Turkey is feeling the squeeze. How else to explain President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s remarks in late December signalling his interest in closer relations with Israel? Turkey has also reportedly picked a new ambassador to Israel to fill a post that has been left vacant for more than two years. Yet only four months before then, in August, Ankara had warned the United Arab Emirates that it was ready to suspend diplomatic ties and withdraw its ambassador from Abu Dhabi in the wake of the UAE’s proposed normalisation deal with Israel. Turkey described the deal as a betrayal of the Palestinian people.

Over the past decade, Turkey has been competing with Iran as the standard bearer of the Palestinians, doing exactly what the Soviets did during an earlier era: championing the Palestinian cause over the heads of moderate Arab leaders in a bid to strengthen its political influence in the region. Erdogan has been particularly outspoken in his condemnation of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.

Yet Turkey itself has enjoyed longstanding political, economic and strategic ties with Israel dating back to the 1950s. This strategic cooperation arguably reached its peak in the 1990s with Israel selling advanced weapons systems to Ankara. However, the strong bilateral relationship fell apart a few years after the rise to power of the Justice and Development Party under Erdogan in 2002.

The deterioration in ties between the two countries hit rock bottom with the Mavi Marmara flotilla incident of May 2010, for which Israel apologised to Turkey in 2013. In 2016, the two countries signed a normalisation agreement that survived barely two years. Turkey recalled its ambassador for consultations in May 2018 and in effect called upon Israel’s ambassador in Ankara to also leave following the move of the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and the deaths of dozens of Palestinians in clashes along the Gaza–Israel border.

So, what explains Turkey’s political U-turn?

Erdogan’s overtures towards Israel are motivated by a need to cultivate ties with the President-elect Joe Biden’s incoming administration, which is expected to be far less indulgent towards the Turkish leader than the President Donald Trump’s outgoing administration.

In addition, Ankara has been disturbed by the growing cooperation in the past decade between Israel, Cyprus and Greece. Amid the rising tensions in the Eastern Mediterranean, Turkey has sought to drive a wedge between Israel, Cyprus and Greece. The establishment of the EastMed Gas Forum in 2019 created a sense in Ankara that Egypt, Greece, Cyprus and Israel, with the support of France and the UAE, are acting in concert to undermine Turkey.

In the 2020 war between Azerbaijan and Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh, Turkey pushed Azerbaijan to reclaim its lost territories, a struggle that was facilitated by the weapons Azerbaijan had acquired from Israel over the years. The decisive outcome of this war in favour of Azerbaijan underscored the benefits obtainable through cooperation between Turkey and Israel. Indeed, it emerged that Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliev was involved in the efforts to mediate between Turkey and Israel.

Ankara also has an urgent need to alleviate the economic hardship and avoid imposition of further sanctions by the United States and the European Union. It’s also likely that Turkey is feeling increasingly marginalised amid the growing number of Arab and Muslim nations that have shown interest in establishing ties with Israel.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was so enthusiastic about securing normalisation deals with the Gulf states of the UAE and Bahrain that he was willing to overlook the proposed US sale of sophisticated weapons including F-35 fighter jets to Abu Dhabi. Israel has historically expressed fierce opposition to strengthening the offensive capacity of any Arab state. Yet it is unlikely to respond with the same enthusiasm to Turkey’s latest overtures, partly because of Erdogan’s strident criticisms and also because of the benefits it is now reaping from the recent normalisation deals with the UAE, Bahrain and Morocco. No less importantly, Israel will not want to jeopardise its defence and energy cooperation with Egypt, Greece and Cyprus. The political crisis in Israel and an early election in March also complicate matters.

However, Israel will be aware of the opportunity emerging from the rising tide of mutual suspicion between Turkey and Iran, with growing potential to create a sense of mounting isolation in Tehran. Turkey’s strong support for Azerbaijan during its recent conflict with Armenia has expanded Ankara’s clout in the south Caucasus, which Tehran views as an unwelcome development. Matters reached a head in December when Erdogan recited a poem during a visit to Azerbaijan that Iran had called a threat to its territorial integrity. Turkey’s communications director later said that Iran’s interpretation of the poem was ‘deliberately taken out of context’.

