In February 2026, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu unveiled what may be his most ambitious foreign policy doctrine yet.
Standing before his cabinet ahead of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Israel, Netanyahu announced a “hexagon of alliances”, a sweeping network of nations united, in his words, against “radical axes.”
At its core sits a triangular relationship between Israel, India and Greece, three nations with deepening defense and technological ties and a shared wariness of regional instability.
The vision is striking in its scope. Israel would serve as the centerpiece of the framework, with India identified as the most important partner — a rising global power and a crucial strategic actor linking Asia with the Mediterranean region.
Alongside Israel and India, the initiative envisions participation from Mediterranean states such as Greece and Cyprus, with moderate Arab states, certain African powers, and several unspecified Asian countries also being considered.
The strategic logic
Netanyahu’s hexagon doctrine did not emerge in a vacuum. The alliance proposal cropped up amid a new strategic alignment between Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt, often labeled the “Islamic NATO”, with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia having already inked a Strategic Mutual Defense Agreement in September 2025.
Confronted with this emerging bloc, Netanyahu is attempting to construct a counter-architecture rooted in technological capability, economic interdependence, and shared democratic values.
Netanyahu framed the alliance’s purpose explicitly: to create “an axis of nations that see eye-to-eye on the reality, challenges, and goals against the radical axes, both the radical Shia axis, which we have struck very hard, and the emerging radical Sunni axis.”
This dual-front framing is unusual. It positions Israel not merely as a nation defending itself but as a would-be organising power for a new regional order.
The India-Israel leg of the hexagon has real substance behind it. India is Israel’s largest defense export client, reflecting strong strategic trust, and India’s tech ecosystem complements Israel’s innovation strengths, making joint partnerships strategically valuable.
For Modi, whose government has cultivated Israel as a security partner while maintaining older ties with Iran and the Arab world, the visit and its symbolism carried weight, though New Delhi has carefully avoided signing on to the hexagon as a formal alliance.
The Greece-Israel leg is similarly grounded in recent history. In December 2025, Israel hosted Greece and Cyprus for the latest round of meetings under their trilateral framework, established in 2016.
Although formally centered on energy and connectivity, the grouping has steadily expanded into security and defense cooperation, in part aimed at Turkey. Greece approved the purchase of 36 PULS rocket artillery systems from Israel in 2025, valued at approximately US$760 million.
The complications
Yet for all its ambition, the hexagon faces serious structural obstacles.
India’s position is the most delicate. Israel’s thrust to position India as a main pivot of the proposed alliance has New Delhi in a quandary.
While India’s West Asia policy gains a firmer foothold by deepening military ties with Israel and Mediterranean partners, it risks pitting India against Iran, with whom there have been traditionally and historically warm ties.
New Delhi also maintains expanding strategic ties with Saudi Arabia, one of the states Netanyahu implicitly frames as part of a rival bloc. India’s famed strategic autonomy is not easily squared with membership in an explicitly anti-axis coalition.
A formal NATO-style pact, analysts argue, is improbable given divergent national interests and competing geopolitical calculations. While Greece has significant defense ties with Israel, it has been pursuing a cautious rapprochement with Turkey.
Athens cannot afford to antagonize Ankara indefinitely, particularly within the framework of NATO membership they both share.
Critics also challenge Netanyahu’s framing of the region as neatly divided between “radical” and “moderate” blocs. Rather than forming a unified “Sunni axis,” several Sunni-majority states have coordinated diplomatically in response to Israel’s regional actions, including joint statements condemning Israeli strikes on Syria and the ongoing conflict in Gaza.
Netanyahu’s binary framing, critics say, distorts a far more fluid and multipolar regional reality.
What it reveals
Whatever the hexagon’s ultimate fate, Netanyahu’s articulation of it is itself revealing. It signals that Israel, after years of military operations across the region, is seeking to reposition itself as a coalition-builder rather than a lone actor.
It reflects a conviction that the post-Gaza regional order will be defined by competing alliance systems, and that Israel must anchor itself within one before the architecture solidifies against it.
Netanyahu’s framing as an “axis vs. axis” project risks hardening regional polarisation, giving Israel’s rivals greater incentive to coordinate.
But it also speaks to a genuine strategic insight: in a fragmenting world order, bilateral ties alone may not be sufficient. Networks matter.
Whether the hexagon crystallizes into a durable alliance or remains an aspirational framework will depend less on Netanyahu’s vision than on the choices of its prospective partners, above all, India.
New Delhi’s studied ambiguity so far suggests that while the idea has appeal, India intends to shape any arrangement on its own terms, or not at all.
This article was originally published on Leon Hadar’s Global Zeitgeist and is republished with kind permission. Become a subscriber here.
