Israel awoke to a fundamentally changed Middle Eastern reality on September 30, 2015: Russian fighter planes streaked through the skies over Homs, carrying out Moscow’s first combat sorties in the Middle East since the end of the Cold War.
President Vladimir Putin had arrived to save Russia’s key Middle Eastern ally, Syria’s then-president Bashar al-Assad.
Nine days earlier, on September 21, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – who had good intelligence about Russia’s plans – flew to Moscow on a lightning visit. He was accompanied not by the press but by then-IDF chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot and then-head of the Military Intelligence Directorate Herzi Halevi – unusual for a foreign trip.
There, Netanyahu and Putin discussed establishing a deconfliction mechanism to prevent Israeli and Russian pilots accidentally confronting each other over Syrian skies. By 2015, Jerusalem had already approved scores of attacks against Hezbollah and Iran’s efforts to build a launchpad against Israel.
The mechanism worked for nearly a decade, until Assad was overthrown in December 2024 by the forces led by the current president, Ahmed al-Sharaa.
How Israel and Russia avoided a Syria confrontation for years
It worked largely because Israel and Russia reached an informal understanding: Each had interests in Syria. Israel would not interfere with Russia’s, and Russia would allow Israel to protect its own.
Those interests were clear. Russia wanted to preserve its regional foothold by keeping Assad in power; Israel wanted to prevent Iran and Hezbollah from entrenching themselves in Syria. Moscow would not interfere with Israel’s actions as long as they did not threaten Assad’s rule, and Israel would not target his regime as long as Jerusalem retained freedom of action against Iran and Hezbollah.
Put another way, the understanding was: “You take care of your business, I’ll take care of mine, and we need not clash as long as we remain within our respective spheres.”
And it worked. Israel carried out hundreds of attacks in Syria as part of its Campaign Between the Wars without directly confronting or seriously harming Russia’s extensive military presence there.
Why does this history matter today, in August 2026?
Because on Tuesday, Israel attacked the runway and storage facilities at the Abu al-Duhur air base in the Idlib province, some 60 kilometers from the Turkish border. Israel believed the base was being prepared for Turkish forces, according to foreign media reports, and a military delegation from Turkey had visited the site just hours before the attack.
Why Israel targeted a Syrian air base linked to Turkey
Netanyahu discussed the reason for the strike in a clip released on Wednesday. “We will not tolerate a Turkish military buildup extending southward. We conveyed that in every possible way.”
“Now we saw that Turkey intended to establish itself at an air base farther south, close to Aleppo, and we sent a message,” he continued. “How shall I put that message? ‘Don’t.’”
The prime minister said that although the original message had been received, “apparently it wasn’t heard,” so Israel acted to ensure that the Turks “understood it better.”
“We will not tolerate a Turkish military buildup extending southward,” he reiterated.
Considering Turkey’s implacable hostility toward Israel in both words and deeds, Netanyahu’s position is understandable. Turkey hosts Hamas and spearheads diplomatic moves against Israel, while President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has spent years spewing virulently anti-Israel rhetoric.
In June, Turkish Interior Minister Mustafa Ciftci said that just as Damascus, Aleppo, and Nagorno-Karabakh had been “liberated,” Jerusalem would also be liberated one day. Ciftci added that he had prayed to become Jerusalem’s governor and predicted that lands once ruled by the Ottoman Empire would return to Turkish rule.
Turkey also recently signed a mutual-defense pact with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan – two major Sunni powers, one of them nuclear-armed. A country whose leaders speak that way and whose regional ambitions are expanding is not one Israel wants building up militarily anywhere near its borders.
But there is more to it than that, because the air base attacked on Tuesday is not near Israel’s border. It is, however, reportedly near a route Israeli aircraft could use to fly to Iran. Israel does not want hostile radar and air defense systems compromising its air superiority and freedom of action.
On Tuesday, the Prime Minister’s Office posted on X/Twitter that Israel and Syria had agreed to a security status quo that Damascus was on the verge of breaching by permitting Turkish troops to deploy at Abu al-Duhur. Israel warned Syria that such a deployment would pose a threat, the post said, but Syria ignored those warnings.
Israel, it continued, “will not tolerate threats to its security and would welcome a return to the status quo.”
Syria and Turkey dispute Israel’s account. Syrian Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shaibani said there were no plans for a Turkish base or permanent Turkish troop presence at Abu al-Duhur, and that Turkish officers had visited the site only as part of military training and cooperation.
But the Israeli statement nevertheless revealed that some kind of modus vivendi had been established between Jerusalem and Damascus regarding what would and would not be tolerated. In Israel’s view, moving Turkish troops – and possibly sophisticated radar and air defense systems – into the Abu al-Duhur air base violated those understandings.
The attack, therefore, carried two messages: one to Syria, warning it to respect the previous understandings; and one to Turkey, making clear that Israel has redlines.
It also triggered a response from US Ambassador to Turkey Tom Barrack, who is also Washington’s special envoy for Syria and Iraq. Barrack initially called the strike “an unnecessary escalation that does not advance regional stability.”
