Israeli Press
Former envoy Shoval warns the Mecca pact pushes Israel out regionally
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
The Newsdesk gathers reporting from wire services and primary sources and rewrites every story in-house before publication. How our journalism is made →
Zalman Shoval, twice Israel's ambassador to Washington, called the Saudi-Turkish-Pakistani defence pact no good news for Israel in an opinion piece in the Israeli daily Maariv on Tuesday, writing that it builds a regional order that pushes Israel's integration further and further away.
The pact was signed last week in Mecca — and the choice of Islam's holiest city over Riyadh, in his reading, marks it as a Sunni bloc raised against Shia Iran, but from Ankara's side also a counterweight to Israel's power.
Turkey is his biggest political winner: a leadership claim in the Sunni world, the Gaza role President Trump's Board of Peace handed Ankara, and arms-industry deals with Riyadh on the way.
He rates the "Middle East NATO" label an exaggeration. There is no joint command, and no shared enemy — Pakistan watches India, Turkey watches Greece, Saudi Arabia watches the Houthis.
The critical question, Shoval writes, is Washington: did it bless the pact, or did Riyadh stop trusting American protection? He sees Mohammed bin Salman hesitating between the American nuclear agreement — conditioned retroactively on normalisation with Israel — and his nuclear-armed ally Pakistan.
The Emirates, Egypt and Bahrain stayed out; Abu Dhabi, he notes, is building a defence axis with Israel and India instead. And plans are accumulating, he closes, for transport corridors that bypass Israel in favour of Turkey, Iraq and Syria — one of Israeli diplomacy's biggest tasks in the period ahead.
