Shrinking Buffers: Why Turkey and Israel Are on a Collision Course

When Israeli warplanes struck the Abu al-Duhur airbase in Syria on Aug. 18, 2026, the smoke rose over the demolition of an old geopolitical assumption about the Middle East. This time, Israel directly targeted a strategic sphere of influence where the Turkish military had been working to build local security capacity.Turkey rapidly filled the power vacuum in post-Assad Syria, expanding its military and intelligence footprint southward and positioning itself as a founding actor in the Levant’s new security architecture. With this military move, Israel aimed to draw a new line of engagement on the ground for both Ankara and Damascus. Through this strike, the Israeli security apparatus delivered a clear ultimatum to Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa: never turn a blind eye to a Turkish military presence that threatens Israel’s interests. This armed encounter demonstrates that the security paradigm maturing in the Israeli strategic mindset for some time — the idea that “Turkey is the new Iran” — has now found an operational reality on the ground.For years, analysts in Washington and Europe believed that the tension between Turkey and Israel was nothing more than a mutual war of words tailored for domestic politics. The wreckage at Abu al-Duhur proves just how wrong these optimistic analysts were.The era of managing crises between the two countries solely by trading diplomatic notes has officially ended. The collapse of traditional buffer zones in the Middle East puts the Turkish and Israeli defense apparatuses on a direct collision course. Ankara is now moving beyond diplomatic condemnations, actively constructing a deterrence strategy on the ground against Israel’s preemptive military interventions. These shrinking buffer zones in Syria, the Eastern Mediterranean, and the intelligence domain are turning into a military confrontation, while a new geopolitical prescription could help policymakers prevent a regional war.Erased Borders in Syria and Operational ClashesThe Syrian theater has become the most concrete laboratory for the structural conflict between Turkey and Israel. The collapse of the Assad regime completely eliminated the physical and geopolitical buffer zone that had existed between the two countries for decades. In this paradigm of redrawn borders, the regional security doctrines of Israel and Turkey are colliding head-on.Understanding the scale and tempo of Israel’s response requires acknowledging the severe strategic anxieties driving its defense apparatus. Israeli security planners see acute vulnerabilities in Syria’s geopolitical landscape. The origins of key factions within the new Syrian government alarm Israeli officials about the long-term stability and intentions of their northern neighbor. Furthermore, Israeli strategic planners apply a rigid calculus to existential imperatives, such as securing the Golan frontier, managing the sensitive dynamics of Druze populations in the south, and maintaining absolute freedom of action in the air to interdict Iranian resupply lines to Hizballah, all of which demand constant operational management. The Israeli defense establishment views any consolidation of Syrian airspace, especially the introduction of a Turkish air defense umbrella, as a direct threat to its operational capacity to monitor and strike these Iranian logistical corridors.However, these security concerns do not validate the strategic efficacy of the Israeli security establishment’s response. Israel attempts to manage these complex threats by doubling down on its “Campaign Between the Wars” concept, a doctrine of preemptive attrition initially designed to sever the logistical lines of non-state asymmetric proxies. The critical strategic vulnerability emerges when the Israeli defense apparatus applies this attrition concept against a conventional army and a structural state-building project in Syria. Directing “Campaign Between the Wars” against the stabilizing presence of the Turkish Armed Forces stretches the concept fundamentally beyond its original utility, dragging Israel into an interstate friction it is ill-equipped to sustain.By treating almost any emerging state capacity on its borders as a latent threat, Israel’s preemptive strikes inadvertently paralyze the very infrastructure needed to stabilize the region. The Israeli government operates under the flawed assumption that maintaining a perpetually destabilized, fragmented buffer is safer than allowing a regular army to consolidate. Ultimately, this approach fails to address Israel’s core anxieties and instead perpetuates a cycle of conflict while destroying the only mechanism capable of policing those borders and reining in the militias Israel fears: a functional, centralized state authority.This Israeli preference for maintaining perpetual crises and structural weakness fundamentally collides with Turkish foreign policy’s new regional vision. The Turkish strategic mindset prioritizes building rational state apparatuses that hold the monopoly on violence rather than dealing with fragmented entities and proxy wars on its borders. Ankara ties the permanent elimination of terror networks, refugee waves, and militia forces to the restoration of state capacity in neighboring geographies.The post-Assad Syrian theater is the main laboratory where Ankara implements this foundational vision. The Turkish Armed Forces and intelligence elements are actively constructing a new security architecture across a vast geography extending deep into Syria. Turkey provides direct political and military sponsorship for the new Damascus administration led by Ahmed al-Sharaa to establish a regular and centralized army, completely break the territorial dominance of non-state armed groups like People’s Defense Units and Kurdistan Workers’ Party, and secure the physical stability