In June 2023, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stood before cameras and declared that Israel would become a “global communications centre.” The plan was elegant in its simplicity: lay a 254-kilometre fibre-optic cable along the existing EAPC oil pipeline from Ashkelon on the Mediterranean to Eilat on the Red Sea, transforming the narrow sliver of Israeli territory between two seas into a digital land bridge connecting Asia, the Gulf, and Europe. Netanyahu invoked the ancient Spice Route. “Today, in the modern digital world,” his office proclaimed, “the products are information, knowledge and technology.” It was, by any measure, a compelling strategic vision—and it is now under existential threat from a country that, until fourteen months ago, was a failed state.

[https://thecradle.co/articles/ksa-seeks-to-replace-israel-with-syria-in-fiber-optic-cable-project-report]

On 20 February 2026, Middle East Eye reported that Saudi Arabia is actively seeking to replace Israel with Syria as the transit country for the East-to-Med data Corridor (EMC), a major fibre-optic cable project connecting the kingdom to Greece via the Mediterranean. The EMC, a joint venture between Saudi Telecom (STC) and the Greek electricity provider PPC announced in 2022, was originally conceived during the high-water mark of Abraham Accords optimism, when Saudi-Israeli normalisation appeared imminent. The route was designed to transit Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Israel before reaching the Mediterranean. That architecture now lies in ruins. Riyadh’s insistence on routing through Syria rather than Israel is not a technical preference; it is a geopolitical declaration.

To appreciate the magnitude of this shift, one must understand what Israel stood to gain—and now risks losing. In the language of finance, Israel’s geographical position between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea constitutes a natural monopoly on the shortest terrestrial corridor connecting European and Asian digital networks. This is not a marginal advantage; it is a structural one. More than 95 per cent of intercontinental data traffic flows through submarine cables. The nation that controls the junction where these cables transition from sea to land and back again commands extraordinary leverage: transit fees, data sovereignty, intelligence access, and the gravitational pull that attracts data centres, cloud computing infrastructure, and the high-value technology employment that accompanies them. Israel’s EAPC project was designed to monetise this geography. The Cinturion Trans Europe Asia System (TEAS), backed by Israeli investment firm Keystone, was to create a multi-cable network with Mediterranean and Red Sea components landing on Israeli shores. Google’s Blue-Raman cable system proposed a similar Israeli terrestrial crossing. These were not merely commercial ventures; they were instruments of “quiet normalisation”—the construction of physical infrastructure that would bind Gulf economies to Israeli territory through mutual dependence, even absent formal diplomatic recognition.

[https://www.submarinenetworks.com/en/systems/asia-europe-africa/teas]

October 7 shattered that calculus. The Hamas-led attacks and Israel’s subsequent military operations in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and Iran did not merely delay normalisation talks; they fundamentally altered the strategic environment in which connectivity decisions are made. Enter Syria. The fall of Bashar al-Assad in December 2024 created a geopolitical opening that Saudi Arabia has seized with remarkable speed. Within months, STC won an $800 million contract to build SilkLink, a 4,500-kilometre fibre-optic backbone connecting Damascus and Aleppo to submarine cable landing stations at the port of Tartous. In October 2025, Syria signed a landmark agreement with the Barcelona-based Medusa Submarine Cable System for its first international subsea cable. The Ugarit 2 project, developed with American firm UNIFI, is upgrading the thirty-year-old Syria-Cyprus cable. And now, Riyadh is demanding that the EMC corridor itself be rerouted through Syrian territory—alongside a High Voltage Direct Current electrical interconnection with Greece that would similarly bypass Israel. As a western official told Middle East Eye: “For Saudi Arabia, Damascus is at the heart of regional connectivity. The Saudis want the roads, cables and trains to go through Syria.”

