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Bibi Put Israel’s Partners in an Awkward Position With His Description of the “Hexagon”

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Yves here. Many readers have criticized some of the analyses made by Andrew Korybko in earlier posts. I still continue to publish some of his pieces because he often focuses on important developments that have been under-noticed even in the independent media, as he does here with what looks like a foot-in-mouth over one aspect of Israel’s grand strategy. And the reader debates over Korybko’s claims are informative.

The Netanyahu “hexagon” remark comes in close succession with other even-more-than-usually-presumptuous remarks by the US, demonstrating yet again the US-Israel presumption of superiority.

As regular readers know well, this part of Witkoff’s remarks grossly misrepresents Iran’s position on nuclear enrichment. Iran has been repeatedly found in US intelligence assessments not to be pursuing the development of a nuclear weapons. It was the US that pulled out of the JCPOA, which provided for inspections. Iran has repeatedly made clear it is willing to negotiate over its nuclear program. But it is not willing to give it up entirely, as the US demands, nor is it willing to give up its sovereignity as the US also demands by getting rid of its medium and long range missiles and not working with allies in the region.

This follows a damaging, in the sense of saying the quiet part out loud, of US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee saying that he, and by implication, the current Administration, supports a very expansive Biblical reading of Israel’s territorial rights:

Larry Johnson (among many others) described the furious reaction from Arab states in the region:

Fourteen Muslim countries — which include all of the countries the US claims as allies — along with three major Islamic organizations, are furious with Trump because of the intemperate remarks of US Ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee. Huckabee, during his conversation last Tuesday with Tucker Carlson, said it would be acceptable for Israel to exercise control over territories belonging to Arab States, including the occupied West Bank.

That stupid remark has ignited an inferno of outrage from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Indonesia, Pakistan, Turkiye, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, Bahrain, Lebanon, Syria, the State of Palestine, along with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, the League of Arab States and the Gulf Cooperation Council. Talk about bad timing.

Jordan and Saudi Arabia are currently hosting hundreds of US combat aircraft and tankers that refuel those planes. Does this mean that they will block any US attempt to launch an attack from their territories? Maybe. It also is noteworthy that both the Saudis and the Emiratis signed on to this stern denunciation because they have been busy pissing on each other during the past two weeks. This is the strongest joint-condemnation of Israel since the start of the genocide in Gaza.

The statement:

The anti-Zionist US group Torah Jews also weighed in:

At a minimum, these casual yet self-undermining remarks are more evidence of hubris. So when does Nemesis show up?

By Andrew Korybko, a Moscow-based American political analyst who specializes in the global systemic transition to multipolarity in the New Cold War. He has a PhD from MGIMO, which is under the umbrella of the Russian Foreign Ministry. Originally published at his website

By speaking on their behalf and placing them at odds with Iran, Saudi Arabia, and their network of partners, he undermined the balancing acts that some of them like India and Ethiopia practice.

Bibi recently declared during a government meeting that “we will create an entire system, essentially a ‘hexagon’ of alliances around or within the Middle East. This includes India, Arab nations, African nations, Mediterranean nations (Greece and Cyprus), and nations in Asia that I won’t detail at the moment…The intention here is 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…and the emerging radical Sunni axis.”

This puts Israel’s partners in an awkward position because some of them like India, whose Prime Minister visits later this week, don’t want to make enemies out of the countries that Bibi considers to be part of the Shia and Sunni axes. This segues into exactly what those axes refer to, with the first obviously being the Iranian-led “Resistance Axis” comprised of Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and some Iraqi militias, while the second seems to be an allusion to the so-called “Islamic NATO”.

This envisaged Saudi-centric security network only includes Pakistan right now, but there’s talk of expanding it to Turkiye and Egypt, whether as part of a multilateral alliance or through separate arrangements between them and Saudi Arabia like the security deal that it just reached with Somalia. Whether or not it’s formalized and/or multilateralized, the “Islamic NATO” concept basically refers to this regional coordination platform for optimizing the pursuit of their shared goals in Sudan and Somalia.