Israel’s cooperation with the Gulf states is driven in part by a shared fear of Iran, but also by suspicion of Turkey. While a rapprochement with Turkey could be a means to further isolate Iran, it risks undermining the advantages Israel has accrued through the recent warming with Gulf states and other countries in the region.

Nonetheless, reinstating the ambassadors in Tel Aviv and Ankara can be done without any major concessions from each side. This step will not bring a significant improvement to Turkey–Israel relations, but it could at least make a modest contribution to lowering tensions in the region.

Morocco is the latest Arab country to formalise a relationship with Israel that has been an open secret for decades. There were Moroccan and Israeli liaison offices in each other’s capitals until 2002 when Rabat decided to close them down in the midst of the second Palestinian intifada. However, contact continued even after their closure. Now, King Mohammed VI has decided to establish diplomatic relations with Israel in return for Washington’s recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over the disputed region of Western Sahara, which even the UN refuses to accept as Moroccan territory. In addition, reports suggest that the United States is negotiating the sale of at least four sophisticated large aerial drones to Morocco as a further reward for its public embrace of Israel.

The United Arab Emirates began this phase of formal reconciliation with the Jewish state. Emirati–Israeli relations had existed in multiple spheres, including security and technology, possibly for a couple of decades. Abu Dhabi agreed to go public ostensibly in exchange for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ‘suspension’ of his plan to annex parts of the West Bank granted to Israel by US President Donald Trump’s ‘peace plan’. This claim was immediately undermined by Netanyahu’s statement that the agreement didn’t nullify the Trump deal’s provision awarding Israel 30% of the occupied West Bank.

The real quid pro quo became apparent with the Trump administration’s approval of the sale (though it requires the agreement of Congress) of top-of-the-line F-35 aircraft to the UAE to bolster its military capacity and its prestige in the region.

Bahrain, where an authoritarian Sunni dynasty rules over a restive Shia majority, followed in the UAE’s footsteps. There were two major reasons for this move. The first was to buy insurance from both Israel and the US against its neighbour Iran, which is seen by the regime as the primary external supporter of Bahrain’s Shia majority agitating for democratic rights. In light of Washington’s increasing military disengagement from Middle East conflicts, the Gulf sheikhdoms have come to progressively perceive Israel as their ‘protector’ against Iran.

Second, given Bahrain’s dependence on Saudi Arabia—which saved the Bahraini monarchy from being toppled during the 2011 Arab Spring by sending troops to help it crush the democracy movement—Manama’s move is a trial balloon on behalf of Riyadh to gauge Arab and Muslim reactions to a future Saudi recognition of Israel.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, encouraged by the muted reactions to the Bahraini and Emirati moves, decided to meet with Netanyahu in the presence of US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo a few weeks ago, thus making public ongoing Saudi–Israeli coordination aimed at Iran, which both consider the primary threat to their security. Two factors motivated the Saudi decision. The first was to signal to Iran that Riyadh won’t be alone in a future showdown with Tehran even if the US decides not to directly participate in any confrontation with Iran. Second, MbS wanted to placate the US Congress, which has a heavy pro-Israeli presence and has been critical of him since the brutal assassination and dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, which most people believe was carried out on his orders.

Sudan’s decision to recognise Israel was in some ways a course reversal, for it was perceived to be friendly with Iran. Kharotum’s refusal to join the Saudi–Emirati war against the Houthis in Yemen was seen as proof that it didn’t want to spoil relations with Iran. However, the Sudanese regime changed its mind in light of the American offer to take it off its list of terror-supporting states as a quid pro quo for establishing diplomatic relations with Israel. This would make it considerably easier for Sudan to trade and engage with the rest of the world. It would also lead to a toning down of the criticism of the regime in the West for its undemocratic credentials and its relative success in aborting the movement for democracy in the country.

