“We are not like Israel. They met with the Greek Cypriot administration and formed an alliance against the Muslim countries of the region.” — Hakan Fidan, Turkish Foreign Minister, Antalya Forum, April 19, 2026
“After Iran, Israel may turn its attention to Turkey.” — Hakan Fidan, April 12, 2026
“This could be the Golden Age of the Middle East!” — Donald Trump, Truth Social, April 9, 2026.
In March 2026, the Dor Moriah Center surveyed 1,010 Israelis about the “Hexagonal Alliance,” a regional bloc the prime minister has envisioned with India, Greece, Cyprus, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and several African states.
The first question was simple: Had they heard of it? A majority—56%—said no.
Respondents were then given a brief explanation of the initiative and asked a second question: Would it strengthen Israel’s security or not? This time, 61% said yes.
In other words, people who had learned of the initiative barely a minute earlier were already prepared to judge its prospects with confidence.
That was not a quirk of polling. It captured something real about how Israelis think about foreign policy.
Before examining the nature of that support, it’s worth clarifying what the initiative actually is.
The idea has a long lineage. In the 1950s, David Ben-Gurion formulated what later became known as the Periphery Doctrine: If Israel was surrounded by hostile Arab states, it should look to non-Arab powers on the region’s outer rim. The three main pillars were Turkey, Iran and Ethiopia. To that were added the Kurds, Lebanese Christians, and, where possible, African states beyond Suez.
The logic was simple: The Arab belt was hostile, but beyond it stood another belt—a non-Arab one—and that was where Israel should anchor its regional security.
That framework held for decades. Strategic ties with Turkey lasted into the 2000s. Under the shah, Iran cooperated with Israel militarily and in intelligence until 1979. Ethiopia remained a steady partner against the Arab states of the Red Sea.
Today, none of it remains. After the 1979 revolution, Iran went from ally to principal adversary—and for the past year and a half, Israel has effectively been at war with it.
Under Erdoğan, Türkiye has moved from strategic partner to open antagonist. Its leaders have spent months speaking of Israel as a target, hinting at a military scenario “as in Libya and Karabakh,” and publicly describing Israel’s regional partnerships as an “alliance against the Muslim countries” of the region.
Ethiopia, the quietest of the three pillars, has also become unreliable. Addis Ababa is being pulled deeper into Turkey’s orbit through Somalia and the Red Sea, while Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has been balancing between Turkey and Israel with a visible tilt toward the former.
Meanwhile, Kurdish autonomy in Syria was dismantled with U.S. acquiescence.
All three pillars of the old periphery are now either adversaries, liabilities or fading partners. As a practical strategy, Ben-Gurion’s doctrine is over.
Reconstruct a strategic architecture
The Hexagonal Alliance is an attempt to rebuild that outer ring with different pieces. India replaces Iran in the east, serving as a counterweight to Pakistan, Turkey’s ally. Greece and Cyprus replace Turkey in the Mediterranean as Ankara’s direct rivals. The Gulf monarchies—the UAE, Bahrain, and possibly, Saudi Arabia—stand in for Ethiopia as a new southern axis.
And then there is the African flank, where Israel is trying to establish itself in spaces where Turkey has already built influence through Somalia and Qatar.
This is not an improvisation. It is a sustained effort to reconstruct a strategic architecture analogous to the one that existed under Ben-Gurion.
There is also a second purpose, and in some ways it is the more painful one. Washington is not merely stepping back from the region. It is beginning to build a new regional order around precisely those actors against whom Israel increasingly feels it must defend itself. Turkey and Qatar became guarantors of Trump’s Gaza plan.
On Jan. 22 in Davos, Trump announced the creation of a “Board of Peace” a supranational body meant to govern postwar Gaza and, in his words, “possibly replace the U.N.”
Its members, and those of its Gaza executive committee, included adviser Jared Kushner, U.S. special envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio—alongside Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan and Qatari diplomat Ali al-Tawadi. Two states with which Israel is in strategic conflict became guarantors of a U.S.-backed peace plan and were granted a role in overseeing territory over which Israel had been fighting for two years.
