Britain has just inked a $10.7 billion deal with Turkey for 20 Eurofighter Typhoon jets. At the same moment, London continues to restrict and suspend arms exports to Israel, the Middle East’s only liberal democracy and the only nation on Earth fighting, in real time, the very jihadist regimes and movements that threaten democracies worldwide. This is not values-based foreign policy; it’s hypocrisy with afterburners.
Since late 2024, the United Kingdom has suspended or revoked dozens of export licenses for items that might be used by the Israel Defense Forces in the Gaza Strip, roughly 30 immediately, while ministers vowed to block any new licenses tied to the conflict.
Even Britain’s High Court had to intervene this year to confirm that shared F-35 parts could still legally reach Israel.
Now, contrast that hair-trigger “risk” standard for Israel with the red-carpet treatment for Turkey’s new Typhoon fleet.
The same Britain that halts exports to the Jewish state over a hypothetical “risk of misuse” has just sold advanced combat aircraft to a government with a documented record of wars, occupations and civilian killings. That isn’t moral consistency. It’s diplomatic theater.
In northern Syria, Turkey’s 2019 invasion left a trail of atrocities. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch documented executions, torture, abductions and looting by Turkish-backed militias operating under Ankara’s command. Turkey dismissed the reports as “propaganda.”
In Iraq, Turkish airstrikes and drone strikes have repeatedly hit villages far from any battlefield, killing civilians whose only crime was living near a suspected a Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) site. Reuters and HRW have chronicled entire families erased by these so-called precision raids.
In Nagorno-Karabakh, a region of Azerbaijan, U.N. experts reported “widespread evidence” that Syrian mercenaries, recruited and transported with Turkish assistance, fought for Azerbaijan during the 2020 war with Armenia.
And then there is Cyprus. Since 1974, Turkey has occupied the island’s northern third in defiance of U.N. resolutions and repeated European Court of Human Rights rulings.
The ECHR continues to find Ankara guilty of “continuing violations”: unlawful killings, disappearances, property seizures. Yet Britain now rewards that same regime with a multibillion-dollar jet contract.
Inside Turkey, the view is no less bleak. The Turkish government routinely ignores binding ECHR rulings, including those ordering the release of opposition leader Selahattin Demirtaş.
The ECHR called his imprisonment a flagrant violation of democratic rights. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the president of Turkey, responded by tightening political control over the Turkish judiciary.
Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International describe a Turkish judicial system where judges take instructions from the executive, opposition politicians are prosecuted for “insults,” and journalists are arrested by the dozen.
Elected mayors from opposition parties are removed and replaced by government trustees. Thousands of civilians remain imprisoned on vague “terror” charges.
This is the country to which Britain will now export 20 of its most sophisticated fighter jets.
Britain’s arms-export policy toward Israel operates under what it calls a “clear risk” test: If there’s a plausible chance that a weapon could be misused, then London halts the sale.
Yet when it comes to Turkey, a NATO member that invades neighbors unprovoked (unlike Israel, which acts in self-defense after being attacked by Hamas, Hezbollah and other Iranian proxies), that test somehow vanishes.
Even more perversely, Turkey is bound by the European Court of Human Rights, whose rulings it routinely ignores, while Israel, though not subject to either the International Criminal Court or the International Court of Justice, remains under constant investigation and scrutiny by the United Kingdom based on patently libelous allegations.
Israel’s tactics can be debated, but there is no moral universe in which its battlefield record approaches Turkey’s half-century of occupation and cross-border aggression. Still, Britain tightens the spigot on Jerusalem while opening the throttle for Ankara. This is moral theater masquerading as policy.
By arming Turkey, London is sending a message to every autocrat watching: Don’t worry about human-rights abuses; the West will eventually look away as long as you buy its planes.
At the same time, by punishing Israel, it is sending the opposite message to democracies under siege: Restraint and transparency don’t earn respect; they invite sanction. Israel’s military operates under judicial review, a free press and relentless external scrutiny.
Turkey’s wars, by contrast, unfold behind censorship and propaganda, general social media and public apathy. After all, no Jews equals no news.
Britain loves to champion the “rules-based international order,” but rules that bend to political winds, or to social-media outrage, are not rules at all. When London applies one moral vocabulary to Israel and another to Ankara, it exposes its arms-sales policy as a costume change between allies and scapegoats.
If Britain truly followed a consistent, evidence-based standard, the outcome would be obvious. Turkey’s record of aggression in Syria and Iraq, its use of mercenaries and its half-century occupation of Cyprus would disqualify it from receiving new warplanes.
Israel’s record, by contrast, would pass as it’s a democracy facing existential threats, operating under independent judicial oversight, and employing more safeguards to avoid civilian casualties in Gaza than either the United States or Britain did in Afghanistan, Iraq or the war against ISIS.
The bottom line is this: Britain can sell jets to whomever it wishes. But it should stop pretending that this is guided by morality or law. Selling advanced weapons to a serial human-rights abuser while lecturing the Jewish state about “proportionality” isn’t principled. It’s posturing.
If London insists on turning foreign policy into theater, then it should at least drop the mask and admit the performance: In the great moral fog of modern diplomacy, consistency has been grounded and hypocrisy flies first-class.
Micha Danzig served in the Israeli army and is a former police officer with the New York Police Department. An attorney, he is active with a number of Jewish and pro-Israel organizations, including StandWithUs, T.E.A.M. and Friends of the Israel Defense Forces.