Israel’s success in establishing diplomatic relations with four Arab states in quick succession signals that the Palestinian issue is no longer considered important by Arab regimes and that publicly selling out the Palestinians doesn’t affect their legitimacy at home. However, this series of diplomatic victories is not as great a breakthrough for Israel as many Western analysts assume. In most cases it merely formalises relations that existed without much publicity for years if not decades.

There’s a discernable pattern in the sequential recognition of Israel by Arab states over the past few months. In all cases the US played a key role in bringing Arab parties around by holding out arms sales as carrots or acceding to other demands important to them. But hostility towards Iran among many Arab regimes, especially in the Gulf, was a major driving force behind the establishment of diplomatic links and the public strengthening of security ties with Israel at a time when the US, currently in retrenchment mode, is coming to be seen by Gulf Arab regimes as an unreliable ally against Tehran. Joe Biden’s election to the US presidency is likely to augment this feeling because of his publicly stated intention of reviving the Iran nuclear deal.

It won’t be much of a surprise if Saudi Arabia establishes diplomatic relations with Israel soon after Biden’s inauguration. Given Saudi Arabia’s importance because of its oil wealth and its position as the ‘protector’ of the two holiest Islamic sites, this would be a major public relations success for Israel and would likely intensify Netanyahu’s opposition to Biden’s attempt to revive the nuclear agreement and normalise relations with Iran. A coordinated public bid by Israel and Saudi Arabia to derail Biden’s projected opening towards Iran can be expected to carry greater weight with Washington than if they acted separately.

It seems increasingly likely that the 2 July explosion at the Iran Centrifuge Assembly Centre, located near the Natanz Pilot Fuel Enrichment Plant, was the result of sabotage. And, despite initial speculation that it was the result of a cyberattack against critical operational control systems—and thus of a similar vein to the Stuxnet attack that took down multiple centrifuge cascades at Natanz in 2010—the simpler and more plausible explanation is that the explosion was caused by a bomb.

Despite claims of responsibility by a previously unknown group calling itself the Homeland Cheetahs that supposedly comprises disgruntled Iranian former military and security services personnel, it now appears widely accepted that Israel was behind the attack. There has been further speculation that Israel was also behind other curious incidents that have occurred at Iranian facilities in recent weeks—including explosions at the gas storage area near the Khojir missile facility at Parchin, at a medical facility in Tehran, and at a factory south of Tehran—although there is as yet no evidence of foul play in these events.

Multiple media outlets—including the New York Times and the Washington Post—have referenced intelligence officials attributing the Natanz attack to Israel. And while Tehran was slow in apportioning blame, on 7 July it accused Israel of being behind the attack, saying it was ‘a “wake-up call” meant to deter Iran amid advancements in its nuclear program, and … [that] those who planted the explosives had significant insight into the country’s nuclear program’.

Satellite image taken on 8 July of the blast site at the Natanz Pilot Fuel Enrichment Plant.

Source: Nathan Ruser/Maxar Technologies.

Israel has form in using lethal force against high-value nuclear targets in the Middle East. Between 2010 and 2012, Israeli agents murdered four Iranian nuclear scientists. Earlier, Israel launched military strikes that destroyed the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak in 1981 and the Syrian Al Kibar reactor in 2007, the two most obvious manifestations of the Begin doctrine, which stipulates that Israel cannot allow any of its regional adversaries to develop a nuclear weapons capability.

However, two key issues remain unresolved. First, it’s not clear that the explosion at the centrifuge assembly centre will be a significant a setback for Iran’s enrichment capabilities. Second, if it is accepted that Israel was behind the incident, it’s difficult to assess whether the Natanz attack was merely a warning to Tehran or represents a new stage in Israeli efforts to curtail Tehran’s nuclear program. It’s possible that the attacks were also intended to provoke a reaction from Tehran that would justify more punitive and definitive military strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities by either Israel or the US.

On the first question, the assembly centre is a critical element of Iran’s capacity to build more advanced centrifuges for its uranium-enrichment program. According to the Institute for Science and International Security, the workshop was ‘dedicated to assembling, on a production-scale, advanced centrifuge rotors, bellows, end caps, and other key subcomponents’ for Iran’s enrichment program.

