Figure 1 measures bilateral trade using a trade intensity index, which compares each country’s share of its partner’s imports with its share of world exports. Grounded in the same basic logic as gravity models used by trade economists, this normalization accounts for countries’ differing weight in global trade when evaluating the intensity of trade between them. This normalization captures the intensity of the bilateral relationship relative to each country’s broader importance in global trade (an intensity of 1, for instance, means that Turkey supplies the same share of Israeli imports as it does of world exports). After remaining marginal through the 1980s, the two countries expanded bilateral trade rapidly during the 1990s, as the end of the Cold War and a broader expansion of global trade created new opportunities for economic and strategic cooperation (note that some Turkish data is missing from 1990-1993, as well as for 2025-26).
The trade intensity index immediately reveals a key asymmetry in the Israel-Turkey trade relationship over the course of the pre-rupture period: trade intensity from Turkey to Israel was, on average, nearly twice that in the opposite direction. But what was the prevailing trend in this relationship, and was it continuing to intensify in both directions? Headline numbers taken out of context might lead us to believe that the trade relationship had been deepening since the 1990s, before suddenly collapsing in 2024. Indeed, by 2022, Turkey had become one of Israel’s five largest sources of merchandise imports, behind only the United States, China, and Germany, and Switzerland. Turkish-origin goods accounted for 6.3% of Israeli merchandise imports.[ii]
To systematically analyze the series and unearth the more complex story of the shifting trends preceding the 2024 collapse, structural-break analysis was used here. This is a statistical method for identifying points at which the trajectory of trade changed significantly. Combined with the observed trajectories, the results suggest that the pre-rupture years can plausibly be divided into three broad periods: expansion (1990–2002), stabilization and convergence (2003–2013), and divergence (2014–2023). In the final period, the asymmetry that had narrowed during the second period once again became more pronounced, foreshadowing the eventual rupture.[iii]