required for the return of refugees. Forward operating bases like Abu al-Duhur, targeted by Israel, are the keystones of this Turkish geopolitical project aimed at pulling Syria out of the chronic failed-state swamp — a playground for militias — and transforming it into a functioning neighbor.This is exactly where the operational clash begins. Israel’s attacks on critical military and logistical hubs like Abu al-Duhur no longer merely sever Iran’s supply lines. They directly sabotage the new security architecture the Turkish army is trying to build in Syria. For policymakers, this translates to an intolerable strategic deterioration. As the Turkish Armed Forces’ presence in Syria transitions from outpost guarding to structural order-building, the entry of Israeli jets into these spheres of influence pushes Ankara to update its rules of engagement.While Israeli security sources claim they attempted to reach an understanding through indirect dialogue with President al-Sharaa prior to the strike, this narrative actively distorts the reality of military deconfliction. It is true that days before the attack, Mossad spy agency chief Roman Gofman relayed Israel’s concerns to Syrian Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shaibani, who subsequently met with U.S. Ambassador to Turkey Tom Barrack in Istanbul on Aug. 17, just hours before the strike. However, warning Damascus is fundamentally not the same as utilizing established Turkish-Israeli channels.By intentionally bypassing the direct joint fusion cell established in January under American supervision for intelligence sharing and military de-escalation, Israel made a calculated choice. The Israeli government’s decision to use a diplomatic backdoor to pressure the Syrian government, rather than engaging the direct military-to-military deconfliction mechanism with Turkey, demonstrates a deliberate refusal to recognize Ankara’s legitimate security architecture in the region. For Turkish defense planners, it is a calculated strategy designed to test the Ankara-Damascus alignment while knowingly risking a direct military response. Turkish defense planners read Israel’s expanding strike range as a direct challenge to their own border security and are actively calculating how to establish a de facto military barrier.To legitimize its preemptive strikes on critical stabilization hubs like Abu al-Duhur, the Israeli defense apparatus has aggressively promoted a specific operational narrative. The Israeli military’s stated rationale is that the strike was executed to halt an impending Turkish deployment. Specifically, Israel claims it acted on intelligence suggesting Ankara intended to install a radar and an air defense system manned by Turkish personnel at the base, targeting the runway to physically prevent Turkish aircraft from landing. However, Ankara categorically denies Israel’s characterization of its presence at the facility as an offensive military buildup aimed at its borders.Furthermore, this stated Israeli rationale collapses under its own strategic contradictions. Even if one were to entertain Israel’s claims, a radar and air defense network is inherently defensive — a logical requirement for securing the broader state-building and stabilization efforts in post-Assad Syria, not an offensive weapon aimed at Israel. Israel’s acute threat perception over a theoretical defensive radar reveals its true objective: maintaining a fragmented, defenseless Syrian airspace where it can operate with impunity. To mask this, Israeli policymakers attempt to frame Turkey’s capacity-building footprint as an imminent threat to silence domestic opposition ahead of the Oct. 27 elections.In orchestrating these frictions, the Israeli government’s primary strategic audience is less the Turkish leadership and more the Trump administration. By deliberately elevating the dispute from a rhetorical standoff to the threshold of armed conflict, the Israeli defense apparatus is attempting to manufacture a regional crisis, one specifically designed to convince Washington that Ankara’s expanding footprint is a severe security threat requiring immediate U.S. intervention to restrain Turkey.Yet, top Washington diplomats such as Tom Barrack have debunked these arguments, explicitly stating that American intelligence examined Israel’s claims of a military buildup and found that the data did not align with realities on the ground. Barrack’s emphasis that Turkey is not seeking any adversarial relationship or attack against Israel demolishes the Israeli government’s narrative. The picture before us cannot be dismissed as a mere security dilemma; it is a calculated attempt by Israel to lure Turkey into a combat trap on the ground.Washington’s stance, which hollows out the Israeli government’s claims, has not been limited to the intelligence sphere. The U.S. administration’s official removal of Syria from the State Sponsors of Terrorism list — with President Donald Trump’s direct approval — is a historic diplomatic step that fundamentally shatters Israel’s security narrative. While the Israeli security apparatus tries to market the Ahmed al-Sharaa government and Turkey’s presence in Syria as a threat, Washington is doing the exact opposite by rewarding the new Damascus administration’s fight against Iran-backed militias and Hizballah, thereby providing this structure with international legitimacy.While the American administration’s decision to lift these sanctions is fundamentally a bilateral assessment of the new Damascus government, it generates a profound structural convergence with Ankara’s geopolitical objectives. Rather than an explicit certification of Turkey’s specific state-building project, this delisting effectively validates the core premise of Turkish regional doctrine: that cultivating a unified, rational state actor in Damascus is a far more viable stabilization strategy than