Michael Doran
JNS, Feb. 20, 2022
“the plot had the opposite impact. Far from driving a wedge between Jerusalem and Ankara, it pushed them closer together.”
Iran’s assassination plots are windows into its fears. On Feb. 11, the Turkish media reported that MİT, Turkey’s National Intelligence Organization, had foiled an attempt to assassinate Yair Geller, a Turkish-Israeli businessman. The plot was a response to the killing of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the chief of Iran’s nuclear weapons program, in November 2020, allegedly at the hands of Israel’s Mossad. By targeting an Israeli-Turkish dual national on Turkish soil, Iran was also sowing seeds of Discord between Ankara and Jerusalem.
If Iran’s assassins had completed their mission, the setback to Israeli-Turkish relations would indeed have been severe. Many in Israel have grown accustomed to thinking of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey as an enemy power, controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood and inveterately hostile to the very existence of a Jewish state. In such an atmosphere, Tehran could reliably count on influential voices in Israel to interpret Geller’s murder as the direct result of Erdoğan’s policy of permitting Hamas leaders to operate on Turkish soil.
This article was first published by The Struggle for Mastery in the Middle East newsletter.
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