As President George W. Bush famously said more than two decades ago, “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” Over the weekend, President Erdogan was not only with the terrorists, he gave one one of them a big bear hug.

The picture of the Turkish leader embracing a Hamas thug, Khaled Mashal, as the terrorist group’s political bureau chief, Ismail Haniyeh, looked on approvingly made a splash across the Turkish press. It speaks volumes to Turkey’s tangled role in the events now reshaping the Middle East. 

It is a role now bordering on toxic. Where will the Hamas henchmen, accustomed to living in the lap of luxury in glittering Doha, turn up next? In an advertisement for Turkish Airlines, perhaps? The weekend’s photo opportunity at Istanbul comes amid reports that the terrorist group’s “political” wing could soon ditch Qatar for another country that should also know better by now.

There is so far no indication that that country will be Turkey, but Mr. Erdogan has welcomed members of Hamas before. The aging and, according to some reports, ailing Turkish president has not been shown much love by his own country’s voters of late.

In courting known Hamas terrorists on Turkish soil, he risks legitimizing them on the international stage at the same time that Israel seeks to stamp out Hamas following the terrorist group’s attack on Israel on October 7.

As part of a highly choreographed visit, Mr. Haniyeh flew to Turkey on Friday evening ahead of his meeting with Mr. Erdogan the following day. This was the first face-to-face meeting between Mr. Erdogan and a Hamas delegation headed by Mr. Haniyeh since the start of Israel’s campaign against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

The parley took place just  three days after Mr. Haniyeh met with the Turkish foreign minister, Hakan Fidan, at Doha. In a statement, Mr. Erdogan’s office said that “issues related to Israel’s attacks on lands of Palestine, particularly Gaza, efforts for adequate and uninterrupted delivery of humanitarian aid to Gaza, and a fair and lasting peace process in the region were discussed.”

Mr. Erdogan has risibly called Hamas a “liberation movement” and criticized the West for its support of Israel. Ankara has also imposed trade restrictions on Israel. Relations between Turkey and Israel are deteriorating — a situation exacerbated by the weekend visit.

The Israeli foreign minister, Israel Katz, stated on social media that Mr. Erdogan should be ashamed of meeting with Mr. Haniyeh. A Turkish foreign ministry representative, Öncü Keçeli, shot back, “It is the Israeli authorities who should be ashamed … the efforts of the members of the Israeli Government to change the agenda will not yield results.”

The last part of that statement is curious, because Turkey is, in effect, trying to push an agenda, and not in Israel’s favor. As the Jerusalem Post observed, the Turkish meeting and others like it at Moscow, Tehran, and Doha have shown that, apart from Hamas, “no other group in history has massacred a thousand people, many of them civilians, taken 250 hostages, and then received so many high-level meetings in such a short period of time, including by two U.S. allies in the region,” Turkey and Qatar.

That report speculated that the Hamas delegation visited Turkey with the coordination of Tehran and that the warming commercial ties between Turkey and Israel in recent years were in reality just a ruse to give Ankara more leverage over Jerusalem once Hamas launched an attack. 

Not for the first time, Mr. Erdogan takes a long and somewhat delusional view of history, seeing himself as something of a latter day sultan — Turkey may straddle two continents, but for him it is still at the center of the world. Little wonder then that as the pro-government Daily Sabah reported, he compared Hamas’s “struggle” with Turkey’s war of independence a century ago. 

So it appears that Ankara is trying to quietly rewrite the rules of what goes in a part of the world where it once held much firmer sway. That mostly under-the-radar effort is creating headaches for Israel now, and also threatens amicable relations with a fellow NATO member, Greece.