He’s been crashing out since the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement was signed between Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkey.

Saudi Arabia and Pakistan had already made an earlier defense agreement with each other about a week after Qatar was bombed by Israel, which theoretically puts Saudi Arabia under Pakistan’s nuclear umbrella. Now with Turkey in that brings aboard a rather large military with NATO standards… and one that has mutually terrible relations with Israel.

For a while Israel has been angling to pull in Saudi Arabia on the other more Abraham Accords side of things without giving into the Saudi condition that they first start an irreversible path to establishing Palestinian statehood before normalizing relations but Saudi Arabia taking this step with Turkey shows rather publicly that those efforts have been frustrated.

Amichai also urged Israel to deepen alliances with Greece, Cyprus, the United Arab Emirates and the otherwise unrecognized government of Somaliland as a counter. Obviously Greece and Cyprus pin down Turkish forces to their west and on Cyprus to limit what Turkey could hypothetically bring to bare against Israel. To those who don’t know the UAE and “Somaliland” may seem kind of random. But the UAE has been supporting a lot of coups, civil war factions and so on whenever there’s instability in the region and doing heavy investments in Africa. So the UAE has considerable sway in Sudan via the RSF, Somalia via supporting Somaliland and Puntland, Haftar in Libya (who has allowed eastern Libya to be used as a channel to funnel weapons into Sudan even over protests from Egypt), and so on. Even paying Ethiopia to train RSF rebels and fire drone attacks into Sudan.

As Turkey and Saudi Arabia are invested into the existing recognized governments of Somalia and Sudan, this splits their focus and could force them to have to pick and choose among their various projects or still try to support them all but be less likely to succeed.

Unfortunately for Syria the proximity to Israel and being under Turkish influence also means that when Israel wants to lash out against Turkey, it is very easy to do that by harming Syria. When Syria was fresh out of the revolution Turkey tried to send personnel to evaluate existing air bases so that Turkish airforce could be stationed there and Israel reaponded by bombing those bases over the entire country and destroying the Syrian airforce. Syria invaded the UNDOF buffer zone and claimed the heights of Mount Hermon which gives it huge unblocked range for what it can see and respond to with radar. When the Suwayda clashes happened, Israeli issued demands to demilitarize southern Syria and began airstrikes to destroy the government forces sent to the area (plus an airstrike on the presidential palace in Damascus), allowing Hijri’s forces to consolidate their power in Suwayda and remove the local Bedouins. Sharaa can’t do much of anything about it by himself because his military is not even large enough to properly restore order in all of Syria with all the militia running around. Trying to concentrate enough forces to ward off Israel (a tall task indeed) means some areas will get stretched. If security is too stretched in an environment with a huge number of people out for revenge killings, a provocation that overwhelms local professional forces in an area (ex. like the ambushes at the coast) could easily spiral out into massacres again as the trigger-happy militia running around in to settle scores. And such massacres further stoke sectarian tensions to make a repeat easier and makes it harder for other governments to support Syria, so either way Israel is winning.

Anyway any guesses on this guy’s reaction if the rest of the faction can talk Egypt into signing onto the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement? Egypt is also invested in protecting Eritrea, Sudan and Somalia’s existing governments; they do not want Ethiopia growing overstrong by cheaply accessing ports out of those countries lest a powerful Ethiopia use the leverage of the Nile River to make Egypt so whatever it wants. This was important enough to flip Egypt out of alignment with the UAE which had backed the military coup against the elected government. And the worse Israel acts in Palestine, the worse the pressure of the enraged people becomes on the government of Egypt for their existing ties with Israel. So although Egypt is kind of the odd man out among Turkey, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia they have all been acting more and more closely despite their differences.