As Trump meets Erdogan and F-35 sales dominate the headlines, former Israeli intelligence colonel Or Horvitz makes a contrarian case: Turkey is a real and growing threat to Israel, but it is not, and will not become, the next Iran.
In this conversation with The Jerusalem Post’s Jacob Laznik, Horvitz breaks with the alarmist consensus taking hold among Israeli decision-makers. He argues that Ankara “is not Abu Dhabi, but not Tehran either”, a pragmatic actor Washington and Jerusalem still have real leverage over, from NATO corridors to the quiet air-force deconfliction seen over Syria. On the F-35 fight, he notes that Israeli officials themselves frame the sale as “very bad, but not a disaster,” and warns against turning a manageable disagreement into a public rupture with Israel’s indispensable ally. On Gaza, he’s blunt: Hamas’s move to disband its emergency committee is “only a charade,” and the group will never surrender its weapons without military force.
What makes this perspective unusual is the source. Horvitz spent years at the center of Israel’s campaigns against Hezbollah and Iran, and he’s now warning that pattern-matching Turkey onto the Iran template is a strategic error, one that could push Israel toward a confrontation that disciplined competition could still avoid. It’s a rare inside-the-tent argument for restraint on one front so Israel can concentrate on the threats that matter most: Iran’s enriched-uranium stockpile, a demilitarized Hezbollah, and the dismantling of Hamas.