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Netanyahu campaigns in American media to keep F-35s from Turkey
Graphic: Times of Palestine
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Washington is discussing Turkey's return to the F-35 programme as a serious possibility for the first time in years, and Israel is working to stop it, the journalist Fatih Kocaibiş argued this week in Responsible Statecraft, the publication of the Quincy Institute, the Washington think tank that campaigns for American military restraint.
At the NATO summit in Ankara last month President Trump said he would lift the sanctions imposed on Turkey under the CAATSA law after Ankara bought Russian S-400 air defences. Kocaibiş writes that Benjamin Netanyahu answered by taking his case to three American television networks, arguing that Turkish F-35s would destroy the balance of power in the region and recasting remarks by the Turkish foreign minister, Hakan Fidan, as antisemitism.
The doctrine Israel is invoking is the qualitative military edge, the standard written into American law that obliges Washington to keep Israel's forces ahead of any combination of regional states. Extending it, Kocaibiş argues, "would put that doctrine in direct tension with NATO's requirements".
Trump's reply, quoted in the piece, was that nobody tells him what to sell.
The argument is a think tank's, and the Quincy Institute makes it from a settled position against American arms diplomacy in the region. But the file it describes belongs to Palestinians as much as to Ankara. The edge Israel defends here is the same legal instrument that guarantees the aircraft flying over Gaza, and Turkey is a member of the Board of Peace now governing the Strip's transition.
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