Last Thursday, in what at the time seemed out of the blue, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi posted on X/Twitter that he had received a phone call from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and that they “exchanged views on the current situation in West Asia.”
He also wrote, “We reviewed progress on various aspects of the India-Israel Special Strategic Partnership which continues to grow from strength to strength.”
Modi posted the message in English and Hebrew, and Netanyahu reposted it.
Only the next day would the full context become clear. On Friday, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Turkey signed a sweeping mutual defense treaty, dubbed the Mecca Pact because of the city where it was finalized.
It is difficult to imagine that the looming pact was not a major focus of the Netanyahu-Modi conversation. While the public only saw the treaty signed on Friday, Jerusalem and New Delhi would almost certainly have been aware that a significant regional realignment was in the works.
When the leaders exchanged views “on recent developments in West Asia,” they were addressing one of the largest structural shifts in the region’s security architecture in years.
For years, Washington pushed a vision of a US-led regional security architecture integrating Israel with Saudi Arabia and other pragmatic Arab states. But that’s not what transpired in Mecca, and Modi and Netanyahu were surely discussing the ramifications of a very different tripartite alignment.
One major ramification Modi alluded to was the “progress on various aspects of the India-Israel Special Strategic Partnership.”
The announcement in Mecca will certainly add fuel to moving that partnership forward at full speed. That’s the way the world works: actions cause reactions, which in turn spark new arrangements.
Pakistan: Mecca Pact contains NATO-style Article 5 clause
On Friday, after the signing of this accord – which the Pakistani Foreign Ministry confirmed contains a NATO-style Article 5 clause meaning an attack on one is an attack on all – The Wall Street Journal summarized the moment perfectly: “When a superpower flails about, regional powers begin to make arrangements for themselves.”
The superpower here is the US, and the flailing is its execution of the war in Iran. Saudi Arabia, having lost confidence in the American security umbrella alone to provide the protection it feels it needs, is looking elsewhere.
That’s a rational calculation, considering the pounding the Gulf states have taken from Iran and its proxies despite – and perhaps, at times, because of – the presence of US bases on their soil, paired with Washington’s waffling over how to respond.
What is deeply disappointing from Israel’s perspective is where Riyadh looked for its new partners. By joining up with Turkey and Pakistan, Saudi Arabia chose an architecture that fundamentally complicates Jerusalem’s long-term regional strategy.
Saudi-Pakistani defense ties predate new defense pact
Pakistan is not a new security partner for the Saudis. The two countries have had close defense ties for decades, and signed another security pact last year. But those arrangements did little to shield Riyadh when it came under attack from either Iran or the Houthis.
There is also an internal logic to the Saudis seeking out fellow Sunni states to build a new security architecture. But it nevertheless shatters Jerusalem’s hope that the recent upheaval in the Mideast would shuffle the deck in the region and lead to a clear-cut alliance between Israel and the pragmatic Sunni states.
The Saudis had different ideas. They wanted an alliance, but not with Israel. Hence the disappointment. But disappointment is not policy, and that explains the Netanyahu-Modi call.
This new trilateral alliance, though ostensibly a bulwark against Iran, is as much a concern for India – Pakistan’s bitter enemy – as it is for Israel. The combination of Saudi money, Turkish defense manufacturing capabilities, and a nuclear-armed Pakistan is causing just as much alarm in New Delhi as it is in Jerusalem.
The strongest evidence that this deal dominated the Modi-Netanyahu phone call is what happened immediately afterward.
On August 7, Turkish and Pakistani media outlets published reports claiming that India had urgently approached Israel to sign a reciprocal bilateral defense pact to counter the new Saudi-Pakistan-Turkey axis. The rumors grew so intense that India’s Ministry of External Affairs Fact Check unit issued an immediate statement dismissing reports of a new formal pact as “fake news.”
Crucially, however, MEA Spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal explicitly confirmed that New Delhi is “closely following the development” of the Turkey-Pakistan-Saudi deal.
That is an understatement. India has ample reason to be alarmed by any framework that enhances Pakistan’s military position, especially given Turkey’s history of supplying advanced drones and other military hardware to Islamabad.
For Israel and India, moreover, the concerns are not only military; they are economic as well.
Saudi Arabia sits at the geographic center of the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) – the grand, multi-billion-dollar transit network intended to bind India, the Gulf, and Haifa’s port to Europe. Turkey was explicitly excluded from the original IMEC route and has actively promoted a rival transit project.
By drawing Saudi Arabia into a much closer strategic relationship, Ankara potentially gains a new avenue of influence over a country central to the very economic corridor India and Israel have spent years trying to promote.
The Mecca Pact also complicates the already difficult path toward Saudi-Israel normalization.
By binding itself more closely to Ankara and Islamabad – two capitals fiercely hostile to Jerusalem – Riyadh is entering a strategic framework whose other members would strongly oppose any Saudi move toward the Abraham Accords.
That does not give Turkey or Pakistan a formal veto over Saudi policy, but it raises the political and strategic price Riyadh would have to pay for normalization with Israel.
And it makes it even less likely that the Saudis will soften their insistence on movement toward Palestinian statehood as a prerequisite for normalization.
There is an irony here.
Some analysts thought the weakening of Iran would naturally lead to a strengthening of Israel’s ties with the pragmatic Arab states. Instead, Iran’s weakening – and Israel’s demonstration of its own military reach – has apparently led some of those states to now fear Israeli dominance, and this alliance is one way to counter it.
But as The Wall Street Journal noted, when superpowers flail, regional powers make other arrangements. The Turks, Pakistanis, and Saudis are not the only wise men in town. Israel, too, will make other arrangements.
We have seen this script play out before.
When Israel’s once-strategic relationship with Ankara collapsed following the 2003 rise to power of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Jerusalem was forced to readjust. And readjust it did, forging close security and energy ties with Turkey’s historic rivals, Greece and Cyprus, and, to a lesser extent, Bulgaria and Romania.
Those ties with Greece and Cyprus are also likely to get a boost from the Mecca Agreement. Athens and Nicosia are as concerned about an expanded Turkish footprint in the eastern Mediterranean as Jerusalem is.
And India, faced with a new framework that strengthens its archrival Pakistan and gives Turkey – already a close Pakistani ally – a larger regional role, has its own reasons to draw still closer to Israel.
That brings the story back to the seemingly out-of-the-blue Netanyahu-Modi phone call on Thursday.
It may have looked at the time like just another diplomatic conversation between two friendly leaders. In retrospect, it looks more like an early glimpse of the counter-alignments that the Mecca Pact may produce.