sustaining a fractured geography dominated by militias.Ankara’s underlying motivation here goes far beyond a mere quest for regional hegemony. Consequently, Ankara’s decision to withhold an immediate, symmetric military response to the Abu al-Duhur strike is a calculated exercise in strategic patience. By prioritizing this longue durée stabilization project over a reflexive, tit-for-tat military escalation, Turkish defense planners are refusing to be drawn into a tactical trap that would disrupt their broader geopolitical momentum in the Levant. The Turkish strategic mindset sees the construction of rational state structures capable of maintaining a monopoly on violence and standing on their own feet as the only way to create a belt of strategic autonomy closed to external interventions. The latest U.S. move proves that Turkey’s doctrine of establishing rationalized state structures integrated into the international system, instead of weak and fragmented neighbors on its borders, has found a pragmatic reception even in Washington. In short, through its strikes in the Syrian geography, Israel is not only clashing head-on with Turkey’s military architecture but is also directly conflicting with Washington’s new vision of stability in the region.The Eastern Mediterranean: From Encirclement Perception to Naval DeterrenceThe friction generated by shrinking buffer zones on land is also spilling over into the maritime sphere with full intensity. For a long time, seismic surveys and exclusive economic zone disputes in the Eastern Mediterranean were framed as mere legal disagreements. However, the Turkish naval command perceives this picture as a much more existential security threat. The energy-centric alignment Israel established with Greece and the Greek Cypriot Administration is steadily expanding as France injects its geopolitical and military weight into the equation. Ankara clearly codes this emerging bloc as an attempt at military encirclement.This perception of encirclement has accelerated Turkey’s shift, transforming its “blue homeland” doctrine from a diplomatic thesis into a hard military posture. Western policymakers often dismiss the “blue homeland” as a rhetorical cartographic claim. In reality, it is Ankara’s official maritime strategy, relying on naval power to actively fortify its strategic depth and sovereignty claims in surrounding waters. In the specific context of the Eastern Mediterranean, the operational translation of this doctrine is crystal clear: directly severing the energy and logistics corridors Israel hopes to route to Europe and blocking this maritime space with an active naval presence.Driven by this strategic objective, the Turkish navy has ramped up its patrols, submarine operations, and military exercises in the Eastern Mediterranean to unprecedented levels. The aggressive presence of the Turkish fleet in these waters has long surpassed the routine protection of natural gas drillships. The primary operational objective is to contain Israel’s strategic depth at sea and physically break the new geopolitical hierarchy the Israeli security establishment is attempting to establish through structures like the Eastern Mediterranean Gas Forum and its expanding bilateral defense pacts with Athens.The tactical reality on the water reflects this growing strategic friction. Rather than overt armed clashes, this manifests as a high-stakes war of nerves: increased shadowing of foreign vessels by Turkish naval assets, assertive maritime patrols, and a robust forward presence designed to physically complicate any exclusionary Israeli-Greek-Cypriot maritime operations. Leveraging its growing naval power, Turkey is erecting a formidable barrier of deterrence right across Israel’s shifting energy-security maps. This active naval deterrence strategy serves as a constant reminder to the Israeli government that regardless of whether Israeli gas flows through pipelines or Egyptian liquefied natural gas terminals, the broader maritime security architecture cannot be stabilized without Ankara’s consent.The Weaponization of Intelligence WarsThe disappearance of buffer zones has forced conventional armies and intelligence services into a new paradigm of war, pushing them directly into the field. The interaction between the Turkish National Intelligence Organization and Mossad has evolved far beyond traditional intelligence gathering, transforming into an operational struggle to break each other’s capacities. The tacit competition once waged through proxies and third parties is now adopting the identity of a paramilitary attrition strategy, directly targeting each other’s local networks of influence and asymmetric military capabilities.For decades, Israel’s intelligence apparatus leveraged a doctrine of regional impunity, but a systematic counterintelligence campaign launched by the Turkish National Intelligence Organization and Turkish law enforcement in 2021 has effectively dismantled Mossad’s domestic networks.This multi-year crackdown unraveled deep-seated espionage rings that rapidly evolved from monitoring Palestinian students to deploying 56-member “ghost cell” networks targeting foreign diplomats and political figures, alongside simultaneous raids in 2024 targeting blackmail and surveillance cells. Crucially, this intelligence friction is directly tied to the Levant: the Aug. 2024 arrest of Mossad’s financial coordinator in Istanbul revealed that digital assets and wire transfers were being funneled directly to cross-border operational cells inside Syria. This defensive neutralization of dozens of operatives was merely the first step of the strategy.Today, Turkish intelligence is waging an active field campaign in third-party countries like Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon to disrupt Israel’s regional operational capacity. In response to Mossad’s efforts to carve out spheres of influence by