Israeli Press
INSS scholar tells Israelis the Saudi-Turkey-Pakistan pact cuts both ways
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
The defence pact between Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan presents Israel with risk and opportunity at once, the Gulf scholar Yoel Guzansky argued on Sunday in the pro-Netanyahu daily Israel Hayom. Guzansky is a senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies, the Tel Aviv establishment think tank, and his reading is notably cooler than the weekend's alarmed front pages.
On its face, he writes, a security framework binding three central Muslim states — one a NATO member, one nuclear-armed — looks like a negative development for Israel. But he doubts its teeth: would Turkey or Pakistan actually fight for Riyadh against the Houthis or Iran?
Pakistan shares a border and a layered relationship with Tehran, in his telling, and Turkey competes with Iran in some arenas while cooperating in others. Saudi-Turkish suspicion over leadership of the Sunni world has thinned but not vanished, and Pakistan's bomb lends the pact deterrent weight without amounting to a nuclear umbrella.
The fault line Guzansky watches most is the absence of the United Arab Emirates, Israel's closest Arab partner and Riyadh's growing rival. If Abu Dhabi reads the pact as Turkish-Pakistani encroachment, he argues, the region gets competing axes rather than an "Islamic NATO" — a fragmentation that leaves Israel room to manoeuvre.
His counsel: take the agreement seriously, without panic. As long as no one knows what the allies would do in a crisis, he concludes, the pact is a latent possibility rather than a finished strategic fact.
