By Dr. Nikolaos Stelgias, TLF Chief Editor, Researcher, Historian, Journalist
At dawn on Saturday, The Levant Files received an unusual piece of correspondence. It came from a figure within the Israeli establishment — one who, for reasons readily understood, preferred to remain unnamed in this piece of opinion— responding to our recent opinion piece, "Expect Turkey-Israel War When Red Snow Falls." What follows is not a rebuttal in the conventional sense, but a necessary continuation of a conversation the region can scarcely afford to leave unfinished.
Our correspondent's letter was, in its way, a generous one. He conceded the essential thesis: that neither Israel nor Turkey seeks open conflict. Yet he was equally insistent that our analysis had left too much unspoken. Turkey's posture toward Hamas, he argued, is not the diplomatic hedging Ankara presents it as, but tacit alignment with an organization whose 2023 atrocities laid bare the true character of the region's revisionist actors. Syria, in his account, is being quietly refashioned into a Turkish satellite — intelligence officers and military advisors embedding themselves within the new government's sensitive posts, replicating, as he framed it, the pattern Ankara established in Cyprus after 1974. Beyond Syria, he catalogued a wider constellation of grievances: Turkish assertiveness in the Eastern Mediterranean's energy basin, pressure exerted upon Israel's regional partners, a campaign of diplomatic encirclement, and the enduring, if unproven, suspicion of a back channel between Ankara and Tehran undermining the shared Western effort to isolate the Iranian regime.
The letter's conclusion was its most arresting element. Israel, our correspondent wrote, may prefer to avoid direct confrontation — yet Turkey must understand that certain red lines exist, and that crossing them invites consequence. He was explicit as to where such pressure might fall: the Turkish Cypriot north, Ankara's ambitions to modernize its air force, and intensified Israeli support for those states that regard themselves as a check upon Turkish expansionism.
Having read the letter with the care it merits, four points demand to be made.
First, precisely because of who our correspondent is and the institutional vantage he occupies, his frustration ought to be read as more than private grievance — it is a signal, and one worth heeding. The suggestion of possible countermeasures directed at Cyprus, in particular, warrants sober and unhurried attention, not dismissal.
Second, and with genuine respect for our source's evident expertise, this manner of one-sided narrative is precisely what drags the Levant toward dead ends rather than away from them. Consider the charge levelled against Turkey's support for Hamas. It is entirely comprehensible that Israel should feel betrayed to watch a former partner align itself, rhetorically or otherwise, with its gravest adversary. Yet that grievance becomes exceedingly difficult to sustain in isolation while Gaza is being systematically razed and millions of Palestinians face starvation and disease. The question must be put plainly to our friend in Jerusalem: when the policy pursued is the erasure of Palestinian presence — not only in Gaza, but increasingly in the West Bank — what response did you imagine Ankara would offer? Or, for that matter, the wider court of world opinion?
Third, our correspondent insists that Syria is becoming a satellite of Turkish design. Before accepting that framing, a more elementary question must be posed: who created the conditions that made it possible? How did a modest jihadist faction, operating out of Idlib, contrive to topple the Syrian state and its armed forces within the span of a few weeks? Set aside, for a moment, the role of Western intelligence services — was Israel not among those who opened that door, through its methodical dismantling of Hezbollah and of Iran's broader network of regional proxies? Our correspondent's own letter concedes as much. This is no defence of the brutal regime that preceded the present one; it is simply an insistence upon historical candour regarding how we arrived here.
Last, a word addressed directly to our esteemed correspondent. You write that Israel possesses the right to damage Turkish interests — in northern Cyprus, in Ankara's air force modernization, through deepened patronage of states arrayed against Turkish influence. Is this, in earnest, the answer to a region already burdened beyond measure with grievance? To meet accumulating crisis with fresh fronts of confrontation, rather than with dialogue and diplomacy? And can you be certain the great powers — Washington, Moscow, Beijing — will stand idle while regional middle powers compound the volatility of an already combustible Western Asian theatre? For my part, I harbour no such certainty.
Allow me to close with the question I would put to our friend in Jerusalem directly: do you truly believe that Turkish and Israeli societies alike — each straining beneath the weight of war, economic hardship, political scandal, and the exhaustion of perpetual crisis — retain any genuine appetite for a new regional adventure? I do not know his answer. But I am far from persuaded it would be yes.