Commentary
Will Israel and a Trump White House Miss a Historic Window of Opportunity with Syria? (Dina Kraft, December 23, 2024)
Dina Kraft is a journalist, podcaster and the co-author of the New York Times bestseller, My Friend Anne Frank, together with Hannah Pick-Goslar. She lives in Tel Aviv where she's the Israel Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor and a creator of the podcast Groundwork, about activists working in Israel and Palestine. She was formerly opinion editor of Haaretz English.
One evening last week a flutter of reports appeared in the Israeli media in quick succession with what at first appeared to be breakthrough news – Benjamin Netanyahu on his way to Cairo ostensibly to finalize a deal with Hamas, a Saudi-Israeli normalization agreement at hand.
The reports, however, were swiftly proven to be baseless, even wishful thinking.
But where was Netanyahu who had requested to excuse his absence that day in the courtroom hearing the corruption case against him on account of official state business? Was he not hard at work on major diplomatic advances – especially as the country remains on exhausted on edge waiting for a truce with Hamas that would lead to the release of its 100 hostages being held in Gaza?
The answer revealed itself quickly in the release of a photo of the Israeli prime minister wearing a flak jacket and sunglasses, standing alongside his new defense minister and about 25 Israeli soldiers clasping M-16s on the snowcapped peak of Mount Hermon, on the Syrian side of the Golan Heights.
The area is part of a narrow buffer zone between the two countries inside Syria that Israel seized just as Syrian rebel forces were taking control of Damascus earlier this month, describing the move as defensive and temporary. But by the time of the photo op, ten days later, Defense Minister Katz declared it essential, promising Israel would stay there “for as long as is needed.”
He justified the open-ended time frame saying Israel needs to be there to bolster Israel’s security and to deter both Hezbollah and the rebel forces in Damascus who, he said, “pretend to present a moderate image but belong to the most extreme Islamic sects.”
No doubt Israel has to proceed with caution, and its blitz of hundreds of air and missile strikes on Syrian military installations, since Assad fell, including chemical weapons sites (lest in fall into the “wrong hands”)is evidence that it is being extremely proactive.
But there are many Syria experts in Israel who see a Syria focused more on recovering from decades of Assad’s dictatorship than a risk to Israel, hailing it as a moment of historic potential. Some, including Eyal Zisser, a professor of Middle East history at Tel Aviv University, see Israel sinking its boots into the Syrian side of the Golan Heights in violation of a 1974 post-Yom Kippur War agreement that set up the area as a no-man’s land, as more a show of muscle flexing than real defensive need.
Carmit Valensi, director of the Syria research program at the Institute for National Security Studies, a think tank in Tel Aviv, told the Economist. “There are more opportunities for Israel in Syria than threats now … With Assad gone and Iran no longer powerful in Syria, Israel has a chance to use diplomacy with the new players in Syria and try to ensure security.”
Ahmed al-Sharaa, the leader of the Syrian rebel group with jihadist roots that helped overthrow Bashar Assad has said he would not let Syria become a base of operations for attacks on Israel. He also called on Israel to back off from the attacks on military sites and to withdraw from the buffer zone.
In recent days Al-Sharra has shed his military garb for a suit as he continues to present himself as a pragmatist who will unite a fractured Syria and work with the international community to help it rebuild.
Among his most recent visitors, the U.S. Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Barbara Leaf who came to a Damascus to meet him in person at a Damascus hotel. After what was described by US diplomats as a “very productive” meeting reviewing the political transition of the country, a decision was made to remove a 10 million dollar bounty on his head. The group he leads, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, was originally affiliated with al Qaeda.
But Leaf was careful to leave with cautionary words, saying “We will judge by deeds, not just by words. Deeds are the critical thing."
On Monday Israel’s Channel 12 reported that American officials are urging Israel to open ties with al-Sham, sending a report that reads, “Cooperation and communication channels of yours with al-Julani (al-Shaham’s nom de guerre) will bolster Israel’s influence in the entire area … We are talking about a pragmatic leader who wants to develop strategic relations with the nations of the region.”
