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........

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