Israeli Press
Israel reads the Saudi-Turkish-Pakistani pact as proof America is slipping
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
Israel is not alarmed by the mutual-defence pact Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan signed in Mecca this week, and reads it mainly as a verdict on the United States, Lisa Rozovsky reported Saturday in the Israeli daily Haaretz.
Sources in Jerusalem told her Israel is a secondary addressee of the agreement at most, and that its first message is aimed at Iran. The three governments announced that an attack on any one of them would be treated as an attack on all.
The same sources read the pact as an economic and political arrangement rather than a military one, with the potential to steady the region — and, alongside that, as a sign of Riyadh's diminishing confidence that Washington will defend it. The risk they name is a stronger Turkey.
That reading was echoed on Israel's most-read news site. Dr. Yoel Guzansky of the Institute for National Security Studies, a Tel Aviv University think tank close to the Israeli security establishment, told Ynet the guarantee may not hold in practice: "The Pakistanis do not want to get entangled, and it is not certain the Turks have the capacity to deliver."
Neither account discusses Palestine, and that is the part Palestinian readers should mark. A new Arab-Muslim security axis is being assessed in Jerusalem entirely by what it does to Iran, to Ankara and to American standing — with the question of what its members will ask for Gaza left out of the ledger.
