In a rather surprising development, Israel’s Foreign Minister Israel Katz is demanding that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) expel Turkey over President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s recent remarks about intervening in the Jewish State over the latter’s widely condemned military campaign in Palestine.

The Israel’s Foreign Ministry has stated, according to The Times of Israel, that “in light of Turkish President Erdogan’s threats to invade Israel and his dangerous rhetoric, Foreign Minister Israel Katz instructed diplomats… to urgently engage with all NATO members, calling for the condemnation of Turkey and demanding its expulsion from the regional alliance.” Kat is also accusing the Turkish authorities in Ankara of joining the “Iranian axis of evil”, as he calls it, “alongside Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis in Yemen.” The Atlantic Alliance in any case does not even have, as of now, a mechanism to expel a member, and back in 2021 NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said that creating such a system “would never happen”.

The Israeli move is arguably quite arrogant, given the fact that the country is not even a NATO member itself – although it is, as the US government calls it, a “major non-NATO ally” (MNNA), in the spirit of the so-called Mediterranean Dialogue (MD) since 1994. Israeli leaders however have traditionally viewed their country as a “natural partner” to the political West. Back in 2007, then Leader of the Opposition (and today’s Prime Minister) Benjamin Netanyahu said, at the Second Annual NATO-Israel Symposium, that “Israel is NATO – we are the West. We are the same.” Although a rhetorical statement, 17 years on, his thinking remains quite the same on that issue.

During a speech to his Justice and Development (AK) Party on........

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