Erdogan’s Turkey is a Rising Power

By Henry Srebrnik, Saint John Telegraph-Journal

If Iran emerges from the current war with Israel and the United States weakened, whether politically, economically, or militarily, Turkey’s relative influence in the broader region will increase.

Ankara has already consolidated significant influence in Syria and Azerbaijan, and it continues to pursue strategic projects across the South Caucasus. It has also been very active in the debates over the Hamas-Israel war in Gaza.

The recent NATO summit in Ankara marked an important moment for Turkey’s role within the alliance. It came after years of strained relations between Ankara and several of its NATO partners, especially the United States, following a period marked by disagreements over regional security, defence procurement and foreign policy.

Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan hopes to soon reach an agreement with Washington on lifting U.S. sanctions that were imposed on Turkey that followed its purchase of Russian S-400 missile defence systems. As well, Ankara desires to acquire advanced F-35 fighter jets.

In 2020, Washington imposed sanctions under the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA), following Turkey’s acquisition of the S-400s. It also excluded Ankara from the F-35 stealth fighter jet program. The U.S. Congress passed a law requiring Turkey to dispose of the S-400s before it could rejoin the F-35 program.

The Turkish daily Hurriyet reported July 10 that Turkey could soon announce it would sell the S-400s to a Gulf country to persuade Washington to supply it with F-35s. Before President Donald Trump’s arrival in Ankara, Fidan traveled to Moscow, where he met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and President Vladimir Putin to gain their approval.

Turkey is now seeking Russia’s consent to transfer the S-400 air defence system, an effort aimed at clearing the way for the purchase of the airplanes. Currently, Ankara does not use the system despite having it in its inventory.

Meanwhile, Turkey has reportedly paused its planned purchase of 40 American F-16s and the modernization of 79 existing aircraft while reassessing its long-term fighter strategy. The costly program is now considered a lower priority compared with Turkey’s domestically developed KAAN fighter, and the F-35 acquisitions, according to Hurriyet.

Over the past decade, the United States and Turkey have differed sharply on some major issues, including the U.S. partnership with Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces against the Islamic State organization in Syria. Turkey purchased the S-400 system from Moscow during a period of estrangement from its NATO partners, which began during Barack Obama’s presidency and deepened after a failed coup attempt against Erdogan in 2016. That frustration became part of Ankara’s justification for turning to Russia. But the Syrian problem has lessened with the creation of the new, generally pro-Turkish, Sunni Arab government in Damascus following the 2024 fall of Bashar al-Asad.

Some Mediterranean states are not happy with the possibility of Turkey’s potential acquisition of new military hardware. Greek Defence Minister Nikos Dendias on July 9 said Athens “would not welcome” Turkey receiving either F-35 fighter jets or engines for its next-generation Turkish KAAN combat aircraft. Advanced American weapons should never be used against fellow NATO allies.

Greece cannot dictate the defence procurement decisions of third countries, but it has both the right and the obligation to present its security concerns to Washington, particularly given Turkey’s longstanding declaration that any unilateral extension of Greek territorial waters in the Aegean Sea would be considered a casus belli.

This news also worries Israel, whose own relationship with Turkey has been rapidly eroding since the start of the Gaza war, given Turkey’s continuing support for the Palestinian Sunni Islamist group Hamas after October 7, 2023, and its official suspension of trade with Israel.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told a number of American and Israeli television networks that history “teaches that when one regional power declines, another rises. Our task is to make sure Israel continues rising faster than anyone else.”

This explains why Netanyahu launched a public campaign against Trump’s apparent willingness to sell the fighter jets to Turkey, which is the very state now furiously jockeying to replace Iran as the Middle East’s dominant power. Selling F-35s to Ankara reflects a growing conviction in Israel that Turkey is shaping up to be Israel’s principal long-term challenge.

Turkey, Netanyahu contends, “has aggressive aspirations” and “is not a force for peace and security.” F-35 planes in its hands would “destroy the power balance” in the region

Erdogan dismissed objections by Greece and Israel to a potential F-35 sale, saying there was “no place” for such opposition. “Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis should not have made the mistake of opposing Turkey’s purchase of the aircraft,” he replied. “We have the right to acquire aircraft and defensive equipment, and we are holding talks on this matter.”

Turkey has the second largest army in NATO and a burgeoning defence industrial base. Turkish defence and aviation exports broke records last year, exceeding $10 billion. All of this has won admiration from Trump.

