a staff mind" behind Iran's strategy. "And this mind," he adds, "perhaps exceeds Iran itself" — a tantalizing hint, dropped and never pursued, that he may believe some grander invisible hand is orchestrating events. One is left to speculate.

Nobody Will Fight for America. Not Even the PKK.

Karagül is on firmer — if still highly tendentious — ground when he notes that Washington's attempts to recruit regional proxies for a ground campaign against Iran have failed comprehensively. Sunni Arab states refused to be drawn in. Turkey and Azerbaijan declined. And in a detail that even Karagül appears to find mildly amusing, he reports that even the PKK/PEJAK — long characterized by Turkish government circles as America's instrument of choice — announced it would not be "used and discarded" in such an adventure.

The irony of a columnist who has spent years warning about American-PKK conspiracy now deploying that organization's reticence as evidence of Washington's impotence appears entirely lost on him.

The Main Event: Turkey Will Invade Greece, Take Cyprus, Then Destroy Israel

Here the piece departs from the merely tendentious and enters territory that is difficult to characterize without resorting to clinical terminology.

Should Israel make what Karagül calls the "fatal mistake" of targeting Turkey after dealing with Iran, the consequences, he writes, will be as follows: Turkey will first seize the Aegean islands. It will then "liberate" Western Thrace — and, for good measure, occupy all of Greece. It will take the whole of Cyprus.

This alone would be a foreign policy programme ambitious enough to keep most general staffs occupied for a generation. But Karagül is just warming up.

Turkey will then open what he calls "the main front" — an invasion of Israel itself. Tel Aviv will be "annihilated." Jerusalem will be "liberated." Millions will pour into Israel. "Not one stone will be left upon another." Israel's right to exist as a state will be revoked. And — in a passage that presumably plays well with a certain readership — Karagül notes that the Ottomans have a score to settle for the dismemberment of their empire, and that the time for settling it is approaching.

"Israel," he concludes, with the serene confidence of a man who has never commanded anything larger than a newspaper column, "is a state of one week. Tel Aviv is a city of one day."

One pauses. One reads it again. It still says the same thing.

A Note on Tone and Accountability

It would be easy — and perhaps too easy — to simply mock this. The column is, on one level, the purest expression of a genre of Ottoman revivalist fantasy that has flourished in pro-government Turkish media for years, a genre in which Turkey is always on the verge of becoming the axis around which the entire world turns, its enemies always one miscalculation away from total ruin.

But there is something worth noting seriously: this is not a fringe blog. Yeni Şafak is one of Turkey's largest-circulation newspapers, with close ties to the presidential palace. Its columnists are read by officials, diplomats, and policymakers. When a prominent voice in that ecosystem calls — in explicit terms — for the military invasion of a NATO ally (Greece), the seizure of an EU member state's territory (Cyprus), and the destruction of a sovereign state (Israel), the words carry a particular weight, however unhinged the underlying logic.

One also notes, with some concern, that Karagül's piece was published on the same day that a more sober and academically grounded Turkish columnist — Yasin Aktay — was writing about Turkey's potential role as a regional stabilizer and equilibrium-builder. The contrast between these two visions of Turkish foreign policy, appearing on the same morning, tells its own story about the range of voices competing for influence in Ankara.