“Fifteen years from now, Israel will have a war with Egypt.”
The words belong to Amiad Cohen, delivered last Sunday at the second annual International Policy Summit of the Jewish News Syndicate (JNS). Cohen is the CEO of Herut — the Center for Israeli Liberty, a nationalist-conservative think tank whose intellectual infrastructure runs through the settler movement, the religious Zionist right, and the Tikvah Fund network that has, over the past two decades, done more than any comparable institution to give Israel’s expansionist right a coherent ideological vocabulary.
His reasoning at the summit was precise and deserves to be followed in full: the Muslim Brotherhood, he argued, is steadily expanding its influence inside the United States, corroding the political foundations that sustain the American-Israeli alliance; it could eventually return to power in Egypt, at which point the 1979 Camp David peace treaty becomes a dead letter, and war follows. With the “Shia jihad” weakened by the Iran war, he warned, a rising “Sunni jihad” anchored by Turkey and future Islamist-aligned Egypt would constitute Israel’s next existential challenge. Israeli leaders must begin preparing now, he urged.
At the same event, Cohen called for Israel to “diversify our alliances if we want to act as an independent nation,” because America, in his telling, is growing weaker and cannot be assumed to remain a reliable anchor.
The traditional pillars of American regional architecture — Egypt and Turkey — are being re-conceptualized as future adversaries within an order that Israel is preparing to replace.
What his remarks represent is the explicit articulation of a logic that Israel’s political leadership has been enacting through policy over the past two years, without quite stating it so plainly. Within this logic, the traditional pillars of American regional architecture — Egypt and Turkey — are being re-conceptualized as future adversaries within an order that Israel is preparing to replace.
Former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett declared in February that Turkey as a country looks more like Iran, warning that Erdoğan is building a “new monstrous axis” with Qatar and nuclear-armed Pakistan to “flip Saudi Arabia against Israel.” Netanyahu warned in December 2025 that Turkey should “not even think about” reviving its influence over the Levant.
In August 2025, after being presented with an amulet depicting a “map of the Promised Land” that encompasses parts of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, Netanyahu said he felt “very” connected to that vision and considered himself on “a historic and spiritual mission.” Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said that Israel’s borders should eventually extend to Damascus, and stood at a Paris podium adorned with a map incorporating Jordan to declare there is “no such thing” as the Palestinian people.
These statements constitute a program, and the program has a demographic and territorial logic. Seizing Greater Israel in the same manner that Palestine was seized in 1948 — encompassing more territory with fewer Arabs on it — requires ethnic cleansing.
Mass displacement, in turn, requires neighbors who will absorb the displaced or, at a minimum, refrain from organizing resistance to it. Egypt and Turkey are precisely the states that have done most to resist this project: Egypt primarily through its refusal to accept Gaza’s population into the Sinai, and Turkey through its role as the organizational center of anti-Abraham Accords politics across the region. Their re-framing of these countries as existential threats follows, in significant part, from this resistance.
There is a psychological reading of the turn against Egypt and Turkey that captures something real: that Israel’s security establishment, having degraded the Axis of Resistance, generates new adversaries to sustain the political culture of permanent war mobilization — the need for an enemy to animate its society, economy, and politics.
The U.S. constraint on Israel
Bennett’s framing, which equates Ankara with Tehran on the basis of a shared genealogy with the Muslim Brotherhood, has the quality of a template seeking application rather than a genuine threat assessment. The psychological reading, taken alone, leaves the structural dimension — the one that actually determines the direction of Israeli policy — largely unexamined.
The American-authored regional order was built on a set of interlocking assumptions.
Egypt’s peace with Israel was foundational and sustainable, a cornerstone around which the broader architecture could be organized.
Turkey, as NATO’s second-largest military power, was a manageable, if sometimes contentious, partner within the American system.
Gulf normalization with Israel could be advanced incrementally, without requiring Arab states to formally abandon the Palestinian cause.
And undergirding all of it, Washington would remain the guarantor of last resort — the power whose presence made the whole arrangement credible to every party within it.
Each of these assumptions now constrains what Israel’s current government wants to do — expand, ethnically cleanse, and dominate the region — and Israel’s growing strategic consensus is that it must break free from them. American power is weakening, the argument goes, and American politics is simultaneously being reshaped by forces hostile to the alliance, creating a compounding vulnerability that Israel cannot afford to see unfold without acting.
The paradox in Israel’s new strategy toward the U.S.
