By Halil Karaveli
The 12-day war between Israel and Iran, and Israel’s demonstration of its crushing military superiority, has added renewed urgency to the Turkish efforts to achieve reconciliation with the Kurds. More than anything else, Turkey fears a Kurdish alliance with Israel. Co-opting the Kurds is both a national security imperative and a necessary condition for the perpetuation of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s regime. The end of the PKK and of the conflict that has plagued Turkey for four decades may well revive Erdoğan’s political fortunes. But the question remains if societal reconciliation can be achieved when reforms for the Kurds are coupled with oppressive measures against the main opposition party. And the Kurds have reason to ask how much they can trust a democratization that is granted from above by a state that could renege on it when it no longer suits its interests.
BACKGROUND: On June 17, Devlet Bahçeli, the leader of the far right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) and the key partner of Erdoğan, claimed that “Israel’s political and strategic ambition is to encircle Anatolia and to prevent, on behalf of its patron, the realization of the goal of a Turkey without terrorism.” The latter is a reference to the peace process with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) that Bahçeli initiated in 2024 while the “patron” of Israel refers, presumably, to the United States.
On October 22, 2024, Bahçeli stunned the country by suggesting that Abdullah Öcalan – the leader of the outlawed PKK which Öcalan founded in 1978 and that has waged an insurgency against the Turkish state since 1984 – should be granted parole if he renounces violence and disbands the organization. On February 27, Öcalan called on the PKK to dissolve and lay down its arms. On May 22, the PKK announced its dissolution. The organization is expected to begin handing over its weapons in early July.
The 12-day war between Israel and Iran, and Israel’s demonstration of its crushing military superiority, has added renewed urgency to the Turkish efforts to achieve reconciliation with the Kurds. Ankara has become increasingly worried that regional turmoil could stoke domestic instability. Above all, Turkey fears a Kurdish alliance with Israel. Last November Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar described the Kurdish people as victims of Turkish and Iranian oppression and Israel’s “natural ally” and said that Israel should strengthen its ties with them. Some Kurds are indeed fantasizing about Israeli-Kurdish hegemony in the Middle East.
In October 2024, the pro-PKK newspaper Yeni Özgür Politika republished a section of Öcalan’s Manifesto for Democratic Civilization, written more than a decade ago, in which he suggested that the PKK could align with the United States and Israel against Turkey. That prescription was at odds with the traditionally anti-Israel and anti-American thinking that informs the leftist tradition in Turkey from which the PKK sprang; however, U.S. military-political and Israeli political support for the PKK’s offshoots in Syria during the last decade has changed Kurdish perceptions. Today Öcalan advocates for an alliance with Turkey, but it’s by no means clear that the PKK is fully on the same page as its founding leader. On June 17, Selahattin Demirtaş, the imprisoned former co-chair of Peoples’ Democracy party (HDP) – the DEM Party’s predecessor – was compelled to warn fellow Kurds, as it would seem, against the temptation of “imperialist schemes” and said that such “moves will end with disaster.” Demirtaş pledged that “We are going to stand united as the society of Turkey and if need be sacrifice our lives in the defense of our common fatherland.”
In April, Öcalan reportedly told a visiting delegation from the pro-Kurdish, left-wing Peoples’ Equality and Democracy (DEM) Party that “Netanyahu and Trump want to make Israel the hegemonic power in the Middle East. After Gaza, Lebanon, Syria it’s going to be the turn of Iran and Turkey. The Kurds are absolutely crucial for the realization of this scheme. Whoever succeeds in attaching the strategic position of the Kurds to itself will acquire the superiority in the Middle East.”
Erdoğan and Bahçeli subscribe to the same view; they believe that Israel, as the new hegemonic power in the Middle East represents a threat to Turkish interests and that it will – as Israeli official statements indeed suggest –exploit Turkey’s ethnic divisions. Three weeks ahead of his appeal to Öcalan in October 2024, Bahçeli explained, “When we call for peace in the world, we must also secure peace in our own country.” In an address to parliament the same month, Erdoğan emphasized the need to “fortify the home front” in the face of “Israeli aggression.”