Imagery published by the institute shows significant damage to the facility, including structural damage, likely rendering the facility and all the equipment within it inoperable. Following the explosion, Tehran admitted that the site contained advanced equipment and precision measuring devices that were either destroyed or damaged, and conceded that the incident will slow down the development and expansion of advanced centrifuges.

Nevertheless, the broader impact of this attack on Iran’s enrichment capabilities may be limited and may do little more than delay Tehran bringing online more advanced centrifuge designs. Some analysts have estimated that the explosion at Natanz will set back Iran’s nuclear program by more than a year, whereas others concluded that the explosion would have little immediate effect on Iran’s two existing uranium-enrichment facilities.

Others have concluded that the attack may do little more than encourage Iran to carry out nuclear-related activities in secret rather than in publicly declared facilities subject to inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency. As noted by Jeffrey Lewis, the director of the East Asia Proliferation Project at the Middleborough Institute of International Studies, ‘You can set them back a few months, but is it really worth it if you don’t have a plan for solving the nuclear problem during those few months?’

The timing of the Natanz incident is also noteworthy, given it occurred less than a month after the release of the latest IAEA report on Iran’s nuclear program. The report confirmed that Iran had further increased its stockpile of low-enriched uranium from around 1,050 kilograms to more than 1,500 kilograms during the reporting period. The IAEA also noted its concern that Tehran was continuing to deny inspectors complementary access under its additional protocol to two locations of proliferation concern and failing to respond to questions on possible undeclared nuclear material and nuclear-related activities.

The incident at Natanz clearly appears to have been a targeted attack by Israel on a key, but not critical, component of Iran’s nuclear program. If Israel wants to conclusively stop Iran’s nuclear activities, in accordance with the Begin doctrine, it is highly unlikely that decision-makers will assess the damage wrought at Natanz as sufficient to do the job, especially given growing concerns about Iran’s success in shortening the breakout time for realising a nuclear weapons capability.

Importantly, it’s highly likely that Israel also thinks that it’s well past the time to be issuing warnings. So, the Natanz attack may plausibly be but one part of a broader Israeli strategy with a more serious end goal in mind. But the clock is ticking if Israel is seeking to definitively resolve the thorny question of Iran’s nuclear ambitions before the US presidential election in November. If it is, then we’re likely to see more attacks on sensitive Iranian facilities in the weeks ahead.

The media’s obsession with the novel coronavirus pandemic has pushed all other crises, actual and potential, out of the headlines. This does not mean they have vanished; it’s only a matter of time before one or more of them reappear with a vengeance. But there are two potential flashpoints in the Middle East that the international community cannot afford to ignore.

The most prominent of these, and one that could once again threaten war and further destabilisation of the region, is the impending Iranian nuclear crisis. Last week marked the second anniversary of America’s withdrawal from the Iranian nuclear deal. Tehran waited for a year to allow the European powers—Britain, France and Germany, who were also parties to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action—to convince US President Donald Trump’s administration of its folly.

When that didn’t happen, in May 2019 Iran began a calibrated series of actions to defy the limits put on its nuclear program by the JCPOA. It resumed uranium enrichment beyond the threshold permitted by the agreement and restarted research on and development of advanced centrifuges. It also expanded its stockpile of nuclear fuel, cutting in half the time it would need to produce enough weapons-grade material to build a nuclear bomb.

While these steps don’t mean that Tehran is immediately preparing to make a dash to build a nuclear weapon, they do indicate that Washington’s ‘maximum pressure’ strategy of forcing Iran through sanctions to forgo its right to enrich uranium to the level guaranteed by the JCPOA has failed.

The US expected that its sanction campaign would persuade Tehran to abandon its policy of supporting proxy actors such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and Shia militias in Iraq, as well as to curb its ballistic missile program that Washington felt threatened the security of its allies in the Middle East. The American strategy has failed to achieve these objectives as well.