exploiting weak state structures in the region, the Turkish National Intelligence Organization is consolidating local elements to aggressively shrink the operational footprint of Israeli intelligence.The escalation of these intelligence wars proves that the invisible buffers between the two countries have also vanished entirely. Stepping out from behind the shadows, Turkey and Israel are now directly pressing on each other’s nerve endings.Active Deterrence and Diplomatic ContainmentAll these operational realities harbor a clear warning: Turkey and Israel are right in the middle of a structural, military, and intelligence collision to shape the future security architecture of the Middle East. Yet policymakers in Washington, London, and Brussels continue to read this friction solely through the lens of the Palestinian issue, domestic political fodder, or a temporary diplomatic crisis. This myopia overlooks the risk of the region’s two most capable military powers being dragged into a direct interstate conflict.Ankara, however, refuses to wait for the West to call for restraint. The prevailing geopolitical objective is to confine Israel’s destructive interventionism within a de facto containment cordon using all instruments of the international system. Turkey is preparing to fortify this active military deterrence with a comprehensive isolation and de-legitimization strategy in the diplomatic arena.Indeed, as materialized in U.S. Ambassador Barrack’s statements, Washington’s public debunking of Israeli-origin intelligence manipulations — and the Abu al-Duhur operation drawing rare condemnations even from traditional allies like the United States — prove that Israel’s diplomatic leverage and information monopoly in Western capitals have been shaken. This diplomatic rupture opens a powerful maneuvering space for Ankara’s international containment strategy. The critical position developed by European actors like Spain against Israel on the Palestinian axis demonstrates that the diplomatic containment doctrine Ankara is trying to build can find solid ground from within Europe as well.If the principal actors of the international system fail to pull Israel into a deconfliction and containment posture aligned with the realities on the ground, a hot conflict between the Turkish and Israeli armies in the shrinking buffer zones will cease to be a low-probability scenario and turn into an unavoidable geopolitical reality.To bring this inevitable confrontation under control within a rational framework, Western policymakers should urgently take the following two geopolitical steps.First, Washington should transition from enabling Israel’s military adventurism — a strategic drift that recently dragged the United States into a direct confrontation with Iran — to actively brokering a new deconfliction framework in the Levant. This requires policymakers to recognize Turkey’s capacity-building in Syria not as a threat, but as a viable pillar for regional stabilization.If Washington actively restrains Israel’s preemptive strikes against Turkish spheres of influence, Ankara can finalize its ongoing efforts to institutionalize a new security architecture. The strategic offer Turkey brings to the table is the assumption of full regional responsibility: by actively working to establish a strict monopoly on violence in post-Assad Syria, Turkey aims to permanently eliminate the non-state asymmetric threats, terror hubs, and militia networks that inherently destabilize the entire region. A mutual recognition of red lines, where Israel halts its armed violations and Turkey is allowed to solidify a conventional, rational state order on Israel’s borders, is the only pragmatic way to prevent a conventional escalation.Second, Western capitals should abandon the zero-sum military alignments in the Eastern Mediterranean designed to contain Ankara. Rather than turning a blind eye to exclusionary defense pacts and joint naval exercises that embolden Greece, the Greek Cypriot Administration, and Israel at Turkey’s expense, the United States and NATO should broker an inclusive maritime security framework. If Western actors recognize Turkey’s legitimate maritime boundaries and dismantle these anti-Turkey military architectures, Ankara offers a formidable strategic dividend in return.Turkey will integrate its unparalleled maritime power into a collaborative security apparatus, serving as the ultimate guarantor of NATO’s southeastern flank and regional stability, while moving away from using its robust naval capacity to disrupt exclusionary blocs. The West can secure these bufferless waters through balanced, negotiated engagement by recognizing the Turkish navy as a stabilizing anchor instead of trying to isolate it, avoiding an unwinnable regional arms race.In conclusion, the buffer zones have melted away, and two massive military powers have come face-to-face. Turkey’s deterrence strategy has long surpassed the limits of diplomatic rhetoric, transforming into a combat-ready mechanism actively operating on the ground, at sea, and in the intelligence sphere. If global actors fail to anchor the boundaries of the new regional order on a negotiable, rational foundation, the smoke rising from Abu al-Duhur will be merely the first spark of a much larger regional storm.Ali Murat Kursun is an assistant professor of international relations at Marmara University in Turkey. He received his Ph.D. from Aberystwyth University, where he focused on the regional order of the Middle East. He has published on Middle Eastern borders, Turkish foreign policy, and the Middle East order. His academic work has appeared in journals such as International Politics, Third World Quarterly, and All Azimuth. He also writes op-eds for various media outlets. Kursun is a member of the Istanbul-based Association of Researchers on the Middle East and Africa. Image: Emiroğlu52 via Wikimedia Commons