The next day, in an interview with The Jerusalem Post, he stressed the need to establish a deconfliction mechanism – and quickly.“Turkish forces were not aware that the Israeli aircraft were en route to that specific Syrian base, nor of their intended purpose, and therefore could potentially have been inclined to scramble their own jets in the belief that they themselves were under attack,” he said.
Barrack said there was no “inherent obstacle” preventing Syria, Israel, and Turkey from maintaining open lines of communication. “Diplomatic discourse is the best prevention to kinetic interactions,” he said in diplomatese.
In plain English: Talk to one another through a hotline, not through fighter jets, whereby messages can be misunderstood, leading to potentially tragic consequences.
Can the deconfliction model with Russia work with Turkey?
But can the kind of deconfliction mechanism Netanyahu established with Putin be replicated with Erdogan’s Turkey?
On paper, the logic holds. Both sides have a compelling interest in avoiding an accidental war. But there are enormous differences between Putin’s Russia in 2015 and Erdogan’s Turkey in 2026.
Putin did not enter Syria to harm Israel. He came to preserve Russian interests: Saving Assad, maintaining Moscow’s Mediterranean foothold, demonstrating Russia’s global standing, and preventing Islamist forces from taking control of Syria and potentially feeding jihadist threats in Russia’s own North Caucasus region.
Erdogan’s immediate interest in entrenching Turkey in Syria may likewise not be to attack Israel. He wants to secure Turkey’s southern border, curb Kurdish power, shape the new Syrian state, expand Ankara’s regional influence, and make billions rebuilding the country’s infrastructure.
But unlike Putin, Erdogan has ideological and historical ambitions that place Turkey on a collision course with Israel.
When a senior minister speaks of “liberating” Jerusalem and becoming its governor – after nearly two decades of Erdogan’s poisonous rhetoric against Israel – the difference between Russia’s attitude toward Israel and Turkey’s becomes clear.
Putin operated in Syria with the cold calculation of a global strategist. He had no big ideological stake in the Arab-Israeli conflict — his Russia was not the Soviet Union under Leonid Brezhnev.
Moscow viewed the Levant as a chessboard on which pieces could be moved to secure Mediterranean ports, preserve an allied regime, and poke a finger in Washington’s eye.
When Israeli jets entered Syrian airspace, Putin viewed it pragmatically: As long as Russian assets were not hit and Assad was not endangered, Israel’s war against Iranian proxies was none of his business.
Erdogan’s Turkey poses a different challenge than Putin’s Russia
Erdogan’s Turkey is different. Ankara views Syria as its immediate backyard, and Erdogan’s worldview is shaped by Muslim Brotherhood sympathies and Neo-Ottoman ambitions inherently hostile to Israel.
While Putin was content to preserve Russia’s coastal enclave around Tartus and Latakia and keep Assad in power, Erdogan views himself as the principal patron and protector of al-Sharaa’s new Syrian state.
He has also made no secret of his desire to project Turkish and Sunni power across the region, with the new defense pact with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan the latest expression of Ankara’s growing strategic reach.
For Erdogan, quietly signing a live-and-let-live airspace agreement with Jerusalem cuts against his ideology and the image he has cultivated as Israel’s strident and uncompromising opponent.
Yet despite the toxic rhetoric, the danger of an accidental war means that both sides may have little choice but to establish a deconfliction mechanism.
And this time there is another actor involved that was less central when Israel and Russia made their arrangement work in 2015: Washington.
Washington steps in to prevent an Israel-Turkey Syria escalation
Israel and Turkey, a NATO member, are both close US allies, and Washington is already working to prevent a catastrophic miscalculation between two major military powers.
Israeli and Turkish defense officials began technical talks in Azerbaijan in April 2025 aimed at preventing clashes in Syria. Following the Abu al-Duhur strike, Barrack said the US was working to create a broader mechanism involving Israel, Turkey, and Syria.
Any arrangement that will emerge will undoubtedly look less like the quiet, permissive green light Israel enjoyed with Russia and more like a tense, highly conditional division of the Syrian arena, brokered and monitored by Washington.
Israel’s core demand is clear: Turkey may help rebuild Syria, but advanced Turkish radar and air defense systems cannot be allowed to creep southward and threaten the Israel Air Force’s freedom of action or strategic routes toward Iran.
Turkey and Syria, for their part, will demand that Israel respect Syrian sovereignty, reduce its attacks, and give the new government room to stabilize the country.
That is a much more difficult bargain than the one Netanyahu struck with Putin.
In September 2015, Israel demonstrated the diplomatic agility needed to share Syrian skies with Russia. But sharing airspace with a distant global power pursuing cold strategic interests is vastly different from sharing it with a hostile, ideologically driven regional power with far-reaching ambitions.
Left to their own devices, and considering the bad blood between Ankara and Jerusalem, it is doubtful that Israel and Turkey could reproduce the Israeli-Russian model.
But they will not be left to their own devices. Washington has every reason to step in aggressively to ensure that this increasingly tense rivalry does not spiral out of control.