Now the US has launched a move to get the UN Security Council to extend an embargo on conventional arms supply to Iran that expires on 18 October. Washington has also warned that if the Security Council fails to extend the embargo, the US, as one of the original signatories to the JCPOA, will trigger a provision of the agreement to reimpose on Iran all international sanctions, including the conventional arms embargo, that were in force before the nuclear deal was reached.

Most observers believe this move to be of dubious legality since the US has withdrawn from the deal and is no longer a party to it. Moreover, Iran has made clear that if this happens it will pull out of the JCPOA completely, expel International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors and possibly withdraw from the nuclear non-proliferation treaty altogether.

All the components of this scenario point to an eventual face-off between the US and Iran that could easily degenerate into a full-fledged war. While Trump may not be interested in engaging in a major conflict in the Middle East in an election year, the possibility of such a conflagration is likely to increase radically if he is re-elected in November.

The other potentially dangerous conflict in the Middle East may erupt over the Palestine issue. The Trump ‘peace plan’ has paved the way for Israeli annexation not only of the major Jewish settlements in the West Bank but of the Jordan Valley as well. It leaves a disconnected and unviable Palestinian entity, hemmed in by several conditional clauses, that no Palestinian is willing to buy.

The prospect of such annexations has increased with Benjamin Netanyahu’s return to power as prime minister and Benny Gantz’s abject surrender to the wily Likud leader in the coalition arrangement about to come into force.

With the two-state solution now off the table, only two options are left. The first is the collapse of the Palestinian Authority and the indefinite continuation of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank in a more direct form. The second is the eventual emergence of a bi-national state of Israel–Palestine with equal civic and political rights for all its citizens. The latter will not be acceptable to the majority of Israeli Jews and certainly not to Netanyahu’s constituency among them.

The first option is likely to eventually mutate into an apartheid state with Palestinian enclaves used as a fig leaf for ethnic domination. As the use of Bantustans in South Africa demonstrated, this is unlikely to be acceptable to the international community.

At some point, a major Palestinian revolt in reaction to the implementation of this ‘peace plan’ is likely to erupt. Unlike in 1947–48, major Arab states are unlikely to be drawn into such a conflict directly. Also unlike that time, it will not be possible for the Israeli state to expel the vast majority of Palestinians from Palestinian territories. An unconventional, asymmetric guerrilla war appears the most likely outcome if this scenario unfolds.

A Palestinian revolt is likely to find support in the Arab and Muslim worlds if not among governments then among the public, and could become a cause célèbre for Islamist terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda, Islamic State and their offshoots. If that happens, it could destabilise not only the Middle East but the world as a whole.

The Covid-19 pandemic should not be allowed to totally distract the attention of world leaders from these potentially dangerous conflicts that may erupt without much notice. Geopolitical and ethno-national conflicts don’t disappear just because there’s a major global health emergency. Their half-lives are usually longer than those of the most dangerous viruses.

Looming over this year’s commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, were two contradictory impulses that lay behind the creation of the Jewish state: cosmopolitanism and nationalism. A painful dialogue between these perspectives marked the event, reflected in the utterances of the officials who attended and the objections of those who stayed away.

In opening the ceremony, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu set the tone for what was to come. He described Auschwitz as ‘an abyss’ and Jerusalem as ‘a peak’, with the former representing ‘enslavement’ and ‘death’ and the latter epitomising ‘freedom’ and ‘life’. To give meaning to the lives of those murdered in the Holocaust, he sought to link their deaths to Israel’s founding just a few years later. But in doing this, he risked presenting the massacre of the Jews as a necessary staging post on the ‘marvelous journey of the revival of our people’. Rather than presenting the fate of Europe’s Jews as a reason to renew the struggle against hatred and genocide everywhere, he focused more narrowly on the interests of the state of Israel and concluded his remarks with a battle cry against Iran.

