Turkey doesn't need F-35s to threaten Israel. It's already testing its arsenal in Libya - opinion

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu went on Fox News this week to make an urgent argument, just before US President Donald Trump sat down with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan at the NATO summit in Ankara. Asked about Turkey's push to rejoin the F-35 program, the Israeli prime minister didn't hedge. Turkey, he said, is "a regime influenced by the Muslim Brotherhood," and arming it with F-35s or F110 engines would tip a balance of power that he says rests on Israeli air superiority and the American military presence in the region.

Trump, sitting beside Erdogan on Tuesday, signaled he was already leaning the other way. He told reporters his administration would lift the CAATSA sanctions imposed after Turkey bought the Russian S-400 missile system in 2019, and that restoring Ankara's access to the F-35 was "certainly something we will consider." For a Turkish leader who has chased both outcomes since his air force was expelled from the program seven years ago, it was the closest thing to a green light he has received from Washington.

The F-35 story will dominate coverage out of Ankara this week. But for Israeli security planners trying to gauge what Turkey would actually do with expanded access to advanced Western technology, the more useful case study isn't playing out at the summit. It's in Libya, where Turkey has spent seven years turning a civil war into a live demonstration of exactly the kind of regional power projection Netanyahu was warning about.

Turkey's Bayraktar TB2 drones entered the Libyan war in 2019, and within months they broke the momentum of Khalifa Haftar's assault on Tripoli. Precision strikes on Haftar's armored columns, combined with Turkish electronic warfare systems that jammed his Russian-supplied air defenses, turned a collapsing position for the UN-recognized government into a stalemate that has held, in various forms, ever since.

The drones were followed by troops, trainers, and a permanent footprint: a naval presence at Misrata and an airbase at Al-Watiya that still serve as maintenance depots and command nodes for Turkish-supplied platforms. In December, Turkey's parliament voted to extend that deployment for another two years. Few Turkish military commitments outside its own borders have lasted this long.

What separates Libya from an ordinary arms relationship is what it reveals about Turkey's underlying strategy. Ankara has spent the past decade building an indigenous defense base: Baykar's drone families, Aselsan's Koral electronic warfare suite, the TAI KAAN fighter program, the MILGEM corvette line. The point has always been to escape the political conditions that come attached to Western exports.

In Libya, that independence converts directly into influence. Units trained on Turkish equipment inherit Turkish maintenance contracts and Turkish doctrine, a dependency that outlasts any single arms shipment and that rival powers have struggled to dislodge.

That is what makes this week's F-35 discussion different from earlier rounds of the same fight. Turkey is no longer negotiating from a position of pure dependency on American hardware. An F-35 sale would not hand Ankara a new capability so much as validate and extend one it has already built, tested, and exported on someone else's battlefield.

Turkey's position has also grown more opportunistic. For most of the past six years, Ankara backed only the Tripoli government against Haftar's forces in the east. That began to shift in 2025. Ibrahim Kalin, head of Turkey's intelligence service, met Haftar and his son Saddam in Benghazi last August. By the following summer, satellite imagery reviewed by Reuters suggested Turkish TB2s had reached an airbase controlled by Haftar's forces for the first time, a reversal that would have been unthinkable during the 2020 siege of Tripoli.

The apparent price of admission is ratification, by the eastern-based House of Representatives, of the 2019 maritime boundary memorandum Ankara signed with Tripoli, an agreement that cuts across Greek and Cypriot claims in the Eastern Mediterranean and that Israeli officials have watched warily given their own offshore gas fields, chiefly the Leviathan and Tamar reservoirs that anchor Israel's energy exports to Europe.

As of this spring, ratification still hadn't happened. But the direction of travel is clear: Turkey is now willing to arm both sides of a Libyan civil war if doing so protects its maritime and energy claims.

It is a familiar playbook. Turkey has hedged this way before, selling TB2s to Morocco and then armed Anka-S drones to Algeria to manage the fallout, treating rival buyers as parallel revenue streams rather than a strategic contradiction.

For Israel, the concern was never really the hardware itself. It's who ends up holding it. Turkey's record in Libya shows a consistent pattern: favoring factions and personalities aligned with Erdogan's own political networks, some with documented Muslim Brotherhood sympathies, over the development of a unified, professional Libyan military.

Advanced drones and electronic warfare systems sitting with ideologically aligned militias, rather than an accountable state, is precisely the proliferation risk Israeli officials have raised about Turkish exports elsewhere in the region.

It sits uneasily next to the wider regional picture Israel has spent the past five years building. The Abraham Accords rest on a bet that Gulf states, Sunni governments wary of political Islam among them, will keep aligning with Israel against Iran and its proxies. A Turkey that arms Muslim Brotherhood-linked networks while also sitting inside NATO complicates that bet without ever declaring itself Israel's enemy outright.

It's also why Netanyahu's F-35 intervention this week wasn't really about a single aircraft. Turkey's Libya record suggests that once Ankara gains a technological edge, it uses that edge to advance a political and ideological project, not just a national defense one.

Congress isn't united behind Trump's decision either. Republican Senator John Cornyn said on Tuesday that he hoped the move would prove to be a mistake, even as other members of the bipartisan delegation in Ankara called lifting the sanctions good news for NATO cohesion. That split tracks a question Israeli officials have pressed for years: whether Turkey's value as a NATO ally outweighs what Ankara has already done with the arsenal it built outside NATO's framework, in places like Libya.

Erdogan has had seven years and two Libyan factions to demonstrate what he does with sophisticated technology once he has it. Jerusalem's task now is convincing Washington that the F-35 question and the Libya question are, in substance, the same question, asked in two different theaters. Ankara has already given its answer. Washington is still deciding whether it was listening.