On the night of September 27 Netanyahu stood in front of the United Nations General Assembly and in during his address held up two maps, one he called “a map of blessing” highlighting Israel, Egypt, Sudan and Saudi Arabia in green and another as a “map of a curse” highlighting Iran, Iraq, and Syria in black, which he described as a “a map of an arc of terror that Iran has created and imposed from the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean.”
While Netanyahu was speaking that night in New York, back home in Israel air force jets were preparing to take off to strike Hezbollah’s headquarters in a basement building in Beirut, targeting and killing Hezbollah’s longtime leader Hassan Nasrallah.
Since then the “Axis of Resistance” has further crumbled not just with the decimation of the Hezbollah leadership, but the toppling of the Assad regime which for years had served as Iran’s highway for transporting weapons to Hezbollah in Lebanon.
The October 7 Hamas attack has reset a new regional order in the Middle East but not as its leaders imagined thanks in part to Israel’s offensive moves in the past three months against Hezbollah and Iran.
But military operations should, experts argue, help set up diplomatic, political openings, not just serve as a conduit for more military force.
In a recent analysis in Foreign Affairs, Amos Yadlin a retired Israeli general and former head of military intelligence and Amos Golove, a former director of Israel’s national security council, argue for Israel to take advantage of this turning point moment in the Middle East to make bold political moves.
“It has both the opportunity and the responsibility to steer the region’s trajectory toward a new, more peaceful and sustainable reality. Currently, Israel’s ability to force regional changes militarily outpaces its readiness to articulate and enact a cohesive strategic vision; its operational successes do not, as yet, have clear strategic ideas to go along with them. Israel should push for a political framework to match its battlefield successes,” they wrote.
Their suggest to make that happen, “An Arab-Israeli coalition backed by the United States could repel threats from Shiite and Sunni radicals, provide the Palestinians with a realistic political future, safeguard Israel’s security interests, secure the return of the Israeli hostages still in Gaza, and prevent another attack on Israeli soil.”
But with an incoming Trump administration with an isolationist outlook that has already indicated the United States will not intervene in Syria and a hardline Israeli government that seems more interested in military action over diplomacy – will the window of opportunity to help stabilize Syria slam shut at everyone’s peril?
Gaza and the Hostage Issue (Hard Questions, Tough Answers- December 16, 2024)
Yossi Alpher is an independent security analyst. He is the former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, a former senior official with the Mossad, and a former IDF intelligence officer. Views and positions expressed here are those of the writer, and do not necessarily represent NJN's views and policy positions.
Q. Following upon the defeat of Hezbollah, the fall of Assad in Syria and multiple setbacks for Iran, the prospects for an Israel-Hamas hostage deal appear to be improving. And after the deal: what fate awaits the Gaza Strip itself?
A. All relevant parties--Israel, Hamas, Egypt, Qatar, the US--have stepped up the pace of multilateral negotiations over a hostage deal and ceasefire in Gaza. A resurgent Turkiye, after its Islamist allies triumphed over Assad in Syria, is bidding for a role. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu appears finally to be pushing a majority of his right-messianic coalition toward agreeing to the prolonged ceasefire that will be necessary for a prisoner-for-hostage exchange. The heads of Mossad, Shin Bet and the IDF have been in Egypt for talks.
US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan just visited Israel, Egypt and Qatar and expressed optimism that a deal could be finalized before President Biden leaves office on January 20, and possibly even this month. US President-elect Donald Trump, waiting in the wings, has threated Hamas that it will “have hell to pay” if it does not free the hostages before he takes office (though what new punishment he could possibly inflict on Gazans after more than a year of death and destruction is not clear). Trump’s designated hostage affairs envoy, Adam Boehler, will arrive in Israel this week.
US pressure and incentives, by both Biden and Trump, appear to be having some effect. It is fascinating to note the degree of apprehension and expectation in Israel projected by Trump’s impending second term when most likely, beyond bluster, he himself has little idea what he will do in the Middle East.