On Jan. 17, Netanyahu’s office officially stated that the makeup of the body “had not been agreed with Israel and contradicts Israeli policy.”
It changed nothing. In the end, Netanyahu had little choice but to accept the invitation to join, because refusing would have meant a direct clash with Trump.
Opposition leader Yair Lapid called it “a diplomatic failure”: “Turkey is in. Qatar is in. And according to the IDF, Hamas still has 30,000 armed militants in Gaza.”
At the same time, Trump has been building ties with Syria’s new leadership—the regime of Ahmad al-Sharaa, the former head of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, which until recently was still designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the United States.
In May 2025, Trump personally met al-Sharaa in Riyadh and announced that sanctions on Syria would be lifted, explicitly saying he had done so at the request of Erdoğan and the Saudi crown prince. In November 2025, al-Sharaa was welcomed to the White House as a fully legitimate head of state. The United States suspended enforcement of the Caesar Act, effectively opening Syria to Turkish and Arab investment. The new Syria is a Turkish project. And the United States is backing it.
Then came the U.S.-Iran ceasefire. On April 8, Trump announced a two-week pause in hostilities and added that “Israel had agreed to the contours of the deal.” Netanyahu’s office was left to confirm that publicly while also clarifying that Lebanon was not part of the arrangement. On April 16 came a 10-day Israel-Lebanon ceasefire, following Trump’s “excellent conversations” with Aoun and Netanyahu. Each time, Israel seemed to learn of its own consent from Truth Social.
The Hexagonal Alliance is, in effect, a response to both crises at once: the collapse of Ben-Gurion’s non-Arab periphery and an American policy that has shifted from shielding Israel to pressuring it. One strategic design is meant to answer both problems. If the old pillars have fallen away, and your principal ally is building a regional order in which you are expected to comply rather than shape outcomes, then you need a system of your own—with different partners, in a different configuration, and less dependent on whatever Washington decides next Thursday.
But that is only part of the story. There is another problem as well.
Over the past several weeks, Turkish leaders have made a series of statements that, in any normal country, would have dominated the news cycle for a month.
In that same March survey, we asked Israelis about what they considered the main threat to Israel’s security in 2026. Only 3.7% named Turkey, almost within the margin of error. That was after Erdoğan had already twice invoked the formula “as we entered Libya and Karabakh.”
The experts our center surveyed in February 2026—all 14 of them, from across the political spectrum—regarded Turkish nuclear ambitions as a serious warning sign. Most believe that after Tehran, Ankara is Israel’s next structural adversary.
When Turkey makes its next move—acquiring centrifuges, building out nuclear infrastructure or staging a demonstrative military operation—Israeli society is likely to go straight to panic, without any intervening phase of understanding.
The Hexagonal Alliance is therefore a response to three developments at once: the collapse of Ben-Gurion’s old periphery; the retreat—or at least the unpredictability—of the United States; and the rise of Turkey as Israel’s principal regional adversary.
That is why the project’s architecture is not a random collection of partners but a deliberate anti-Turkish and post-American design. India serves as a counterweight to Pakistan, Türkiye’s ally. Greece and Cyprus are Ankara’s direct competitors in the Mediterranean. The African flank matters because that is where Türkiye has already built its own network through Somalia and Qatar. And the Arab monarchies offer an alternative to a Turkish-Iranian regional order—Sunni and Shi’ite alike—in which Israel has no meaningful place.
It is a strategically coherent idea. It responds to the actual balance of power—the very one Fidan himself describes, without hesitation, as “an alliance against the Muslim countries of the region.” Turkey understands what the Hexagonal Alliance is for. The Israeli government understands it. Israeli society does not.
The fact that 61% of Israelis support the idea does not mean they understand that America is receding, or that Turkey is advancing. What it means is that for the first time in many years, the government is trying to get ahead of the crisis—not merely react once it has fully arrived, but build insurance before the shock hits.
And that is precisely why this is hardest to explain: When the crisis is not yet fully visible, society does not feel why the insurance is needed.
