As Washington weighs restoring Turkey’s access to the F-35 program, the debate has largely centered on legal mechanics: sanctions law, congressional notification requirements, and the S-400 dispute. But a more fundamental question deserves attention, one of consistency. The United States already arms Israel with the F-35 at no direct cost through military financing grants, while Turkey would have to purchase its jets outright. A comparison of how each country has used, or would use, that access makes the current arrangement difficult to defend.
Israel received its F-35s largely through US Foreign Military Financing, a program that has channeled billions of dollars in grants rather than loans to Israeli defense purchases. Since October 2023, Israeli F-35s and other American-supplied aircraft have carried out a campaign in Gaza that rights groups, United Nations officials and a growing number of governments have characterized as genocide, and Israel has continued military operations and settlement expansion in the West Bank alongside strikes into Lebanon and Syria. Washington has repeatedly found itself drawn into defending or supplying Israel militarily as regional tensions escalated, most visibly during the war with Iran. Critics argue this pattern amounts to the United States subsidizing, and being repeatedly entangled by, a partner whose use of American weapons has fueled instability across the region rather than contained it.
Turkey presents a different picture. Ankara would pay full price for any F-35s it receives, generating revenue rather than drawing on US assistance. Turkey has no comparable record of using American-made aircraft in campaigns that international bodies have labeled war crimes or genocide, and its military footprint has not required repeated direct US intervention in the way Israel’s conflicts have. Turkish diplomacy, meanwhile, has been credited with stabilizing outcomes in several recent crises: Ankara played a central role in the ceasefire and reconstruction discussions following the fall of the Assad government in Syria, has worked to mediate Armenia-Azerbaijan normalization talks, and maintains influence in Libya that has helped keep a fragile political settlement intact. Turkish officials have leaned into this contrast, positioning Ankara as a NATO ally that stabilizes rather than destabilizes its surrounding region.
None of this is to say Turkey’s case is without complication. Ankara’s own military interventions in Syria against Kurdish forces, its human rights record, and its historical purchase of the Russian S-400 system, the very issue that triggered its F-35 exclusion, all give critics grounds to object to renewed access. Congress remains divided on the question, and some lawmakers who back Israel’s access without reservation are the same voices most skeptical of restoring Turkey’s.
Still, the asymmetry is notable. One ally is asked to pay for jets it would use within a NATO framework and a recent record of regional mediation. The other receives them largely free of charge and has used them in a manner that has drawn international legal scrutiny and repeatedly pulled Washington deeper into a conflict not of its choosing. As the Ankara summit brings the F-35 question back to the center of US-Turkey relations, it is worth asking not just whether Turkey should be let back in, but why the terms offered to Ankara and Tel Aviv look so different in the first place.
