Israel’s relentless quest for a next enemy |
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.”
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,........