Q. Do we know the outlines of a hostage deal?
A. Not really. This time around, the negotiators are avoiding leaks. Based (cautiously) on informed speculation, it would appear that the deal will play out in stages. It will begin with release of women, children and elderly and ill hostages--sadly, those that Hamas can locate in the ruins of Gaza. Israel will withdraw at least temporarily from some occupied territory such as the Philadelphia Strip separating Gaza from Egyptian Sinai.
At least some of the Hamas prisoners Israel frees will be repatriated not to Gaza but to the West Bank. The Palestinian Authority will possibly play a role supervising a reopened Rafah crossing to Egypt. Augmented humanitarian aid will flow.
The hostage-release phases are expected to generate further negotiations regarding IDF withdrawal. But this is where the picture gets murky.
Q. Why? What is Israel’s strategic plan for post-war Gaza?
A. Officially, there is none. This reflects the weakness of Israeli governance in general, along with dissent within the governing coalition where extremists demand to remain in the Strip. Yet in historical context, the absence of a viable strategy for Gaza follows an Israeli-Palestinian tradition that goes all the way back to the War of Independence. The fate of this strip of sandy land, 25 miles (41 km.) long and 10 km wide, has been uncertain ever since it filled up with Palestinian refugees from Jaffa, Beersheva and nearby villages in 1948.
Q. Can you illustrate the failed strategies for Gaza?
A. Here are a few brief and tragic examples. In 1949-50, PM Ben Gurion offered to take over the Strip, then held by Egypt and understood since the 1948 War as the launch point for an Egyptian attack on Tel Aviv, and absorb an Arab population of one or two hundred thousand refugees in return for peace with the Arab world. There were no Arab takers. In 1956, Israel conquered the Strip from Egypt along with the neighboring Sinai Peninsula. International pressure forced Israel’s withdrawal and Egypt returned. Until 1967, Egypt used the Strip as a base for Palestinian guerilla attacks on Israel.
In 1967, Israel again conquered the Strip and occupied it militarily. Recognizing Gaza’s overcrowding, Israel launched a clandestine scheme to encourage emigration from the Strip to South America. This ended violently when disgruntled Gazan immigrants attacked the Israel embassy in Paraguay. In 1977-81, when Egypt and Israel negotiated peace and Israel withdrew from Sinai, PM Begin offered the Strip to Egypt. President Sadat refused, noting that Gaza, as part of Mandatory Palestine, was an issue for Israel to solve.
Meanwhile the Gazan population was growing apace. And Israeli settlements had arisen in Gaza. Thus did demography now complicate the Strip’s fate. When in 1992 the Oslo Process began, Yitzhak Rabin wistfully (and not seriously) suggested that the Strip should sink into the sea, while Shimon Peres, ever the visionary, saw Gaza as a future Singapore on the Mediterranean. Gaza, minus its settlements, became a patchwork part of the PLO-administered Palestinian Authority.
Then, in 2000, came the Second Intifada with its suicide bombings. Within a few years, PM Ariel Sharon decided to dismantle all the Gaza settlements and turn over control of the Strip to the PLO. Israel even withdrew from the Philadelphi Strip and gave the PLO/PA/Fateh movement sovereign control over passage from Gaza to Egypt.
From 2005 to 2023, this unfettered link between a Palestinian entity and the Arab world was the greatest dimension of sovereignty ever enjoyed by the Palestinians in the history of the conflict. With Israel having completely withdrawn, between 2005 and 2007 international aid flowed to Gaza in an effort to assist Palestinian state-building there.
That international effort crash-landed in 2007 when Hamas brutally ousted the PLO and its main component, Fateh. Hamas continued until the current war to control the Gaza-Egypt international border. But as is today crystal clear, Hamas devoted whatever funds it could recruit--from Qatar (encouraged by Israel), from Iran, from UN and other agencies and internationally-sponsored projects--to building a terror state. Now that strategy too is in tatters.