Accordingly, this Saudi-centric security network challenges the interests of Greece and Cyprus due to their disputes with the Kingdom’s close Turkish partner, Sudan’s “Rapid Support Forces” (RSF) because of its support for the “Sudanese Armed Forces” (SAF), their suspected Emirati patron that’s now embroiled in a long-simmering regional competition with Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia due to rival Egypt’s planned military build-up in Somalia on anti-terrorist pretexts, and newly Israeli-recognizedSomaliland.

Likewise, the Iranian-centric security network challenges the interests of neighboring Azerbaijan with whom relations have been marked by deep mutual distrust since independence (with a few thaws in between though), the recently defeated “Southern Transitional Council” from South Yemen which fiercely opposes the Houthis (unlike their Saudi-aligned internationally recognized government), and the RSF due to suspected Iranian arms support for the SAF.

The enumerated parties whose interests are challenged by these axes are therefore candidates for the “hexagon”, India’s inclusion being due to rival Pakistan’s alliance with the Saudis last summer and lesser rival Turkiye’s potential involvement therein, but they might not all want to openly oppose them. That could radically worsen their ties with other axis members with whom they don’t have any problems. It might also raise the risk of more intense wars, whether proxy or direct ones, by miscalculation.

For these reasons, Bibi veritably put Israel’s partners in an awkward position by describing his envisaged Israeli-centric security “hexagon” as a counter-axis to the Shia and Sunni ones. By speaking on their behalf and placing them at odds with Iran, Saudi Arabia, and their network of partners, he undermined the balancing acts that some of them like India and Ethiopia practice. The damage isn’t irreparable, however, but their close ties with Israel might now be viewed with more suspicion by those two axes.

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22 comments

  1. Ignacio

    This looks like a classical “you are with me or against me” moment and I hope India and other countries are much more nuanced in their approaches and try to push both Bibi and Trump to come to their senses, forget about military domination, and try some diplomacy for once in their life. Call it hexagon, heptagon whatever idiotic geometry you like but it is that simple.

  2. Bugs

    Truly surprised that Modi is going to Israel again after the Epstein Files revealed that his first visit was arranged between Epstein and Ambani as a quid pro quo to get the White House to answer his calls…

    Dixit JEE – “The Indian Prime minister modi took advice. and danced and sang in israel for the benefit of the US president. they had met a few weeks ago.. IT WORKED. !”

    Modi is the gift that keeps on giving. I recommend the annual video his office puts out where he doles out advice to young people on how to succeed in their studies.

    1. Lee

      As you will recall from discussion of Modi and India’s comprador elites in yesterday’s Links, they seem quite content, for the sake of their own further enrichment, to continue sacrificing the interests of their general population on the altar of Western finance capital. The links provided by commenters Juice and Bugs are enlightening.

      https://rupe-india.org/aspects-no-87/what-explains-indias-response-to-trump/

      https://frontline.thehindu.com/interviews/india-industrialisation-ha-joon-chang-interview/article70321699.ece

  3. Mikel

    From the perch in Moscow, it would be interesting to know more about the realtionship between Russia and Israel. Or does that not cause “awkwardness” with certain alliances?

  4. The Rev Kev

    I was wondering about his ‘nations in Asia’and I wonder if what he really means is Japan and Korea with perhaps Australia and New Zealand included. If so, he is really talking about Collective West countries. Either way, he is talking about an alliance against Shia and Sunni Muslims which is kinda all of them. So perhaps what he is really talking about is Trump’s declared Imperial America Project and Israel wants to partner with it. At a profit of course.

  5. John Merryman

    Given the Zionist desire to control the Jewish narrative, one point in this piece that needs emphasizing is that while Judaism is a religion, Zionism is an ideology. One is spiritual, the other is political.
    Those who don’t understand the difference are, by default, ideologues.
    Their intent on herding everyone off the cliff needs serious dissection.
    Trying to replace the Golden Rule with kill all the Amaleks is one way to bring the entire world against you.
    Tribalism will be superseded by civilization. It’s been a long process.

    1. motorslug

      I detest the word ‘antisemitism’ because Arabs and Palestinians are also semites. Just because a few racists tried to usurp a word for their own selfish purposes doesn’t mean it is definitionally correct.
      That said, no one can turn otherwise apathetic people into an ‘antisemite’ quite as well as zionists or evangelical xians.