“I haven’t totally made up my mind, but my inclination is to say, look, he’s done everything, he’s helped us in so many different ways,” Trump said of Erdogan during a news conference at the NATO summit. Trump repeatedly praised Erdogan, calling him “really a great man” and “a great leader.” Greece and Israel won’t be able to prevent the deal.

 

 

Will the Democratic Socialists of America Control the Democratic Party?

 By Henry Srebrnik, Jewish Post, Winnipeg

On June 23, radical Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) candidates backed by New York mayor Zohran Mamdani won multiple Democratic Party primaries in New York City and elsewhere in the state. They also were victorious in other parts of the country.

The socialist victories in New York far surpassed anyone’s predictions. Who, three years ago, could have predicted that a Muslim anti-Zionist would be elected mayor of a city with 900,000 Jews and would lead insurgents to victories in that party’s primaries in 2026?  Yet here we are.

Marxist Third Worldist ideology has moved out of the universities into the polling booths, after campus activism, divestment campaigns, and social media have reinforced an anti-Israeli framework for years. The DSA’s platform states it plainly: It pledges “support for Palestinian self-determination against Israeli apartheid and settler-colonialism.”

The mayor, a long-standing DSA member, worked overtime to appear at countless campaign events for a trio of candidates he dubbed “the Team”: Claire Valdez, Darializa Avila Chevalier, and Brad Lander. The last two unseated incumbent Democratic congressmen. Mamdani has assembled a coalition in New York City that is capable of elevating like-minded candidates to office.

In the Seventh Congressional District, which straddles northern Brooklyn and southwestern Queens, an open primary to replace retiring progressive Rep. Nydia Velázquez saw State Assembly Member Claire Valdez’s’s defeat Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso. She was even further left than Mamdani himself. In the end, it was not even close: Valdez prevailed with 56.1 per cent of the vote to Reynoso’s 35.8 per cent.

In 2019, Valdez joined the DSA after seeing the rise of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and state senator Julia Salazar, both of whom were elected with the DSA’s help. Valdez emphasized her anti-Israel activism as a key part of her campaign. At events, her staff handed out signs that said “Free Palestine.” She launched her campaign alongside Mahmoud Khalil, a key anti-Israel leader at Columbia University that the Donald Trump administration has tried to deport.

Valdez referred to Israel’s war against Hamas as a “genocide” as early as October 13, 2023. She lambasted police for restraining anti-Israel mobs chanting “Globalize the Intifada” and waving Hezbollah flags outside a Brooklyn synagogue last June.  “New Yorkers don’t just have the right to protest the sale of stolen Palestinian land — they have a responsibility to,” she declare. She has repeatedly criticized the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). She also boasted on social media of having “wiped my hand on the American flag.”

In the Thirteenth Congressional District, covering the upper Manhattan neighborhoods of Harlem, Washington Heights, and Morningside Heights and parts of the West Bronx, Darializa Avila Chevalier won a much more startling victory over Rep. Adriano Espaillat, a five-term incumbent Democratic Party power broker and chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Espaillat’s campaign was heavily backed by AIPAC. Chevalier defied expectations and won by gaining 49 per cent to Espaillat’s 46 per cent. She told the crowd at her watch party that she had fought against the “Democratic machine.” Espaillat lost despite the backing of Democratic leaders in Congress and the state, including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, New York Governor Kathy Hochul, and Julie Menin, speaker of the New York City Council.

When Chevalier, draped in a keffiyeh, first announced her candidacy in November of last year, few outside her immediate circle knew her name. But her message was clear: she presented herself as an organiser working to unite families torn apart by the immigration system and against “what we all know is a genocide in Palestine.”

Chevalier has publicly proclaimed her hatred for Israel, the United States, and “Western civilization” as a whole. She has called for the abolition of prisons, open borders and an end to deportations — even for people convicted of violent crimes. As a student at Columbia University, she was involved in Students for Justice in Palestine. In 2024, she returned to her alma mater to help organize an anti-Israel encampment that was ultimately disbanded by the police.

She co-founded Columbia University Apartheid Divest: “We are Westerners fighting for the eradication of Western Civilization. We stand in full solidarity with every movement for liberation in the Global South. Our intifada is an Internationalist one,” it states.

The day after the October 7 attack, Chevalier attended an anti-Israel demonstration in Times Square. “I can only say I have been advocating for the human rights of Palestinians for my adult life,” when asked about her attendance at the rally. Chevalier has said that her conversion to Islam was inspired by the Israel-Hamas war. Mamdani celebrated her win, describing Chevalier as a person “of clarity, of conscience and of conviction.”

