Israel watches Turkey’s rise with concern as F-35 talks, Hamas’s refusal to disarm and Iran’s uranium stockpile reshape the regional threat map.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/VPXFCAtsRF0?si=QddXDKg5iXFvhdaQWill Turkey box Israel out of Hamas’s future role in Gaza
ByJERUSALEM POST PODCASTSJULY 9, 2026 08:03Updated: JULY 9, 2026 08:04
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As US President Donald Trump meets Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to talk F-35s, Israel is bracing for Turkey to become its next great threat. In the last Deep Dive episode, the host, Jacob Laznik, was joined by Or Horvitz, head of the American program at the JPPI, who pushed back against the panic: Turkey “is not Iran.”
It craves a place in the Western world as much as regional dominance, and that ambition is exactly the leverage Washington and Jerusalem still hold. He doesn’t downplay the danger either; with Turkish disapproval of Israel above 96%, this is no longer just a quarrel with Erdogan, and if Iran keeps unraveling, a rising Sunni power could inherit the role of Israel’s chief rival.
On Gaza, he’s blunt. Hamas’s move to dissolve its governing committee is “only a charade”; the group may cede visible control, but it will never give up its weapons, because the guns are its reason to exist. He explains why Qatari and Turkish influence over any “Board of Peace” is Israel’s quiet nightmare, and why finishing Hamas requires both military pressure and moderate voices most assume can’t be found.
Most revealing is his read on the growing daylight between Israel and Washington. He’ll call the F-35 sale “bad, but not a disaster,” a fight not worth waging in public, while insisting the real red line is the enriched uranium still sitting in Iran.
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