ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Turkish leaders’ decision to end their state’s alliance with Israel in the late 2000s despite strong power-based incentives, most notably significant increases in Iranian military capabilities and regional influence, to preserve it. This decision resulted from a large domestic threat to Turkey’s leaders that began in 2007. In this year, strict secular elites, known as Kemalists, engaged in a sustained campaign to oust from power Turkey’s Islamist leaders in the Justice and Development Party (AKP) by a combination of military and judicial pressure. These efforts resulted in a massive increase in regime vulnerability for the party that significantly increased the domestic costs of preserving the Israeli alliance. In response to the clear and present danger to their domestic interests, AKP elites beginning in 2008 engaged in an Islamic mobilization campaign against their secular rivals, and anti-Israeli statements and policies were central to this campaign. Preserving the Israeli alignment after 2007 would therefore have created major opportunity costs for AKP officials as this would have meant forgoing a key means of mobilizing supporters against a pressing domestic threat.