Q. Every scheme failed. And today?
A. Today, perhaps more than ever, the need for a viable strategy for Gaza is intertwined with both international and local Israeli and Palestinian politics. Nearly everywhere on the international and inter-Arab scene, and despite decades of failure, the demand is for Gaza to become part of a Palestinian state that includes all or part of the West Bank. Nearly everywhere, the designated sovereign in Gaza is the PLO.
Nowhere is there a readiness in the Arab world or, for that matter, elsewhere, to take in Palestinians from war-torn and overcrowded Gaza. About 100,000 (out of some 2.3 million) Gazans with means have managed, since October 7, 2023, to buy or bribe their way into Egypt. But Cairo is absolutely adamant in its refusal to absorb Gazans and resettle them, say, in Sinai, whether in wartime or as part of a peace plan: it is the Israelis’ and the Palestinians’ problem.
As for the PLO, between 1994 and 2007 it failed spectacularly (as the Palestinian Authority) to rule a semi-autonomous Gaza Strip. Today, under an aging and faltering Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), the PA barely rules over areas A and B of the West Bank. It needs new leadership and a rejuvenated security apparatus before it can hope to transplant itself into Gaza with its residual Hamas movement and Islamist and tribal traditions.
As matters stand, there is no viable Palestinian strategy for ruling and rebuilding the Strip. Indeed, Fateh and Hamas recently failed yet again to negotiate an agreed governance plan for post-war Gaza. Fateh, like everyone else, insists that Hamas disarm completely in favor of a single internationally-approved security force. Yet Hamas survives, both politically and (however weakened) militarily.
Additional Arab volunteers? The UAE is mentioned as an interim presence, but only to keep order while a permanent scheme of governance is put in place. Former Gaza security chief under the PLO, Mohammad Dahlan, now in exile in Dubai, is mentioned as a possible UAE-sponsored facilitator. But none of this implies the formulation of a viable long-term strategy.
Q. And on the Israeli scene?
A. The increasingly dominant messianic right in the Netanyahu government, in the settlement movement and in society at large has its own strategic plan for Gaza: thinning or even eliminating the Arab population, particularly in the northern Strip, and rebuilding settlements there. It is that same messianic right that seeks to annex all or most of the West Bank--at least Area C, comprising 60 percent of the territory. Finance Minister Smotrich, who is increasingly in charge of Israeli plans for the West Bank, envisages 2025 as the year of annexation in both the West Bank and Gaza.
Is this a viable strategy? As noted, no one in the Arab world will absorb Palestinians ‘transferred out’ by extremist ministers Ben Gvir, Smotrich and Strook. The entire international community will oppose such a plan. A few Israeli settlements in the northern Strip, if built, will be lightning rods for Palestinian opposition. Not to mention the disastrous effect settling Gaza and/or expelling its Palestinians would have on international and Israeli ambitions to expand normalization to include Saudi Arabia, to say nothing of the economic boycotts and war-crimes accusations that can be anticipated.
There are other schemes on the Israeli right, such as renewing post-1967 military government, which even the IDF and Shin Bet oppose as counter-productive. Indeed, Israel’s security establishment opposes all the right-wing and messianic schemes, citing long-term damage to Israel’s overall security and regional relations.
So there is no viable Israeli strategy, either.
Q. And the US, Europe and others who never tire of pointing out that a two-state solution is the only truly viable strategy, even when Israel and Palestine are deep in the throes of war and extremism?
A. In his previous term as president, Donald Trump presented Palestinians and Israelis with a map for a two-state settlement. The map was dismally out of touch with realities on both sides. But at the strategic level it did the trick of facilitating normalization between Israel and three Arab states: Morocco, the UAE and Bahrain (Sudan too, but it has since fallen apart), all geared to buy into Trump’s transactional style of diplomacy even without a Palestinian solution.
Will Trump try again, perhaps in the hope of persuading the Saudis, too, to normalize with Israel? Trump is of course unpredictable, and not a strategic thinker. But if nothing else, he seems to be better at intimidating the Netanyahu government than Biden has been. Still, thus far there is no viable strategic thinking about Gaza on either side of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean.