From a financial perspective, what we are witnessing is the destruction of option value. In real options theory, the value of a strategic asset depends critically on the absence of substitutes. Israel’s connectivity premium—the additional strategic and economic value derived from its geographical monopoly on the Mediterranean-Red Sea land corridor—was predicated on the assumption that no viable alternative existed. Syria’s emergence as a competing corridor has introduced a substitute asset, compressing Israel’s option value. The analogy is precise: when a company holds a patent on the sole technology capable of performing a critical function, the patent commands a monopoly premium. The moment a competing technology becomes available, that premium collapses—even if the competitor is less mature or carries higher risk. Syria’s digital infrastructure is embryonic, its political stability unproven, and its reconstruction costs staggering (the World Bank estimates $216 billion). But the mere existence of a credible alternative route is sufficient to erode Israel’s strategic position.

The implications cascade outward. The India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), announced at the 2023 G20 Summit in New Delhi with strong American backing, was designed with Israel’s Haifa port—operated by India’s Adani Group—as the corridor’s central Mediterranean entry point. IMEC encompasses not merely fibre-optic cables but railways, roads, energy infrastructure, and shipping routes intended to rival China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Yet IMEC’s viability depends on Saudi participation, and Saudi participation depends on normalisation with Israel—a normalisation that Riyadh has now made conditional on meaningful progress toward Palestinian statehood that the current Israeli government categorically rejects. The German Marshall Fund notes that persistent instability and “the stonewalling attitude of Netanyahu’s governing coalition” raise “substantial doubts about the viability of this route.” Meanwhile, Turkey’s competing Iraq Development Road offers yet another alternative corridor, and the Houthi campaign in the Red Sea has underscored the vulnerability of existing chokepoints, paradoxically accelerating interest in terrestrial alternatives—alternatives that increasingly bypass Israel.

Greece finds itself at the crux of the dilemma. Athens views Israel as a security counterweight to Turkey and a mechanism for sustaining American engagement in the Eastern Mediterranean. But Greece also covets Gulf investment in artificial intelligence data centres and energy infrastructure. If Riyadh conditions cable routing on excluding Israel, Athens faces an agonising choice between its Israeli security partnership and its economic ambitions as a European digital gateway. A November 2025 PPC presentation still shows the EMC corridor transiting Israeli waters; Saudi Arabia’s demand that it be rerouted through Syria has not yet been formalised in the official project documentation. This gap between the planned and the demanded is precisely the space in which geopolitical leverage operates.

Turkey compounds the complication. Ankara contests the maritime zones claimed by Greece and Cyprus in the Eastern Mediterranean and has physically obstructed survey vessels charting cable routes between Israel and Greece. Turkish naval vessels turned back a survey ship plotting such a route, producing a four-day standoff. Turkey’s objections are rooted in its rejection of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea provisions governing island exclusive economic zones—a legal position that threatens any cable route traversing waters that Ankara claims. Syria’s emergence as an alternative landing point may, counterintuitively, reduce Turkish obstructionism by offering routes that avoid contested maritime claims entirely, with cables landing at Tartous and connecting overland.

The strategic implications for Israel are severe. The EAPC Ashkelon-Eilat fibre-optic project, Google’s Blue-Raman, and the Cinturion TEAS system all assumed a regional architecture in which Israel was indispensable—the only viable Mediterranean-Red Sea bridge. That assumption no longer holds. Syria offers a competing terrestrial corridor. Turkey offers another. Iraq’s Development Road offers a third. Each of these routes carries risks that Israel does not—political instability, underdeveloped infrastructure, security uncertainties—but collectively, they constitute a diversified portfolio of alternatives. In portfolio theory, diversification reduces dependence on any single asset. That is precisely what the region’s connectivity planners are now pursuing: reducing dependence on Israel.

The deeper lesson is one that transcends telecommunications. In the twenty-first century, physical infrastructure—cables, pipelines, railways, ports—is the material substrate of geopolitical alignment. A fibre-optic cable is not neutral; it is a commitment, a declaration of mutual dependence, a physical manifestation of political choice. Saudi Arabia’s decision to route its cables through Syria rather than Israel is a statement about the future architecture of the Middle East as eloquent as any diplomatic communiqué. It says: we are building the region’s digital future, and you are not in it. Israel’s response to this challenge will shape not merely its telecommunications infrastructure but its strategic position in the region for decades to come. The cables are being laid now. The question is whether Israel will be connected to them.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)