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\u2019s most capable conventional militaries.<\/p>\n
The shift in language was deliberate, and it came from the top. <\/p>\n
On 17 February, Naftali Bennett, the former prime minister who is widely expected to challenge Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel\u2019s next election, told the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations that \u201cTurkey is the new Iran.\u201d <\/p>\n
He went further, accusing Ankara of working to \u201cflip Saudi Arabia against us and establish a hostile Sunni axis with nuclear Pakistan.\u201d Five days later, Netanyahu offered his own version of the same idea, announcing what he called a \u201chexagon of alliances,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
Two Israeli leaders, in other words, converged within days of each other on the same conclusion: that the country\u2019s 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 \u2014 and, by most measures of hard power, considerably better armed.<\/p>\n
READ:\u00a0\u2018Israel will have a war with Egypt in 15 years\u2019: Zionist activist warns of future conflict after \u2018weakening the Shia\u2019<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cTurkey is the new Iran.\u201d \u2014 Naftali Bennett, 17 February 2026<\/p>\n Start with Turkey, the axis\u2019s presumptive anchor and, on paper, its most formidable member. It fields NATO\u2019s second-largest standing military, some 355,000 active personnel, backed by an annual defense budget above $27 billion. Its domestic arms industry \u2014 Aselsan, Roketsan, TUSA\u015e, and the drone manufacturer Baykar \u2014 has made the country the world\u2019s leading exporter of unmanned aircraft, accounting for an estimated 65 percent of the global UAV market. Its newest system, the jet-powered K\u0131z\u0131lelma combat drone, has already destroyed an aerial target with a radar-guided missile in testing and is now moving into mass production for delivery to the Turkish military this year. Its navy, organized around what Ankara calls its \u201cBlue Homeland\u201d doctrine, already operates through large stretches of the eastern Mediterranean, not far from Israel\u2019s offshore gas fields.<\/p>\n Then there is Egypt, where the comparison Israeli officials still sometimes reach for \u2014 to 1967, when Israeli jets destroyed the Egyptian air force on the ground in a matter of hours \u2014 no longer holds up against current numbers. <\/p>\n Egypt in 2026 fields roughly 450,000 regular troops and 800,000 reservists, spends close to $12 billion a year on defense, and has built a mixed arsenal of American Abrams tanks, French Rafale jets, Russian Su-35s, and German-built submarines. <\/p>\n In late April, the Egyptian military staged a large live-fire exercise in Sinai, called Badr 2026, that state commentators openly described as a message of deterrence aimed at Israel. Netanyahu himself has taken note of the shift: in February, he told a closed session of the Knesset\u2019s foreign affairs and defense committee that \u201cthe Egyptian army is getting stronger and we need to monitor it.\u201d<\/p>\n