The choice between cosmopolitanism and nationalism has always been an especially difficult one for Jews. Historically, the exclusion of ‘wandering Jews’ from official life meant that they were de facto ‘citizens of nowhere’, and thus cosmopolitan by default. Yet precisely for that reason, many Jews went on to become ultra-nationalists in the countries into which they were eventually assimilated. A quintessential example was the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, who as a young man initially welcomed World War I as an opportunity to fight for his country. The same contradictory sentiments are now bound up in Israel’s national identity, animating an abiding tension between democracy and the desire to provide a Jewish homeland.

The foreign speakers at Yad Vashem this year also embodied this conflict between nationalism and cosmopolitanism. Russian President Vladimir Putin decried the weaponisation of history, before doing exactly that, claiming (not inaccurately) that the Holocaust was carried out not just by Germans but also by European collaborators who ‘were often crueler than their masters’. Not surprisingly, he directed this charge specifically at Ukraine, Lithuania and Latvia—all countries with which Russia has a troubled relationship.

But it was the Polish government that objected most strenuously to this interpretation. After not being invited to speak, Polish President Andrzej Duda boycotted the ceremony. And in anticipation of Putin’s speech, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki wrote a commentary for Politico arguing that, ‘Russia is trying to rewrite history. Far from being a “liberator,” the Soviet Union was a facilitator of Nazi Germany and a perpetrator of crimes of its own—before and after the liberation of Auschwitz’. The official Polish response comes as no surprise, given that this is the same government that, in 2018, passed a law criminalising any mention of Polish complicity in the Holocaust.

The contrast with the remarks delivered by the French and German presidents couldn’t be greater. Each reflected on his own country’s guilt before making a case for universal human values. ‘Those who murdered’, noted German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, ‘those who planned and helped in the murdering, the many who silently toed the line: They were Germans.’

Like Netanyahu, Steinmeier also focused on the theme of renewal following the Shoah, which gave way to a new ‘order of peace, founded upon human rights and international law’. But, unlike Netanyahu, Steinmeier wasn’t triumphalist. In fact, he underscored an issue that, in spite of decades of vergangenheitsbewältigung (‘working through the past’), is now afflicting Germany: the return of anti-Semitism.

French President Emmanuel Macron was equally brutal in his self-criticism. ‘France has looked at its history head-on and faced up to the irreparable responsibility of the French state in the deportation of the Jews’, he declaimed. The lessons he takes from Auschwitz are universal and forward-looking. ‘No one has the right to use the memory of the dead’, he argued, ‘to justify some kind of contemporary hatred.’

One wonders how Zweig would have responded to all of these speakers. Although he was a protégé of Zionism’s founding intellectual, Theodor Herzl, a recent biography by George Prochnik shows that Zweig became increasingly uncomfortable with the idea of nationalism over the course of his life. Following the rise of the Nazis, he argued that Jews had a ‘sacred mission’ not to create yet another state with ‘cannons, flags, [and] medals.’ Rather, he wanted Jews to serve as ‘the gadfly which plagues the mangy beast of nationalism’, and to work for the ‘dissolution of nationalist tendencies’.

In other words, were Zweig alive today, he doubtless would sympathise more with the cosmopolitan humanism of Steinmeier and Macron than with Netanyahu’s ethno-nationalism. But it’s worth remembering that even as they established a Jewish nation-state, David Ben-Gurion and most of Israel’s founders were similarly committed to a cosmopolitan and universalist vision based on ‘complete equality of social and political rights … irrespective of religion, race or sex’.

For my part, as a descendent of German Jews—some of whom were exterminated—I strongly support Israel’s right to exist. But I also believe that Netanyahu’s instrumentalisation of the Holocaust’s victims—many of whom didn’t share his Zionist nationalism—directly undermines the ideals of the country’s founders.

As Auschwitz passes from memory into history, it is ironic that the lessons people draw from it would become more particular, rather than more universal. Clearly, the global fight against anti-Semitism needs a new narrative for the 21st-century world of hyper-fragmented and multicultural societies, where no one knows Holocaust survivors personally. Otherwise, history will continue to be politicised and pressed into the service of nationalist agendas, rather than showing the way to a more peaceful future for all.