IMPLICATIONS: As Bahçeli’s statement on June 17 about Israel seeking to “encircle Anatolia” makes clear, the Turkish leadership fears an Israeli alliance with the Kurds in Syria – and with the Kurds in Iran, the only group that responded positively to the Israeli exhortation to the Iranian people during the 12-day war to rise up and overthrow the Islamic republic.
In the weeks after the fall of the Assad regime in Syria last year, senior Turkish officials repeatedly emphasized their wish to see the PKK’s offshoot, the People’s Protection Units (YPG) disbanded. In December, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan described the elimination of the group as Ankara’s “strategic objective,” calling on Syria’s new leaders to dismantle the YPG, expel its commanders and restore central control of all Syrian territory. None of this has happened. The PKK’s affiliates remain in control over northern and northeastern Syria; with an estimated 80 to 100 000 armed militants and backed by the United States, the Syrian offshoot of the PKK retains a position of unmatched military strength and has not committed to disband and disarm.
Statements last year by Fidan suggested that Turkey would undertake an invasion of Rojava, the autonomous Kurdish region of Syria, if the new regime in Damascus failed to take action on its own. Ankara’s best hope today is to be able to co-opt the Syrian Kurds, allowing it to contain Israel’s influence. That in turn requires that Turkey first reaches an accommodation with its own Kurdish citizens, releases Kurdish political prisoners like Demirtaş and commits to respecting the democratic rights of the Kurds.
Turkey has a history of turning toward democracy in the face of perceived threats to its national security. In the 1940s, the authoritarian president İsmet İnönü recognized that Turkey, threatened by the Soviet Union, needed to be fully accepted by the West for its own protection. İnönü agreed to hold a free election in 1950 and duly resigned when he lost. At the turn of this century, a push for membership in the European Union prompted successive Turkish governments to implement liberal reforms required for its entry. It’s a very different story now.
On March 19, Ekrem İmamoğlu – the mayor of Istanbul and Erdoğan’s main rival – was detained by police in a dawn raid; he was later formally charged with corruption and suspended from his post as mayor. İmamoğlu’s arrest sparked the biggest demonstrations in Turkey in more than a decade. Yet, notwithstanding the outpouring of public support, İmamoğlu has – to all intents and purposes – been removed from the presidential equation.
Özgür Özel, the leader of the main opposition, center-left Republican People’s Party (CHP) whose members have endorsed İmamoğlu as the party’s presidential candidate, quipped that “the home front isn’t fortified by treating the opposition as the enemy.” The imprisoned Kurdish politician Selahattin Demirtaş called on the government to put an end to political harassments, pointing out that such practices “don’t contribute to fortifying the home front.” Öcalan is reported to have said that the peace process won’t succeed without the CHP. The pro-Kurdish DEM Party has stood by the CHP, condemning the arrest of İmamoğlu as an assault on democracy.
However, a progressive alliance of the CHP and the DEM Party remains elusive. The DEM Party is optimistic that its aspirations – notably enshrining Kurdish cultural and language rights in the constitution – are eventually going to be accommodated, in return for which the pro-Kurdish party may decide to assist Erdoğan’s reelection. That would require amending the Turkish constitution – which does not allow for a third presidential term – or calling a snap election.
The ruling coalition of Erdoğan’s Islamic conservative Justice and Development Party (AKP) and Bahçeli’s MHP lacks the necessary parliamentary majority for both alternatives, making a grand bargain with the DEM Party its likely objective.
CONCLUSION: Co-opting the Kurds is both a national security imperative and a necessary condition for the perpetuation of the right-wing authoritarian Erdoğan-Bahçeli regime. The peace process enjoys broad popular support and the dissolution and disarmament of the PKK is likely going to boost Erdoğan’s standing. The end of the PKK and of the conflict that has plagued Turkey for four decades may well revive Erdoğan’s political fortunes.
But the question remains if societal reconciliation can be achieved when reforms for the Kurds are coupled with oppressive measures against the main opposition party. And the Kurds have reason to ask how much they can trust a democratization that is granted from above by a state that could renege on it when it no longer suits its interests.
Halil Karaveli is a Senior Fellow with the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute & Silk Road Studies Program Joint Center and the Editor of the Turkey Analyst. He is the author of Why Turkey is Authoritarian: From Atatürk to Erdoğan (Pluto Press)