 

The war was also on the minds of voters in former Comptroller Brad Lander’s race against another AIPAC-funded incumbent, Rep. Dan Goldman, in New York’s Tenth District, covering lower Manhattan and part of Brooklyn. Both are Jewish, but Goldman has been a steadfast friend of Israel while Lander is the quintessential anti-Zionist and a key faction of his coalition was anti-Israel. It was a contest that laid bare the party’s divisions over the Israel-Gaza war.

At his son Marek’s bris, Lander gave a speech lambasting Israel. “We pray fervently that by the time you read this, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, the settlements, the house demolitions, the violence will be history,” which was later reprinted in a 2003 book titled Wrestling with Zion. Lander enjoyed the night’s biggest victory, winning 65.8 per cent of the vote to Goldman’s 34 per cent. Many Democrats have suggested that Lander has proved useful to Mamdani and other leftists who have been accused of antisemitism for singling out the Jewish state for opprobrium.

In the run-up to Election Day, a chain of Brooklyn coffee shops called Poetica posted that it would have barred Goldman entry had they recognized him during a recent visit to their storefront. “We don’t serve racists, fascists, homophobes, genocide enablers,” Poetica declared. “Too bad we didn’t recognize you right away, or we would have turned you away.”

At the state level, seven of the eight candidates endorsed by the DSA for the New York State legislature also won their primary elections. One of them is Aber Kawas, a Queens-based community organizer. If she, as expected, wins in November, she will be the first Palestinian woman elected to state office in New York history.

“Were defeated congressmen Dan Goldman and Adriano Espaillat insufficiently anti-Trump?” asked Will Rahn, a senior editor and writer for The Free Press, rhetorically, in a June 26 column. “Of course not. They lost because they aren’t anti-Israel enough. ‘Free Palestine’ is now the binding issue on the left, the only thing that actually matters.” No matter who you are, how you identify, or what causes you’ve championed, if you refuse to fall in line on Israel, you risk being ostracized from communities you’ve long called home.

For most of the postwar era, support for Israel was one of the least controversial positions in Democratic Party politics. That consensus has not merely weakened; it has collapsed. Once viewed as a righteous anti-colonial cause, Zionism has been reframed by radical thinkers as the ideology of a colonial oppressor of stateless Palestinians. Opposition to Israel is now the litmus test in Democratic Party politics.  “There’s a cliff, and we’re heading towards it,” warned Daniel C. Kurtzer, a Princeton University professor who was ambassador to Israel under President George W. Bush.

The DSA has now built an entire ecosystem that runs parallel to the official Democratic apparatus, equipped with their own consultant network, endorsing organizations, donors and even billionaires who back them.

A generation after Pat Buchanan was denounced as an antisemite by all proper liberals for saying things like “Capitol Hill is Israeli-occupied territory,” will the left now embrace him as a “premature antizionist”? Even satire can’t match this.

Think about it: Since October 7, Israel has done what every other country viciously attacked by implacable enemies throughout history has done: It has lashed back in a defensive war. This is a policy that any state that cared for the life of its citizens would have to adopt.
Yet Israel has become the “omnicause.” That’s why antisemitism and antizionism are two sides of the same coin: hatred of Jews. Jews around the world aren’t being attacked because of Israel. Israel is itself being condemned because it’s Jewish.

American Jews have been blindsided by this, as the French writer Simone Rodan-Benzaquen, senior envoy for Europe at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, tells us in a brilliant article, “Stand Up,” Tablet, July 6, 2026. “When anti-Jewish hostility arrives wrapped in the language of liberation, antiracism, decolonization, and human rights –when it emerges among allies, colleagues, students, professional peers, or other minority communities — the disorientation is deeper. It is inside the world in which one has built a life. It speaks in familiar accents. It borrows cherished values.”

In “A Profound Question Haunting Jews Today,” New York Times, July 6, 2026, Nicholas Lemann, the former dean of the Columbia University Journalism School, agrees. He writes that for half a century or more, American Jews could achieve, “through being successful, culturally Jewish, Zionist, liberal and not especially observant,” a status that elsewhere has persistently eluded them.

“This set of certainties has evaporated. Today, Israel is the pariah nation of the world, and ‘Zionist’ has become an epithet, something it’s unacceptable to be, at least in progressive circles,” where most Jews have usually found themselves.

So, are the Democrats going to become America’s anti-Israel party? And then what?