Well before the launch of Operation Roaring Lion, Naftali Bennett identified Turkey and its President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as building a network of alliances and proxies that will pose an existential danger which Israel “must not be blind to”. Bennett will likely make this a feature of his election campaign. This does not make his threat assessment correct. Treating Turkey and its regional allies as a threat comparable or equivalent to Iran is both historically inaccurate and potentially dangerous to Israel’s strategic interests.

To understand why, we need to consider that the Arab and Islamist threats Israel has faced since its founding fall into three phases, each with its own ideological character and distinct real world consequences. “Arab-Nationalism” or “Pan-Arabism” as articulated by Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser was the dominant hostile ideology between 1948 and 1979. “Pan-Islamism” or “Islamic redemptionism”, led by Iran, was a dominant regional ideological force after 1979, achieving its apocalyptic peak on October 7, 2023. We may now be witnessing its death throes. This leaves a third, structurally different, hostile ideology for Israel to contend with. We can call this “Soft Islamism” or “Islamic nationalism”. It has no single point or date of origin, but manifests itself in a range of recent regional developments: Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s first election victory in 2001, the 2011 “Arab Spring”, the 2020 Abraham Accords, and Ahmed al-Sharaa’s seizure of power in Syria in December 2024.

“Soft Islamism” is distinct from both Iranian theocratic imperialism and Pan Arabism, both in terms of its own ideological aims and the security challenges it poses. The redemption it seeks is primarily from ineffective, corrupt, and generally secular dictatorships (eg. Ben-Ali, Mubarak, Assad), regimes it holds responsible for producing weak states dependent on foreign powers for economic and military viability. This ideology principally emerged out of the 2011 “Arab Spring”. The current iterations of the governments of Turkey, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan have adopted it, in varying forms. The first three share a commitment to both conservative Sunni Islam and national regeneration or state craft. We can trace “Soft Islamist governance” operating in Mohamed Bin-Salman’s and Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s expansive programs of public spending on human and physical infrastructure, and Ahmed al-Sharaa’s campaign against domestic corruption and early promises of national redevelopment. This is a very different type of nation building than the self-aggrandizing military vanity projects of Nasser, Saddam Hussein, and the Assads.

It goes without saying that none of these countries publicly aligns with Israel in most policy matters and all are unlikely to privately either. However, a close reading of public statements by these governments both before and after October 7 reveals an emphasis on the questions of “occupation” and “human rights violations”. This is rhetorically, and ideologically, different from the denunciations of the “Zionist entity” that must be eradicated which structured the Pan-Arabism of Nasser and which is at the heart of the Iranian ayatollahs’ Islamist project.

The fact that this alliance is not an existential enemy of Israel is demonstrated by the willingness of these governments, with the exception of Pakistan, to shoot down Iranian missiles in both of Israel’s post-October 7 wars with Iran. If Iran’s Islamist regime survives this war, it will be severely weakened. In that event, the American strategic calculus may well alter, diminishing Israel’s regional military dominance. This concern becomes especially pressing if the rival powers Israel is competing with are no longer ideologically anti-Western and economically and militarily dysfunctional, but rather newly institutionalizing, more competent, and also economically integrated with the USA. This removes the American strategic need for the total containment and ultimate defeat of this new axis. The USA would thus be unlikely to support an Israeli policy of confrontation as it has Israel’s campaigns against Iran and its proxies.

How should Israel position itself within this new Middle East? Dan Schueftan, chair of Haifa University National Security Studies gave one answer. Above all else Israel must maintain deterrence, in most cases violently. Arguably, this is precisely what Israel’s post-Assad strikes in Syria sought to accomplish. President Trump’s very public displeasure has ensured that there have been no subsequent strikes. For the USA, there is more to gain from a network of regional allies who are emerging technological leaders, are not ideologically hostile to American interests, and do not initiate foreign conflicts, than from an Israeli state in frequent conflict with newly wealthy and consolidated American partner states.

Israel’s best option within this reconfigured Middle East is a mix of security and economic coordination with powers from this “Soft Islamist” or “Islamic nationalist” axis, even if its governments have past or present ideological connections to the Muslim Brotherhood. This position does not preclude preemptive strikes to maintain deterrence. It does require integration based on shared interests with publicly hostile governments, specifically Turkey and possibly Syria.

Such integration would require meaningful re-engagement with the “question of Palestine”. While Palestinian statehood is inconceivable for most Israelis post-October 7, the fact of a new regional architecture could create conditions for limited Palestinian sovereignty in Gaza, Judea, and Sumeria. In a region dominated by “Soft Islamism”, Palestinian leaders will no longer be rewarded for intransigence, funded to foment terror, or promised that if they wait long enough they will witness Israel’s ultimate destruction.

There remains one fundamental and structural impediment for an Israeli government to follow this strategic shift: religious and populist nationalism in Israel. An Israeli electorate rejecting a new Arab world whose leaders at least have abandoned complete rejection of Israeli existence, and choosing instead religious messianism led by politicians acting as shepherds of biblical narratives, instead of leaders of a democratic society in the 21st century, would be a national tragedy. The risk comes not only from openly messianist politicians pledging violent territorial expansion and offering blanket rejections of the entirety of international norms. In fact, national catastrophes, like attempting an actual annexation of Judea and Samaria with “re-migration” of the Palestinian inhabitants, or further escalations in Syria, are given cover by centrist politicians. Such politicians may reject messianic revanchism, yet they remain unwilling to challenge the superseded strategic thinking that legitimates these policies. That is why Naftali Bennett’s premise that Turkey and its axis represent a “new Iran”, and must presumably be treated as such, is both inaccurate and counterproductive to Israeli security needs. To paraphrase Abba Eban’s famous formulation, Bennett, and Israel, must not seize an opportunity to miss this opportunity.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)