There is a version of this story where everything is fine.
In that version, Trump is playing four-dimensional chess. The F-35 signals to Erdogan are a pressure tactic, a carrot dangled to keep Turkey inside the NATO tent and out of Iran's orbit. It's a psyop. It's leverage. It's Trump being Trump, transactional and loud, and none of it means anything until the ink is dry. Netanyahu knows this. The relationship is complicated but intact. Stop panicking.
I want to believe that version. I can't.
Because at some point, the list of things we're being asked to explain away gets too long. Trump called Erdogan "a great leader" and "a friend," warmly, repeatedly, unprompted. He credited him with staying out of the Iran war, a war in which Turkey's interior minister was openly calling for action against the Jewish state. He announced he's flying to Ankara, largely, by his own admission, as a gesture of personal respect to a man who has made hostility toward Israel a cornerstone of his domestic politics. And now he's signaling that he intends to deliver the most advanced stealth fighter in the world to the air force of a country that funds Hamas, shelters Muslim Brotherhood leadership, and has been Israel's most aggressive regional antagonist outside the Iranian axis.
That's not a psyop. That's a policy.
The F-35 is not a symbolic gift. It is not a scarf from the airport. It is a fifth-generation stealth aircraft whose entire value proposition is the ability to penetrate air defenses undetected, to gather and transmit battlefield intelligence across a network, to project power in precisely the theaters where Israel operates. Israeli pilots fly it over Syria. Israeli planners built their entire long-range strike doctrine around the assumption that adversaries don't have it. The qualitative military edge, that bedrock American commitment to ensuring Israel can defend itself against any regional coalition, exists in large part because of the F-35. Giving it to Erdogan doesn't just complicate that edge. It begins to dissolve it.
Israel's Deputy Foreign Minister Sharren Haskel has said, in plain language, that Israeli technology will not be part of any Turkish F-35 package. She is right to draw that line. But the fact that she has to draw it at all, publicly, against a sitting American president, tells you everything about where we are.
And here is the question that nobody in the Israeli government seems willing to ask out loud: Is this deliberate?
Not deliberate in a conspiratorial sense. Not some grand betrayal plotted in secret. But deliberate in the way that a man who has grown frustrated with an ally signals that frustration, by slowly, methodically rewarding that ally's enemies. Trump was reportedly furious at Netanyahu over the Gaza operation, over the timing, over the sense that Israel was making his Iran diplomacy harder. He is said to have told Netanyahu, at some point last year, words that would not be repeated in polite company. The relationship between the two men, once presented as the warmest in the history of the alliance, has curdled into something transactional and tense.
So when Trump stands in the Oval Office and tells the world that Erdogan, a man who calls Israeli operations genocide and hosts Hamas political leaders in Ankara, is his friend, is a great leader, deserves a gift bag of American fighter jets, what is the message to Jerusalem? It is not subtle. It is: you are not irreplaceable. It is: I have other friends. It is: fall in line, or watch me build new relationships in your neighborhood.
Whether that constitutes "turning on Israel" depends on your definitions. Trump has not withdrawn security guarantees. He has not recognized a Palestinian state. He has not sanctioned Israeli officials. By the standards of the Obama years, or even a normal Democratic administration, he remains closer to Israel than the alternative. The people who will tell you Trump is Israel's best friend are not entirely wrong about the comparison.
But the comparison is not the point. The point is that something has shifted, and that the shift has a direction. The trend line matters. And the trend line, from the MOU with Iran that Israeli officials called a capitulation, to the warm embrace of Erdogan, to the increasingly impatient tone from Washington whenever Jerusalem acts in its own interest, is not pointing toward deeper partnership.
Netanyahu has staked his entire strategic worldview on the premise that the American relationship is unshakeable, that whatever tactical friction exists, the alliance holds. He has governed accordingly. He has made concessions, absorbed pressure, waited out American frustration, because he believed that at the end of the day, Washington would not fundamentally reorder the Middle East against Israeli interests.
Trump selling F-35s to Erdogan is a fundamental reordering of the Middle East against Israeli interests.
You can call it leverage. You can call it chess. You can tell me it won't get through Congress, that Israel's technology veto will hold, that Vance's "we're running the traps" means the lawyers will find a reason to say no.
Maybe. I hope so.
But if Netanyahu is sitting in Jerusalem watching Trump prepare to fly to Ankara with a gift bag for the man who calls his army genocidal, and he is not asking himself very hard questions about the assumptions his entire foreign policy rests on, then he is not paying attention.
Trump may still be Israel's friend. Friendships can survive strain, even serious strain.
But you don't hand a knife to someone's enemy and then ask your friend to stop being so dramatic about it.
