Energy News Beat
As Erdogan champions the Palestinian cause, evidence suggests that his regime is facilitating support for Israel.
At the end of November, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan delivered the keynote address at a forum for the country’s national public broadcaster and reaffirmed his support for Gaza. Seyma Yildirim, a Turkish pro-Palestinian activist in the audience, knew that the moment to speak up had come. “I felt compelled to highlight the inconsistency between the stated support for Palestine and the actions on the ground,” she said.
Yildirim and eight others from the Turkish activist group A Thousand Youths for Palestine shouted, “Stop fueling genocide!” in front of live television cameras, calling attention to under-the-radar Turkish oil exports to Israel. Though less visible than arms sales, oil exports are a vital component of Israel’s war machine. As the protesters were escorted from the room, Erdogan’s response was vehement: “Do not be the mouthpiece of Zionists here.”
Erdogan has long made support for Palestinians central to his image as a champion of Sunni Muslims around the world, especially after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack and the Israeli military assault on Gaza that followed. After initially offering himself as a mediator in the conflict, Erdogan expressed outright support for Hamas and denounced Israel as a “terrorist state [that] is implementing a policy of total genocide against our Palestinian brothers.”
Relations between Turkey and Israel, restored in 2022 after a four-year freeze over the killing of 60 Palestinians by Israeli security forces at the Gaza border, were severed anew last year. On April 9, 2024, Turkey halted exports of products from 54 categories, including construction materials, to Israel. A few weeks later, Turkey halted all bilateral trade. This trade was worth $6.8 billion in 2023, 76 percent of it comprising Turkish exports—primarily steel, construction materials, and mechanical devices.
Erdogan has since said Turkey has “severed all ties” with Israel. The embargo continues amid the cease-fire between Israel and Hamas that came into effect on Jan. 19, and the Turkish leader has pledged to “intensify” efforts to hold Israeli leaders accountable for war crimes.
But researchers with Stop Fuelling Genocide, a campaign to pressure governments to halt energy sales to Israel that is backed by the lobbying organization Progressive International, have produced evidence, shared with the media, showing that cargo ships carrying oil are still traveling from Turkey to Israel despite the embargo and trying to cover their tracks.
Using marine tracking data, port logs, satellite images, and eyewitness testimony, the researchers followed the Seavigour, a crude oil tanker that departed Turkey’s Ceyhan port on Oct. 28, 2024, heading in the direction of Israel. Two days later, it turned off its tracking device. When it came back online after seven days, the Seavigour was heading directly away from the Israeli coast and toward Sicily. Upon docking in Riposto, Italy, it was significantly lighter than when it left Turkey. Between those dates, satellite images showed a tanker visually matching the Seavigour docking at Israel’s Ashkelon port on Nov. 5, according to research notes seen by Foreign Policy. Additional research released to the media in December suggests that other tankers are using the same tactics.
Turkey denies that any shipments are leaving its ports for Israel. On Nov. 10, 2024, the Turkish energy ministry issued a notice insisting that claims of continuing oil exports were “baseless” and that all companies and parties operating from Ceyhan port, from where shipments to Israel would usually depart, are compliant with Turkey’s public embargo.
Yet the issue is more complex than such denials suggest. Oil exports are not simple transactions between two countries but complex diplomatic and legal agreements between multiple state and corporate entities. In this case, oil exports to Israel also implicate one of Turkey’s strongest allies: Azerbaijan. While fully halting oil exports would pose few political costs for Erdogan with regard to Israel, it would be a blow to Turkey’s finances and potentially one of its most important regional relationships—a price it appears that Erdogan is not willing to pay.
Turkey has few energy resources of its own, but it is a major energy transit country, which both brings money into the state coffers and confers diplomatic power. It is crisscrossed by pipelines that bring gas and oil from Azerbaijan, Iraq’s Kurdistan region, and Russia to Turkey and onward to Europe. One of the two oil pipelines transiting through Turkey, which runs from Iraq to Ceyhan, was shut down in 2023 due to a dispute between Ankara and Baghdad. The other, the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline, has been active since 2006, bringing Azerbaijani crude oil from under the Caspian Sea through Georgia and on to Turkey’s Mediterranean coast, where shipments to Israel depart.
In Ceyhan, where the pipeline terminates and the crude is loaded onto cargo ships, signs of the connection with Azerbaijan are everywhere. There is a Turkey-Azerbaijan Brotherhood Park, boasting a monument inscribed with a map of the pipeline’s route and fronted by statues of modern Turkey’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, and former Azerbaijani President Heydar Aliyev. (The terminal itself is named after Aliyev.) Relations between the two countries have been fraternal since the collapse of the Soviet Union, but more recently Turkey gained favor by providing significant support to Azerbaijan’s recapture of the Nagorno-Karabakh region from Armenia.