      1. vao

        You are entitled to detest the word, but its definition is exactly the well-known one: it designates a hater of Jews and everything Jewish, not an enemy of the Hebrews, Arabs, and Abyssinians. That is because the word “antisemitism” was not usurped, but rather coined exactly for that purpose by Wilhelm Marr, a very famous racist in his time.

        For that matter, a pedophile designates a sexual predator of underage girls and boys, not a friend of the children.

        1. JP

          And again:
          Pedophilia is a psychiatric disorder characterized by intense, recurring sexual urges or fantasies involving prepubescent children (typically age 13 or younger). It is classified as a paraphilia, with pedophilic disorder referring specifically to cases causing distress or impairment. Treatment often involves cognitive-behavioral therapy to prevent acting on urges

          Under age is statutory (legal) definition for the age of consent. Children are not post pubescent.

      2. John Merryman

        I suspect many people around the world would trade their history of persecution with European Jewry, with Native Americans and Africans at the top of the list. So while it might work on the conscience of Europeans, the situation with the rest of the world is more complex.

    2. David in Friday Harbor

      It’s important to recall that Netanyahu is a follower of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, who was an actual fascist and follower of Mussolini who subscribed to “racial” theories of Judaism rather than its spiritual aspects.

      Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Zionist movement broke from the World Zionist Congress in the late 1920’s and his jackbooted followers Menachem Begin and Yitzak Shamir’s Irgun, known as the “Stern Gang,” invented what we call today “terrorism.”

      1. vao

        “Ze’ev Jabotinsky […] was an actual fascist”

        With that background, it is still surprising that Israel has not yet become a fascist state. It embodies every one of the worst European ideologies (ethno-nationalism; colonialism; racism; eugenism; genocidism), but

        1) it is still way too diverse and balkanized to establish the necessary Gleichschaltung (oppositions between Ashkenazim vs. Mizrahi vs. Sefardim vs. Falasha, Sabra vs. immigrants, Zionists vs. Haredim, agricultural settlers vs. urban IT developers, etc);

        2) it does not have a central figure that represents the country/Zionism (Netanyahu is hated or despised by a large fraction of the population, and so are all contenders for the leadership of the country);

        3) it is thoroughly neoliberal and a corporatist regime with a dirigist, economically all-powerful State striving for autarky is out of question.

        I am not entirely sure there is even a coherent cultural project aiming at bringing forth a “new form of Jewish human beings” (like “regenerated Italians” or “new Germans”) any longer. There definitely was such a project in the beginnings till the 1960s when the kibbutz was a pillar of Israeli society, but apparently not nowadays.

        “Menachem Begin and Yitzak Shamir’s Irgun, known as the “Stern Gang,” invented what we call today “terrorism.””

        Well, I disagree here; perhaps you should clarify your argument. For the notion of terrorism as we know it nowadays was well-established before the Irgun had been founded, and in fact before WWI, mainly because of the spectacularly widespread violent actions by anarchists. In fact, the League of Nations was moved into action and spent years elaborating a convention against terrorism (which never came into force) after the assassination of the king of Yugoslavia, not actions by Jewish extremists.

        1. hk

          1) I suspect things can change surprisingly fast: Germany in late 19th/early 20th century was also incredibly diverse. The idea that Junkers and industrial laborers, Catholics and Protestants, etc could unite behind the same program would have seemed strange (and, tbf, even at the height of Nazi era, they were never all that united.). I suppose, for that matter, so was Italy: 20+ years of Fascist rule didn’t exactly bring Northern and Southern Italy together.

          2) There was no one who really embodied Italian or German fascism either, beyond propaganda. Both Mussolini and Hitler remained divisive figures, even if very few openly challenged them when they were in charge. How quickly Mussolini’s authority collapsed among the Fascists in the leadup to his ouster shows this.

          In fact, following up on #1, I suspect that Fascism has a particularly strong allure among peoples with strongly held national myths that don’t conform to reality–Italians, Germans, Jews. Perhaps it serves as the means to enforce the mythical unity on actually fractious population, and to the degree that people are expected to buy into the myths, they can’t openly challenge that. With Israel, I should add that the unifying myth is not the Tanakh, but the Shoah: the recency and verifiability strengthens the myth far more than anything ancient. (I, personally, would find it deeply offensive, were I Jewish, to have my enemies define my national myth and pigeonhole me into a stereotypical “tribe”–in fact, this is what I find maddening with white liberals jibbering about multiculturalism, but, even there, there are plenty of nonwhites who profit handsomely by catering to whites’ multiculturalist stereotypes…and the Zionists do it better than all of them.)

