By David Hearst
One year after the collapse of the Assad regime, Israel’s increasingly aggressive regional strategy has left Tel Aviv mired in conflicts on multiple fronts.
A year has passed since the fall of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad. Many of the foreign players in Syria were attending the Doha Forum as Aleppo, Homs, Hama, and Damascus fell one after another like a house of cards before the advance of opposition forces.
I watched Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov following the news on a television screen. Even the poker face that has made the world’s longest-serving foreign minister famous could not hide what he was thinking. His features suddenly fell like a stone.
On the panel, in his role as a “news-maker,” Lavrov grew irritated by questions about what was happening and demanded that Ukraine be discussed instead.
As soon as Abu Mohammad al-Jolani shed his military fatigues and became Ahmad al-Sharaa, the interim Syrian president began calling for peace.
Aware that he had taken his nom de guerre influenced by his father’s history as a refugee from the occupied Golan, and mindful of the fact that he had once said as a fighter, “We will not only reach Damascus; Jerusalem awaits us,” al-Sharaa was careful to send clear signals that his administration would not pose a threat to Israel.
The new governor of Damascus, Maher Marwan, went even further in an interview with US public radio (NPR), saying:
“We are not afraid of Israel, and our problem is not with Israel. We do not want to interfere in anything that threatens Israel’s security or the security of any other country… We want peace, and we cannot be an enemy to Israel or to anyone.”
These statements were made at the height of the genocide in Gaza and disappointed Palestinians who had expected Syria to support them.
But the new regime reflected a genuine state of exhaustion among a people who had lived through one of the bloodiest civil wars in the region for 14 years.
A shift in mood
One year later, the mood on the Syrian street has changed dramatically.
At a recent military parade attended by al-Sharaa, soldiers chanted:
“Gaza, Gaza, Gaza, our slogan day and night, bombing and destruction. We are coming for you, our enemy, we are coming, we are coming. Even if you were a mountain of fire, I would turn my blood into ammunition, and your blood into rivers.”
Shortly afterward, an Israeli minister hinted at the possibility of war with Syria.
Days ago, a dawn raid on a village south of Damascus nearly turned into a military disaster. In late November, Israeli helicopters and artillery shelled the town of Beit Jinn, about 50 km southwest of Damascus, while soldiers stormed homes and arrested three residents, according to local media.
An armed clash then erupted, with the entire village population joining the effort to repel Israeli forces. Fighter jets were deployed after Israeli soldiers found themselves surrounded. When they withdrew, 13 Syrians had been killed and 25 wounded, while six Israeli soldiers were injured, three of them seriously.
What happened in the space of one year to change the mood in Syria?
When al-Sharaa came to power, Israel had a choice: either embrace the change and build a new ally in Syria—especially by offering to help al-Sharaa in Washington.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had previously smoothed Mohammed bin Salman’s path to the White House, enabling him to wrest the crown prince position from his more experienced cousin. The same strategy could have been applied to al-Sharaa.
Instead, Israel launched massive strikes that within days destroyed the Syrian air force, sank its navy, and flattened its air-defense radars. It then began a ground incursion into southern Syria, first aiming to seize Mount Hermon, and later expanding to control an area larger than the Gaza Strip.
Weakening Syria
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz justified the invasion as “necessary to protect the communities of the Golan and Galilee from threats,” citing Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack. But such justifications are for public consumption only: Israel has long planned to permanently weaken Syria by fragmenting it into cantons and turning it into a version of Libya.
As I noted at the time of Assad’s fall last December, the speed of the regime’s collapse surprised allies and adversaries alike.
This thwarted Tel Aviv’s plans to establish military and strategic relations with the Kurds in the north and the Druze in the south, keeping Assad weak and under Emirati influence.
That would have served four goals: cutting Iranian weapons supply lines to Hezbollah, permanently weakening Syria, excluding Turkey from northern Syria, and establishing an air corridor over southern Syria and northern Iraq through which Israel could regularly strike Iran.
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar hinted at this plan a month before Assad’s fall, saying Israel should reach out to the Kurds and Druze in Syria and Lebanon, citing “political and security considerations.”
Sa’ar said: “We need to look at developments in this context and understand that in a region where we will always remain a minority, we can form natural alliances with other minorities.”
Playing the Druze card was a way to mask Israel’s bid for regional hegemony. The Druze themselves did not initially seek Israeli occupation. Weeks after al-Sharaa came to power, Druze leader Sheikh Hikmat al-Hijri told Middle East Eye: “The Israeli incursion worries me and I reject it.”
He added that contacts between Syria’s Druze and the new authorities in Damascus had been positive, but said: “We are waiting for achievements from the new government, not just positive words.”
