On Aug. 7, in Islam's holiest city, Saudi Arabia, Türkiye and Pakistan signed the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement, declaring that an armed attack on one is an attack on all. Within 72 hours, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, urging deeper alignment with Greece, the Greek Cypriot administration, India and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). India's former foreign secretary called the pact a "very negative development for Indian interests.” The speed of that reaction is more revealing than the document itself.

Consider the shape of the objection. The agreement has one operative trigger: an armed attack on a member. It cannot activate against a state that has not first used force against Saudi Arabia, Türkiye or Pakistan. It carries no obligation to intervene elsewhere, asserts no territorial claim, and establishes no forward deployment. To feel menaced by such an instrument, a state must be reserving the option of striking one of the three.

Israel's response makes the point. An official quoted by the Ynet news website dismissed the so-called Iran rationale, insisted the alliance is aimed at Israel, and urged a massive force-building program in reply. Yet nothing changed on Aug. 7 for Israeli territorial security. No signatory has threatened Israel or can strike it relying on the agreement.

What changed is the cost of operating freely in other people's airspace. After the strike on Doha, Gulf capitals concluded that sovereignty alone was no longer a shield. An arrangement that raises the price of the next such strike constrains only the party that intended to strike.

Moreover, Türkiye's calculation is pragmatic: Israel has spent the past year telling Ankara what is coming. In February, Israel's former prime minister, Naftali Bennett, told an American audience that Türkiye is the new Iran and that Erdoğan seeks "to encircle Israel." Israel's former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, urged Western governments to reconsider arms sales to NATO's second-largest army.

Nor is this fringe talk. Israel's Nagel Committee, a government-commissioned defense panel, concluded in January 2025 that a Turkish-aligned Syria could become more dangerous than the Iranian threat itself. But isn't it Israel that has occupied Syrian territories since 1967?

Netanyahu himself had announced a new architecture of alliances against what he called an emerging "radical Sunni axis," built around Greece and Greek Cypriot administration, well before the Mecca agreement was signed. A state publicly nominated as the "next Iran" does not need an expansionist motive to seek reliable partners. It needs insurance to protect itself from attacks similar to those Iran has suffered.

India's alarm follows the same line, and it has a recent history. In May 2025, after 26 tourists were killed in Indian occupied Kashmir, India struck targets inside Pakistan without publicly presenting evidence tying the attack to the Pakistani state. This was cross-border punishment on self-declared justification, the doctrine Israel has applied from Doha to Damascus. What followed was not the demonstration New Delhi intended. Four days of fighting produced Pakistani claims of multiple Indian aircraft downed – never squarely denied, and since partially conceded by India's own officers – and left Islamabad's military and diplomatic standing higher than before. Indian analysts now urge New Delhi to expand its options with Israel, Greece, the Greek Cypriot administration and the UAE, calling the pact "damaging to Indian interests," not to "Indian security." The distinction does enormous work.

Indeed, Greece and the Greek Cypriot administration have grievances with Ankara over maritime boundaries and Cyprus. Still, those disputes are negotiable and untouched by a clause that fires only on armed attack. Yet the reflex has been counter-bloc architecture rather than the negotiating table.

Yet, it is noteworthy that the loudest objections come from the two states whose governing movements openly maintain maps larger than their borders.

Asked in August 2025 whether he felt connected to the vision of a "Greater Israel,” Netanyahu answered, "very much," days after his finance minister advanced settlement expansion meant to foreclose Palestinian statehood. Thirty-one Arab and Muslim governments, with the Arab League, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), condemned it as a threat to state sovereignty.

In India, when the new parliament building was inaugurated in 2023 with a mural of the subcontinent, a union minister posted it, captioned "The resolve is clear: Akhand Bharat,” meaning "Undivided India," prompting Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh to seek explanations. Delhi called the map cultural rather than political. Is it though?

Hindutva and Zionism are mirror projects: revisionist, territorially maximalist, and reliant on neighbors who cannot organize a collective answer. Read it that way and the alarm becomes rational. A defensive pact obstructs only those who intended to keep moving.

Furthermore, the charge of a sudden new bloc is overstated. Pakistan has trained Saudi forces for decades and treats the kingdom's security as inseparable from its own. Ankara stood with Islamabad through May 2025, and the two capitals have long spoken of themselves as a single strategic space. The relationships were already load-bearing. What was signed in Mecca is not a new alignment but the written form of an old one, and written commitments deter in a way that sentiment does not.

Finally, Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan has said the grouping should not remain limited to three and named Egypt a natural partner. All three governments stress that it targets no country and is open to accession. In Tehran, a former reformist spokesperson has argued Iran should consider joining, while officials read the pact as evidence that American security hegemony is ending, not as encirclement. Whatever counter-alignment, if formed, around Israel, India, Greece and Greek Cypriot administration will extend no such invitation to Ankara or Islamabad.

So, a question is owed to the critics. If the Mecca Agreement is aggressive, name the aggression it enables, the border it redraws, the doctrine it announces, the operation it makes possible. Absent an answer, the alarm is not about the threat of attack. It is about the loss of impunity. And for those genuinely worried, the signatories have already offered the simplest remedy: the door is open. Walk through it.