The response is simultaneously the construction of strategic autonomy and the deepening of structural integration with American power — two imperatives that appear contradictory, pursued in practice from two directions toward the same destination. On the one hand, Israeli discourse and stated policy increasingly emphasize reducing dependence on the American industrial base and the weapons systems that make its military campaigns possible. On the other hand, it is also seeking a deeper and more integrated relationship with centers of American power.
Netanyahu has stated he wants to reduce Israel’s dependence on American military assistance within the next decade, committing roughly NIS 350 billion ($116.8 billion) to building an independent domestic arms industry capable of producing the munitions, systems, and platforms that Washington has withheld or conditioned at critical moments.
That industrial ambition is one dimension of the autonomy project. The other is diplomatic diversification: what Netanyahu has called the “hexagon alliance,” a proposed bloc anchored by Israel, India, Greece, Cyprus, and select Gulf and African partners. The purpose of this bloc is designed to build Israeli economic and strategic weight.
The legislative track runs in a different but complementary direction. Section 224 of the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act — the United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative — would permanently intertwine American and Israeli defense technology, covering artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, data fusion, and network integration in ways that no other ally has achieved. A companion provision, Section 622 of the Senate Intelligence Authorization Act, would make it legally difficult for any future president to reduce intelligence sharing with Israel.
The design is precise. A president who wishes to use military assistance or intelligence access as leverage over Israeli conduct would find that leverage progressively harder to exercise. Israel would grow more dependent on American power in material terms while growing less subject to American political authority over how that power is used. The Super Sparta conscripts its patron while stripping away the political conditions that once made the patron’s support susceptible to political leverage.
This is nothing short of the accelerated cannibalization of American power: a systematic effort to make American support structurally unconditional, regardless of what Israel does with it, and regardless of political changes in the U.S.
This is nothing short of the accelerated cannibalization of American power: a systematic effort to make American support structurally unconditional, regardless of what Israel does with it, and regardless of political changes in the U.S.
The Iran war has generated consequences that this framework has not yet honestly confronted. The war was predicated on the indefinite continuation of the Sunni-Shia divide, where the Gulf states would be broadly aligned with Washington and Jerusalem, Iran would remain isolated, and Turkey would be manageable at the margins.
Yet what is happening across the region seems to be going in a different direction.
Saudi Arabia and Qatar are now distancing themselves further from Israel; Egypt has opened a diplomatic channel with Iran, as both governments have declared that the two countries are entering into “a new phase” of their relationship; and Egypt and Turkey have held joint naval exercises for the first time in thirteen years.
One of the war’s more paradoxical outcomes seems to be the deepening economic and political integration between Iran and the Gulf, meaning that the structural Sunni-Shia cleavage that decades of American and Israeli strategy have worked to cultivate as an insurance policy against unified regional resistance is now under pressure in ways that would have seemed implausible three years ago.
Iran, far from being broken by the war, is engaged in early reconstruction and appears willing to open economically and politically to its immediate neighborhood. The shared perception that an increasingly belligerent and autonomous Israel constitutes a regional threat is accelerating this realignment, though how far it travels remains genuinely uncertain.
Israel commands remarkable influence through its networks of institutional support — in Congress, in think tanks, and in the evangelical and neoconservative coalitions that have long underwritten its strategic latitude. It leveraged that influence to draw the United States toward war with Iran, and Trump, whether from conviction or calculation, obliged. Yet the institutional support that once operated as a background condition of American foreign policy is becoming visible precisely because it is being strained.
What was once a near-total consensus is now becoming a point of contention, and what was once automatic is now becoming a political choice — one that an expanding share of Americans are declining to make.
A state cannot draw indefinitely on a patron’s power while systematically dismantling the conditions that make that patronage coherent, and the contradictions are accumulating: more territory requires more force, more force requires more American support, and more American support requires a Washington prepared to watch its own regional architecture come apart in real time.
What this looks like for the U.S. is an alienated Gulf, Jordan and Egypt being forced to accept the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, the corrosion of decades-long peace treaties, and new signs of closure in the generational U.S. insurance policy that was the Sunni-Shia divide.
The order being eroded — the petrodollar, the uninterrupted flow of Gulf oil, the signing of peace treaties with regional actors — was designed, in part, to safeguard Israel. But Israel no longer sees this architecture as serving its interests, and is in fact constraining its ability to engage in territorial expansion, and by extension, ethnic cleansing. That is why it is seeking to tear down this architecture — or at least to radically remake it. Ironically, the way for Israel to fully realize its expansionist designs is by eroding an American order that once secured its stability in the region.
Abdaljawad Omar
Abdaljawad Omar is a writer and Assistant Professor at Birzeit University, Palestine. Follow him on X @HHamayel2.
