My two cents comes first from my reading of David Ben Gurion’s recollections from the early 1960’s.
When Israel’s first Prime Minister and one of its key founding father’s arrived in Israel around 1900 the territory was Turkish controlled and part of the Ottoman Empire.
Ben Gurion and other Jews went to Turkey (the mother country) studied Turkish, studied Turkish law etc. etc.
There is a tradition of closeness between the Jews of Israel and Turks, but Erdogan’s Turkey gives me really bad vibes.
But still I’m not excited at all about the Israeli-Turkish friendship at all.
I think Israel’s propaganda organs have deliberately tried to downplay this.
Debka was claiming on its site in an article recently published that a Russian-Turkish-Iranian alliance was forming.
Then we see this apparent appeasement going on at the direction of the Israeli government?????
Indeed there is a far-reaching and long-standing connection between Jews/Israel and Turkey, reaching back to the Ottoman empire. Few are aware of it and many prefer to see everything as Jews+Christians versus Islam. It more often than not was Christians versus Islam+Jews (see the Crusades).
There was a huge influx of Sephardi Jews from Spain and Portugal who fled to the Ottoman Empire after the Catholic Reconquista 1492. A number of them converted (some only on surface - the so called “Dönmeh”) to Sunni Islam after the failure of the messianic movement of Sabbatai Zvi.
Jews also supported before WW1 the “Young Turk” reform movement (whose leaders were responsible for the Armenian genocide).
The pro-Ottoman policies of the German Empire before and during WW1 was in no small part the work of Jews (who were very hostile to the Russian Empire): the German “Intelligence Bureau for the East” where Mid-East policies were shaped, was led by Max von Oppenheim and Eugen Mittwoch. One of the operatives was the Zionist activist Nahum Goldmann. The “Intelligence Bureau for the East” deviced the idea that the Ottoman sultan in his function as Sunni caliph should call for “global Jihad” against the Entente powers - this was largely the branchild of Oppenheim.
Also one the great armament and financial suppliers of the Ottoman Empire under the “Young Turk” regime was the Russian-born Jew Israil Helphand (aka Alexander Parvus)... who also played a key role in getting the German Empire’s secret service to smuggle Lenin with a load of Gold to the Russia and kick off the Bolshevist take-over.
To this day Ottoman historigraphy in the West is strongly shaped by Jewish authors, who mostly take a pro-Ottoman, pro-Turkish stance.
This won’t go down well with many here: the most prominent deniers of the Genocide of Armenians (Bernard Lewis, Stanford Shaw, Guenter Lewy, Norman Itzkovitz etc.) or apologists of other Ottoman-Turkish atrocities (Mark Mazower) are indeed Jewish authors/historians.
It was also for decades the pro-Israel forces in the US (i.e. Tom Lantos, Joe Lieberman, the ADL etc.) which supported the denial of the Genocide of Armenians.
The reason was mostly political - Turkey was deemed an important ally of Israel (since the Cold War, Kemalist Turkey was Israel’s chief regional ally).
However I don’t suggest that there is an uniform Jewish bias towards the Turkish side. I’d like to point out that also among the critics of the Turkish denialists were prominent Jewish/Israeli historians and scientists, such as Elie Wiesel and Irving Horowitz.
But yes... there is a Jewish-Turkish connection that can’t be ignored.
If to some this all is “surprising”... please go ahead and read up. The names mentioned above are a good starting point. History is full of surprises and sometimes doesn’t fit neat ideological shibboleths.