Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli said in an interview with Reshet Bet on Sunday that Turkey poses “the most serious danger to the State of Israel today.”

Chikli elaborated that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan “are leading a very aggressive and offensive foreign policy. They are now building bases in northern Syria.”

He added that the Turks “are arming [Syrian President] Al-Julani’s army, the jihad army. These soldiers already openly state where they are aiming their arrows—toward Jerusalem.”

“Israel has to understand that ‘trouble will come from the north’—Turkey and Al-Julani’s Syria. Turkey is building al-Julani’s Syria as a base to attack Israel. Therefore, we must do everything we can to isolate Turkey.”

As part of his call to isolate Turkey, Chikli emphasized the need to strengthen regional alliances: “We need to strengthen our ties with Cyprus and Greece; this week we even saw a joint naval exercise.” He added that economic cooperation should also be reinforced, noting that “this axis of Eastern Mediterranean countries—Greece, Cyprus, Israel, and Italy—is the kind of thing we need to work on intensively.”

He concluded that Israel must also “convince our friends in the US that a dictator, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose half of the opposition sits in prison, who promotes poisonous antisemitic propaganda, is not an ally and cannot be part of NATO.”

(YWN Israel Desk—Jerusalem)