          1. vao

            “I suspect that Fascism has a particularly strong allure among peoples with strongly held national myths that don’t conform to reality”

            That potentially concerns a lot of peoples, since national myths do have a deplorable tendency to clash with reality quite violently at some point. After all, Portugal, Spain, Greece, Latvia, Brazil, Argentina, also France (under Pétain) went fascist then, and nowadays Ukraine and the RSS in India.

            Israel is a conundrum. Of course there is the myth of ancient Hebrews, temples, kingdoms, Jerusalem, Tanakh, etc — but that Jewish past was not exceptionally successful and was culturally mediocre compared to every other polity around it (whether Egypt, Phoenicia, Mesopotamia, Persia, Greece, Rome, Anatolia…). Besides, as you suggest, we live in the 21st century and a national myth based on the Shoah seems to be the leading direction. But then this clashes with the original Zionist myth itself, of visionary, courageous Jews who built Israel and a new Jewish man, while an assimilationist or traditionalist, obtuse Jewry was stupidly letting itself be betrayed and then slaughtered. For long after WWII, Zionists treated European Jewish refugees with contempt. Futhermore, a subtle hierarchy is still present among Israelis distinguishing those who are immigrants, those who were born in Israel (Sabras), and those who were already established in Palestine or descend from families established there before the State of Israel was even founded.

            The current mish-mash of “Amalek + Zionist colonisation + let us exterminate every supposed enemy to avoid another Holocaust” appears to me a clunky ideological contraption — but perhaps does it seem very coherent to Israelis and Jews in general? There have been articles referred to in NC contending that the Israeli society is deeply divided; the current composite myth may well serve to unite it against everything foreign, but does not seem to prevent Israeli factions to hate each other’s guts.

            In any case, no fascism without the economic and cultural programmes, and the providential leader, debatable or not — and I do not see any of these in Israel. Interestingly, I do not see a leading figure in Ukraine either, the embodiment of the Ukrainian nation, spirit, and virtues being Stepan Bandera, who died long ago (and the basis for Ukrainian national myths is so tenuous that the fascists there liberally copy and paste the symbology of German Nazis, who held Ukrainians for an inferior, despicable, expendable race).

            1. hk

              Fascinating. I had no idea pre WW2 Zionists had that big a place in the Zionist national mythology: I know they existed, but most accounts that I know of suggest that things got “serious” only when European refugees began arriving en masse. I did come across accounts about the “original” settlers treating the new arrivals with contempt, but that part never seemed to draw much attention. I wonder if deemphasizing that part of the divide was also part of the (composite) myth building around the Shoah.

              1. vao

                They were the pioneers, and did construct a myth of the new, regenerated, Hebrew-speaking Jewish people forged in the kibbutzim — a myth that was prevalent till the early 1970s.

                When you think of it, it is not uncommon either for citizens of the USA to remark that their ancestors were already present before the USA became independent — or, even better, that one of their ancestors came with the Mayflower.

                Besides, right from their beginnings, the Zionists profoundly disliked assimilationists and (largely Yiddish-speaking) traditionalists, and later deeply hated the Bundists — who, as communists, favoured a class-based fight in Europe itself rather than emigrating to some colony to implement a scheme subsidized by those super-rich Jewish oligarchs who were exploiting them, Jews and non-Jews alike.

  6. Tom Stone

    Mike Huckabee is stupid or he never would have said this, no matter what his beliefs are.
    Mike Huckabee’s “Faith” amounts to “Anything the Zionists do is wonderful because JESUS IS COMING!!!”
    Genocide?
    It’s God swill
    “JESUS IS COMING!!”
    He is nuts.
    And he makes it crystal clear who he works for and it ain’t the good old USA.

    1. motorslug

      And so hilariously ironic that jewish zionists support them.
      When savior on a stick comes back, xians will either convert or eliminate all the little hats.

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