However, the two countries diverge on Israel. Though Erdogan is a vocal supporter of the Palestinian cause, Azerbaijan is a close albeit unusual ally of Israel. Since 2011, the Azerbaijan-Israel relationship has been galvanized by Israeli arms sales to Azerbaijan and Azerbaijani oil sales to Israel. Last January, prior to Turkey’s embargo, Israel was the biggest importer of Azerbaijani oil, purchasing $297 million of crude that month alone, all exported through Ceyhan. (Foreign Policy asked Azerbaijan’s energy ministry and SOCAR, the state oil company, whether exports to Israel through the BTC pipeline are continuing but did not receive a response.)
The corporate interests involved add another layer of complexity. Though Azerbaijan, Turkey, and Georgia signed the deal to build the pipeline, it is operated by BTC Co. Of the company’s 11 shareholders, the biggest is BP. The others are energy companies based in Azerbaijan, France, Hungary, India, Japan, Norway, Turkey, and the United States. Each company has the right to independently sell its share of the produced oil.
Under the Host Government Agreement that Turkey signed with this consortium in 1999, it can only halt the passage of oil through the pipeline in the case of natural disasters, a war on Turkish soil that Turkey has not initiated, or international embargoes. It cannot unilaterally impose a ban on oil from the BTC going to Israel; if it were to do so, it would be liable for compensating stakeholders.
All of this means that, according to the BTC contracts, Turkey cannot block oil shipments to Israel without first securing consensus from the other stakeholders or incurring large penalties. This could give Erdogan an easy scapegoat for the embargo issue; legally, Turkey’s hands are tied. (Turkey’s energy ministry and communications directorate did not respond to requests for comment on whether it was able to impose a unilateral embargo.)
Rather than explaining this, however, Erdogan has doubled down on his pro-Palestinian credentials while Turkey reaps the financial benefits of the oil shipments. Last November, Ozlem Zengin, a deputy with Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP), revealed to parliament that Turkey earns $1.27 per barrel of oil through the BTC pipeline. With 700,000 barrels flowing through the pipeline daily, that amounts to almost $325 million per year in revenue—a vital source of foreign currency as Turkey tries to reduce its account deficit.
Activists argue that despite the terms of the BTC agreements, Turkey has the power under international law to block oil exports to Israel. Turkey is a signatory to the U.N. Genocide Convention, which obligates it to prevent and punish acts of genocide. As a party to the International Court of Justice’s genocide case against Israel, Turkey also has legal grounds to use its position at the terminal of the BTC pipeline to block exports to Israel, said Naji Muhammed, a campaigner with Global Energy Embargo for Palestine, a U.K.-based lobbying group. “This legal obligation to prevent genocide supersedes any contractual issues,” he said.
For Erdogan, this headache is not going away anytime soon. “People are beginning to understand how the transfer of energy and the genocide are connected,” Muhammed said. Domestically, the allegations are riling much of Erdogan’s religious and pro-Palestinian voter base, particularly young conservatives. Already, the Stop Fuelling Genocide reports detailing the continuing oil exports have triggered protests and brought together political foes—leftists and conservative Muslims—to speak out against the double standards.
The revelations could also create problems for Erdogan internationally, subjecting him to the same accusations of hypocrisy toward Israel that he often levels against Western countries. This could tarnish his reputation in the Muslim world and his attempts to gain leverage over the West in a rapidly shifting Middle East.
With the fall of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Erdogan is positioning himself to wield political influence over the new government in Damascus. Ibrahim Kalin, Turkey’s spy chief, traveled to Damascus just four days after Assad fled, and several of Syria’s new ministers have direct ties to Turkey. The United States is already using Turkey as its back channel to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the militant group that ousted Assad, sidelining other regional powers.
But if anger among Muslims across the region over Turkey’s continued dealings with Israel were to grow, it might stymie Erdogan’s influence in Damascus, given Israel’s ongoing occupation of Syrian territory.
As for Yildirim, who faces a maximum sentence of four years and eight months in prison for her protest, she sees little hope for a change in Turkish policy. In her eyes, Erdogan is trying to silence those who highlight the gulf between his rhetoric and reality. “Erdogan consistently avoids addressing, or outright denies, the significant trade and business dealings with Israel, particularly those involving large corporations and substantial financial interests,” Yildirim said. “That is a stark reality we cannot ignore.”
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