US President Trump has dismissed Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s concerns about a potential sale of American F-35 fighter jets to Turkey, saying: “Nobody tells me what we should be selling.”
Speaking to reporters ahead of a meeting with Netanyahu in Washington, Trump added: “Turkey has been a great ally for me. I think [Turkish President Erdoğan] has done a very good job.”
He also called Turkey, “a tremendous ally”, noting that he considers Erdoğan a “friend”, and praised the Turkish state under Erdoğan, calling it a “very powerful country”, with a “very powerful military”.
However, he did acknowledge that “Turkey is not a big fan of Israel”.
Relations between Israel and Turkey have deteriorated significantly since the rise of Erdoğan’s AK Party in the early 2000s.
Speaking at the International Asia-Political Parties Conference in Istanbul in April, Erdoġan declared: “The blood-stained genocide network (Israel) continues to kill innocent children, women, and civilians without any rule or principle, ignoring all kinds of human values.”
He has also previously called for the Jewish state’s destruction, praying during an Eid ceremony: “May Allah destroy Zionist Israel in His holy name.”
In May 2024, Turkey imposed a trade embargo on Israel and, in August 2025, it announced a further series of sanctions, which included cutting off all economic and trade ties with Israel, closing Turkish airspace to Israeli aircraft, and prohibiting Israeli ships from using Turkish ports to dock.
Israel, meanwhile, has recently changed its foreign policy to officially recognise the Armenian Genocide and publicly reaffirmed its opposition to the Turkish occupation of northern Cyprus, prompting outrage from Ankara.
Turkey currently has the second-largest standing army in Nato, with over 480,000 active military personnel, 380,000 reserve personnel, and a paramilitary force totalling 150,000 personnel.
But, amid the tensions, Israel has raised objections to the prospect of the US selling F-35s to the country given its hostility towards Jerusalem.
The F-35 programme pools manufacturing capability between multiple nations, notably the UK, Italy, Canada and Australia, but is centrally administered by the US Defence Department, which strictly controls which nations the jets are sold to by their ultimate manufacturer, Lockheed Martin.
Israel does not contribute to the programme but is among the nations allowed to purchase the finished products.
Turkey was removed from the programme in 2019 after it purchased air defence systems from Russia, which the US and Nato were concerned could compromise the jets’ technical security and stealth functions.
However, Trump announced during the latest Nato summit earlier this month that he was lifting those sanctions, paving the way for Turkey to buy the aircraft or even rejoin the programme.
It comes after the president confirmed in November that Washington had struck a deal to sell F-35s to Saudi Arabia, again prompting consternation from Jerusalem.
This unease was only exacerbated when Trump announced a new partnership with the Kingdom to assist it in developing a civilian nuclear programme, with some Israeli politicians claiming it could open the door to Riyadh acquiring nuclear weapons.
But Trump insisted that the Gulf nation would not be allowed to enrich uranium domestically and that any nuclear advancement would be conditional upon it signing the Abraham Accords and normalising its relations with Israel.
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