Will Israel take the war to Syria? | policy

With the end of the war on Gaza, the world looks forward to the dawn of a new dawn in the region based on peace and stability. This is what the American President expressed explicitly in his speech in Sharm El-Sheikh, and the leaders of the region and the world expressed it by attending the signing of the agreement to end the war.

But things may not seem that optimistic, in light of an extreme right-wing government in Israel, which is always trying to escape forward from the many internal entitlements that await it, and believes that it has a strong opportunity to change the strategic environment of the region, after its miserable failure at the strategic level in Gaza, where the war ended after two years with major political, economic and geopolitical losses, which will not be compensated by the destruction of Gaza nor the killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians, because contrary to what Israel wanted it. The two-year war did not constitute any additional value on the geopolitical level, as much as it deducted from Israel’s assets and its regional and global weight.

This situation doubles the energy of madness among the extreme right-wing elite in Israel, and pushes them to search for new rounds of violence in the region, and to dispose of surplus power, or to use it to achieve a tangible strategic achievement. Syria appears to be one of the most important arenas in the eyes of the leaders of Israeli extremism, which has the potential to discharge the charges of Zionist extremism.

Why Syria?

The past stage demonstrated the centrality of Syria in Israeli strategic thinking for many reasons.

First: Syria constitutes the heart of Israel’s geopolitical project based on changing the Middle East. The change that Israel intends, through the statements of its officials, is based on the dismantling of the countries of the region and the creation of small entities on ethnic and sectarian grounds.

Syria is considered an ideal case for implementing the Israeli vision, given its social and geographical interconnectedness with Iraq and Turkey, and Iran is very similar to it in terms of the ethnic and sectarian mosaic. Therefore, the dynamics of change in Syria will spread its repercussions to the rest of the countries of the aforementioned region, which constitute basic pillars in the Middle East.

Second: Israel’s operational projects in Syria are unique to other countries in the region, such as the David Corridor, the humanitarian corridor for Suwayda Governorate, and the buffer zone in the south.

Either Israel has begun implementing these projects on the ground, such as the buffer zone project in southern Syria, and has allocated military resources to achieve them, or they are still in the theoretical design phase, and Israel is waiting for the opportunity to realize them on the ground, such as the “David’s Corridor” and “Greater Israel.”

Third: The looseness and fragility of the Syrian arena constitute an incentive for intervention, as Syria is still a candidate for many possibilities, at least in the estimation of the Israeli establishment, and the idea that Syria constitutes a laboratory for the balance of power in the region and a suitable ground for building new equations has not left the mind of Israeli leaders, as it is still under the control of four armies, all of which are competing to have a role in the upcoming arrangements at the regional level, and it still continues to do so. The situation in Syria has the potential to explode due to the rift occurring between its components and the state of political impasse among local actors.

Fourth: The pretext of the vacuum. Israel created the vacuum in southern Syria, by preventing the Damascus authorities from repositioning it to control and manage the region. Israel uses the pretext of the security vacuum for its survival and to develop its operations towards implementing its projects at the appropriate moment.

The road to war

Israel has designed an exceptional situation in Syria based on two options that have no thirds, either war or extremely humiliating surrender, including a concession not only on the Golan, but also large areas of southern Syria, based on two bases: Israel’s ability and Syria’s weakness, and that Israel is the one that engineered the current situation by overthrowing the Assad regime and destroying Iran’s arms in Syria, in addition to its claim that the current authority’s grip on the situation Security is very fragile, which makes the possibility of the return of Iranian influence to southern Syria highly likely, and therefore Israel is not willing to sit and wait for dangers to arise in southern Syria.

These pretexts constituted burdens that shackled the Israeli negotiating position and made it deprived of the flexibility necessary to reach a security agreement with Syria, which had been heralded for so long in recent times. Inventing the issue of opening a crossing to Suwayda was a way out for Israel to escape from signing the agreement with Damascus.

This became noticeable through the statements of former Mossad officers and some retired army generals, who can say things that those still in service cannot say. Because they will become official statements expressing the government’s position.

All of them confirmed that Israel has no interest in reaching a security agreement with Syria at this stage. Because it will tie its hands in the movement, and it will also push it to make pledges to withdraw from the border strip without obtaining parallel gains, and with the same weight as its control over a large sector of southern Syria, and its placing the capital, Damascus, under the threat of Israeli fire, and control of a large water reservoir in Quneitra and Daraa, in exchange for the scarcity of risks against Israel, in light of the withdrawal of weapons and the dismantling of the factional frameworks, and therefore there is no operational necessity for concessions. For valuable geopolitical gains.

However, this Israeli assessment, even if it is based on data, the bulk of which is correct, but they remain current data and in light of them it is not permissible to establish a military situation in southern Syria. Rather, the continuation of this situation would generate dynamics that resist the equation that Israel is trying to stabilize.

Also, any regime in Damascus, regardless of its orientations, will find itself forced to make harsh choices if it is not able, through negotiation and mediation, to get out of this situation, as Israel’s grip on the capital increases, by annihilating the surrounding countryside, which greatly weakens the flexibility of the Syrian leadership and topples its pragmatism on the ground, so that war will then become the only and obligatory option if Israel continues on this path.

Is it possible to bet on Trump’s plans?

The Trump administration seeks to form a new security system in the Middle East, driven by geopolitical considerations imposed by perceptions of continued hegemony over the world. The new security system will replace the previous system that was established after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, and its effects have ended, and even reached an impasse after the recent Israeli wars in the region.

It appears through the facilities provided by the Trump administration to the new Syrian regime that Syria is part of this regime, whether as a result of the desire of countries allied with Washington in the region, or for American calculations related to neutralizing Iranian and Russian influences on Syria.

However, Washington’s courtship of the countries of the region cannot be taken as a guarantee of Israel’s deterrence from Syria. In the end, all parties allied with Washington have deep security and political understandings with it. Nor can we rely on Trump’s enthusiasm to stop the Israeli war on Gaza and include it in the Syrian reality. The war on Gaza, at least in the eyes of the Trump administration, is no longer of great importance. On the contrary, its losses on the Americans and Israelis have become greater than Its gains.

In addition, Washington supports the form and content of the security agreement between Israel and Syria on the terms that Israel wants, and not according to political logic and the rules of international law, and therefore will not oppose Israeli pressure on the new Syrian regime, as evidenced by the fact that Washington did not object, even verbally, to the violation of Syrian sovereignty despite the lack of justifications, which means that Washington separates the path of establishing the Middle Eastern security system from Israel’s security interests in Syria.

The main danger to Syria lies in the continuation of the extreme right-wing structure in ruling Israel, and since it took control of the government, it has not hidden that it deals with politics based on the biblical approach.

In light of the sweep of evangelical thought and its control over American decision-making centers, Trump’s rosy dreams cannot be relied upon, especially regarding Syria, as long as all the projects of the far-right government in Syria are based on biblical myths such as “The Corridor of David,” “Mount Bashan,” and “Greater Israel,” which sees controlling Damascus as a sacred religious mission.