Under the leadership of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Ankara has become increasingly authoritarian, Islamist, and hostile toward Israel and the West more generally. The Turkish government has also indicated that it aspires to alter its maritime border with Greece, and even its border with Syria. Analyzing these changes, and what they term the country’s “bellicose foreign policy,” Efraim Inbar, Eran Lerman, and Hay Eytan Cohen Yanarocak examine the implications for Israel, and how the Jewish state might best respond:

The political changes in Turkey reflect long-term trends in Turkish society and foreign policy that will not disappear even when the Erdogan era ends. Turkey’s frictions with Israel likewise reflect a distancing from the West and a growing solidarity with popular anti-Israeli attitudes in the Muslim world.

In short, Turkey threatens the stability of the region as well as Israel’s strategic interests in the region. Nevertheless, it is possible to design an effective Western strategic response to Turkey.

Israel must act with great caution toward Turkey. It has no interest in turning this powerful country into an active enemy. It should be borne in mind that even under Erdogan’s leadership, Turkey has demonstrated a certain degree of pragmatism regarding Israel. It has not completely severed its diplomatic relations, and it maintains extensive trade ties with Israel, alongside mutual air traffic that is important for Turkey’s tourist trade—including securing access for Muslim visitors to Jerusalem and particularly to the Temple Mount.

Consequently, Israel must distinguish between Turkey’s current leader and Turkish society as a whole to preserve the possibility of better relations with a future government that is not under [his AKP party’s] control, or a government based on moderate elements in the party. Secular circles in Turkish society [and certain religious Muslim circles] want good relations with Israel. Turkey is not Iran.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.