Turkish Imports of Strategic Products from Israel: Strategic Bonds amongst Turbulent Relations

During the last two decades, Turkish-Israeli relations were downgraded from a strategic importance status to an almost hostile one. At the same time, the trade between these two countries has not been affected at all by this negative development. Even though this paradox has already been noticed in the relevant literature, scholarly works have not yet focused on the study of the strategic trade between these two countries in order to examine deeper this contradictory trade-foreign relations interaction. Taking into account that the bilateral relations reached a bottom level only after a political change in Turkey in 2002, the present paper focuses on the strategic products that Turkey imported from Israel. Therefore, the paper addresses the question whether the latter turbulent Turkish-Israeli relations have affected the Turkish imports of strategic products from Israel. To this research question, the paper hypothesizes that the unfavorable climate of the bilateral relations had a quite negative impact on the imports of such products from Israel. Thus, the aim of the paper is to study these imports of strategic products in terms of size and magnitude in order to explore their role in the overall imports of Turkey from Israel and the bilateral relations of these two countries, as well. To achieve this aim, the paper analyzes the quantitative data of Turkish imports from Israel concerning a number of strategic products, from 1995 to 2019, employing descriptive and correlation statistics. The research results reveal that strategic products constitute the main content of the imports of Turkey from Israel, while their trading took place mainly during the years when the bilateral relations had been severely deteriorated. Therefore, the role of strategic products is proved fundamental for the trade and foreign relations between Turkey and Israel.