Last week Mosaic convened an important discussion about Turkey, Israel, and the Middle East, framed by the Turkish-Israeli analyst Hay Eytan Cohen Yanarocak’s September essay, “How Turkey Is Forging a New Ring of Fire around Israel.” Joining Yanarocak and Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver were the Israeli strategist Dan Schueftan, and the American Hudson Institute scholar Michael Doran.
The day before that conversation took place, video footage emerged out of Saudi Arabia showing an intercepted drone that was aimed at Mecca. The Saudis claim that the drone was fired by the Houthis, the Iranian proxy in Yemen. And now, aside from being the holiest city in Islam, Mecca is also the name of a new defense pact that Saudi Arabia signed just over a month ago with Turkey and Pakistan.
The Mecca Joint Defense Agreement is modeled after NATO’s Article 5, which treats an attack on one as an attack on all. The first test has arrived, and its partners offered statements of condemnation, but not much more. Turkish and Pakistani officials have told reporters that they haven’t been asked for help, and that the alliance still needs to be institutionalized. Yet, as Yanarocak points out, the Mecca pact is one of several frameworks Ankara has created that by design exclude Israel. In his view, that fact, combined with the Turkish military presence in Syria, is far more disquieting than any of the inflamed rhetoric coming from Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Yanarocak thus asks us to take seriously a scenario that Bernard Lewis put to him personally, more than a decade ago: Turkey and Iran might one day exchange roles as the primary strategic threat to Israel.
This week, we bring you the full proceedings of his discussion about that question with Michael Doran and Dan Schueftan. You can also read the transcript, or watch the video, on the Mosaic website.
This episode of The Tikvah Podcast is generously sponsored by Marina Solovey and Leo Goldstein in honor of the yahrzeit of Isidoro Solovey (alav ha-shalom). If you are interested in sponsoring an episode of The Tikvah Podcast, we invite you to join the Tikvah Ideas Circle. Visit tikvah.org/circle to learn more and join.