For most of the past year, Israeli officials have described the aftermath of the war with Iran in confident, almost triumphant terms: a weakened adversary, its nuclear program set back, its regional proxies dismantled one by one. But even before that campaign had fully wound down, a new threat was already being sketched out in Jerusalem, in terms once reserved almost exclusively for Tehran. This one is harder to define, has no single capital, and, unlike Iran, comprises states that field some of the world’s most capable conventional militaries.
The shift in language was deliberate, and it came from the top.
On 17 February, Naftali Bennett, the former prime minister who is widely expected to challenge Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel’s next election, told the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations that “Turkey is the new Iran.”
He went further, accusing Ankara of working to “flip Saudi Arabia against us and establish a hostile Sunni axis with nuclear Pakistan.” Five days later, Netanyahu offered his own version of the same idea, announcing what he called a “hexagon of alliances,” built around India, Greece, and Cyprus, to counter both the Shia axis Israel says it has already broken and what he described as an emerging Sunni bloc.
Two Israeli leaders, in other words, converged within days of each other on the same conclusion: that the country’s next strategic contest would not be a rerun of the Iran campaign, fought against a state Israel and the United States had already spent years preparing to isolate, but something more diffuse — and, by most measures of hard power, considerably better armed.
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“Turkey is the new Iran.” — Naftali Bennett, 17 February 2026
Start with Turkey, the axis’s presumptive anchor and, on paper, its most formidable member. It fields NATO’s second-largest standing military, some 355,000 active personnel, backed by an annual defense budget above $27 billion. Its domestic arms industry — Aselsan, Roketsan, TUSAŞ, and the drone manufacturer Baykar — has made the country the world’s leading exporter of unmanned aircraft, accounting for an estimated 65 percent of the global UAV market. Its newest system, the jet-powered Kızılelma combat drone, has already destroyed an aerial target with a radar-guided missile in testing and is now moving into mass production for delivery to the Turkish military this year. Its navy, organized around what Ankara calls its “Blue Homeland” doctrine, already operates through large stretches of the eastern Mediterranean, not far from Israel’s offshore gas fields.
Then there is Egypt, where the comparison Israeli officials still sometimes reach for — to 1967, when Israeli jets destroyed the Egyptian air force on the ground in a matter of hours — no longer holds up against current numbers.
Egypt in 2026 fields roughly 450,000 regular troops and 800,000 reservists, spends close to $12 billion a year on defense, and has built a mixed arsenal of American Abrams tanks, French Rafale jets, Russian Su-35s, and German-built submarines.
In late April, the Egyptian military staged a large live-fire exercise in Sinai, called Badr 2026, that state commentators openly described as a message of deterrence aimed at Israel. Netanyahu himself has taken note of the shift: in February, he told a closed session of the Knesset’s foreign affairs and defense committee that “the Egyptian army is getting stronger and we need to monitor it.”
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Egypt in 2026 is not Egypt in 1967 — and Israeli officials increasingly say so themselves.
Saudi Arabia adds a smaller but capable air force built around Typhoons and F-15s, along with a security establishment that has been quietly diversifying its ties between Washington and Beijing. But the component that most concerns Israeli planners, according to officials and analysts who have discussed it, is Pakistan — the only Muslim-majority state with a functioning nuclear arsenal and the missiles to deliver it, and an air force that has just been tested in actual combat. The Pentagon has confirmed that China delivered 36 J-10C fighters to the Pakistan Air Force, aircraft that Islamabad says used long-range PL-15 missiles to down several Indian jets, including at least one Rafale, during last year’s brief war with India.
In April, Pakistan reportedly moved roughly two dozen of those same aircraft to escort Iranian negotiators home from Islamabad, briefly placing its air force in the same theatre as Israeli operations.
Whether any of this adds up to a coordinated threat is, for now, an open question — and one on which even Israel’s own security establishment is divided. There is no mutual-defense treaty linking Ankara, Cairo, Riyadh, and Islamabad, and there is no evidence that the four governments are coordinating military planning. Yoav Gallant, the former defense minister and a more cautious voice than Bennett, has written only that Turkey “is no longer a partner on the periphery,” positioning itself instead as a major regional power—a description of ambition, not of imminent conflict. Andreas Krieg, a security studies scholar at King’s College London, has described Netanyahu’s hexagon as less a functioning alliance than a rebranding of preexisting relationships. Yossi Mekelberg of Chatham House and Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli ambassador to the United States, have each argued publicly that both Bennett and Netanyahu have domestic incentives — an election, a governing coalition — to keep a sense of external threat alive, and that treating Ankara as a second Tehran risks helping to create the very adversary it describes.
That is the strategic risk analysts say Israel now has to weigh. Iran’s hostility was built over four decades around an explicit ideological project. Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan share no such doctrine, no joint command, and, in Cairo’s and Riyadh’s cases, long-standing peace treaties and quiet security arrangements with Israel that neither government has signaled any intention of abandoning. What unites them, so far, is alarm at an Israel that struck six countries in the region in a single year and now speaks openly of an “emerging radical Sunni axis.” Whether that alarm hardens into something closer to the alliance Bennett has warned about may depend less on decisions made in Ankara, Cairo, Riyadh, or Islamabad than on those still being made in Jerusalem.
OPINION: The next Iran? Why Israel’s Turkey anxiety is becoming doctrine
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.
