Two years ago, Israeli commentators noted what they saw as an alarming development. Turkey and Syria announced that they had just held their first joint military exercise.
It seemed to presage an extraordinary strategic shift by Turkey, whose million-strong army has been part of the Nato alliance since 1951, and which bought much of its equipment from Israel.
Coming in the same year that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan launched an emotional verbal assault on Israel over its operations in Gaza, and when a scheduled joint exercise with the Israeli air force in Turkey had been abruptly cancelled, Israelis feared they were witnessing the creation of a new hostile alliance to the north.