This summer, however, after sectarian clashes between Druze and Bedouin fighters left more than 500 people dead and government forces withdrew, al-Hijri completely changed his stance. He openly pushed a separatist agenda, referred to Suwayda by its Hebrew name “Bashan,” and called for UN and Arab League intervention.
Hitting the wall
Israel’s occupation of southern Syria and its air raids—Israel has bombed Syria more than 600 times since al-Sharaa came to power—were met with total silence from Damascus and Ankara, even though Turkish military intelligence had helped opposition factions seize Aleppo.
The focal point of the indirect confrontation between Turkey and Israel over who controls Syrian airspace became two sites north of Damascus: the T4 airbase and the Palmyra military airport, which Israel repeatedly bombed to prevent Ankara from deploying advanced air-defense systems.
In April, Turkey moved to take control of T4 under a defense agreement with Damascus, but nothing came of it. Ankara instead opted to begin de-escalation talks with Tel Aviv, which also hit a dead end. It later became clear that the defense agreement amounted to little more than an understanding to train Syrian forces.
Senior Turkish officials stepped up visits to Damascus, and talks are underway to deploy Turkish forces in an advisory role. But Turkey’s barking over Israel’s unjustified military control of Suwayda has always been louder than its bite.
Istanbul’s prosecutor’s office issued 37 arrest warrants against Israeli officials—including Netanyahu, Katz, and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir—on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity in Gaza. Yet Turkey’s military stance has remained extremely cautious, allowing Israel to fill the vacuum and later impose peace terms.
Turkey is not alone in hesitating to confront force with force.
Al-Sharaa’s first response to the Israeli threat was to turn to Saudi Arabia. It is said that Mohammed bin Salman told him the kingdom had lost Syria once and would not lose it again.
Mohammed bin Salman introduced al-Sharaa to US President Donald Trump, in a meeting that paved the way for a White House visit and the lifting of Caesar sanctions, allowing foreign capital to flow back into Damascus.
Testing relationships
Trump’s ideas on Syria, as well as those of his envoy Tom Barrack, have been strongly supportive of al-Sharaa. Trump personally pushed to lift Caesar sanctions, saying the Syrian government was working hard “to build a real and prosperous state.”
Last weekend, Trump’s support for al-Sharaa was severely tested when two US soldiers and a civilian interpreter were killed in an ISIS attack in central Syria. But Trump did not turn against al-Sharaa, the former al-Qaeda fighter. Instead, he acknowledged the Syrian leadership’s anger over the incident and that Damascus did not control the area where the attack occurred.
Trump vowed a harsh response—but against ISIS, not Damascus.
In the absence of military opposition, Israel has grown increasingly frustrated with Trump diplomatically. Lieutenant Colonel Amit Yagur offered a clear insight into Israeli military thinking when he wrote in Maariv that Barrack could not be trusted because he was overly influenced by Turkey, where he currently resides.
Yagur said Syria “is not a historical state,” but rather “a collection of sects assembled to serve the needs of the French mandate,” and that al-Sharaa is effectively “the mayor of Damascus and its suburbs.”
He added that Israel has four core interests: ensuring Syria stops acting as a proxy for Turkey; preventing al-Sharaa’s “jihadist militias” from reaching Israel’s borders; preventing another massacre of the Druze; and stopping Syria from becoming “an Islamic state governed by sharia.”
An “endless” war
Al-Sharaa has raised the tone of his rhetoric. At this year’s Doha Forum, the interim president said Israel exports crises to the region to divert attention from its horrific massacres in Gaza. Still, he continues to rely on Trump to mediate an Israeli withdrawal.
Netanyahu, however, has pledged not to withdraw from southern Syria and went further in a speech at the New York Times’ DealBook Summit, describing the wars he has launched as “endless.”
He said: “We won this war, but it doesn’t end. It’s like cancer; if you excise it, it may return, but if you don’t excise it, you die.”
It is a revealing analogy—if nothing else, an unfortunate one.
As any doctor knows, cancer may return because its cells become stronger and more resistant to treatment, while the patient weakens. In the end, the treatment itself may kill the patient.
By this analogy, Netanyahu admits that Israel will never win this conflict; rather, it will eventually succumb to it.
Believing it has defeated Hezbollah, Iran, and now Hamas, openly violating ceasefire agreements it has signed, and dominating southern Lebanon and southern Syria, Israeli military forces appear to be at the point of overextension—especially if all these fronts are to remain permanently aflame.
Syria may prove to be the turning point in Israel’s growing military ambitions. Netanyahu’s prophecy may become self-fulfilling—and then it will be beyond his control.
– Source: Stand4Palestine