Q. Bottom line #1: why has Gaza failed?
A. Lack of resources, over-population, absence of civil society foundations, Israeli mismanagement, Arab insistence that Gaza’s refugees remain refugees, abysmal failure of state-building by any and all, and isolation from the Arab world--reinforced, paradoxically, by neighboring Egypt. None of this bodes well for the future.
Q. Bottom line #2: what will release of hostages, even in prolonged stages, mean for Israelis?
A. For those Israelis who cling to the foundational values of Zionism--in other words, all but Haredim, messianics, and Netanyahu’s many groupies--it will mean confronting the abject failure of the state and its institutions on October 7, 2023 to live up to those values. It will mean prolonged, gut-wrenching months of reckoning, crisis and meltdown.
Assad Falls (Hard Questions, Tough Answers- December 9, 2024)
Yossi Alpher is an independent security analyst. He is the former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, a former senior official with the Mossad, and a former IDF intelligence officer. Views and positions expressed here are those of the writer, and do not necessarily represent NJN's views and policy positions.
Q. A rebel coalition has taken over large swaths of Syrian territory including the capital, Damascus. The rebels are mainly Islamist and are backed by Turkey. President Bashar Assad has fled and the Syrian army has collapsed. Iranian and Russian allied forces have abandoned the regime. What does this mean for Israel, the region, and the world?
A. Once again, and not surprisingly, events are not unfolding as expected in the Middle East. Israel’s battlefield achievements in Lebanon and against Iran appear to have ended up, in neighboring Syria, weakening some actors and empowering others in a manner anticipated by almost none.
This is a major strategic and intelligence surprise on all fronts--for all parties, Israel included, with the sole exception of Turkey. One obvious interim conclusion at the intelligence level is that the degree of Syrian military dependency on Iranian, Hezbollah and Russian forces, meaning the inherent weakness of the Assad regime, was vastly underestimated by not only Israel but practically everyone else.
The rebels are led by Hayat Tahrir a-Sham, an offshoot of al-Qaeda that survived the years since the Qaeda defeat in Iraq and Syria by sheltering in the northwest corner of Syria under the auspices of Turkiye, which is led by the Erdogan government with its Islamist leanings. But the rebel coalition includes non-Islamist Arabs as well as non-Arabs: Kurds and Druze.
The dust has not even begun to settle yet, so this is a very preliminary assessment of the strategic consequences for Israel and for additional regional and global actors.
Q. Let’s start with the Israel-Hezbollah-Syria-Iran dynamic . . .
A. In the course of recent months, Israel inflicted heavy losses on Hezbollah as well as its patron, Iran. This had the effect of weakening the Assad regime in Syria, which Iran and Hezbollah had been supporting in its conflicts with Syrian Islamists and Kurds. And while Bashar Assad was no friend of Israel and the Iranian and Iranian-proxy presence in Syria was seen as a threat, the specter of resurgent Islamists setting up shop in Damascus is hardly welcomed by Jerusalem.
Under prevailing geostrategic circumstances, there is no ideal neighbor for Israel across the Golan border with Syria. Israel confronts the reality of its battlefield accomplishments in southern Lebanon contributing to a dangerous destabilization in Syria and a possible Islamist threat on Israel’s northern border with Syria. This is particularly worrisome insofar as those same battlefield accomplishments against Hezbollah will not necessarily lead to a stable ceasefire on the northern border with Lebanon.
Not necessarily, yet with Hezbollah weakened and no longer supported by an Iranian arms pipeline via Syria, the balance of power within Lebanon is changing. Admittedly, Lebanon is a largely dysfunctional state. But if relatively moderate Lebanese actors--Christians, Sunni Muslims, Druze, moderate Shiites--now even begin to get their political act together, Israel may be able to contemplate a more tranquil Lebanon border and even genuine cooperation in the maritime gas sector.
On the other hand, a resurgent Sunni Islamist Syria could seek to empower Lebanon’s Sunnis or to reassert hegemony in Lebanon. In other words, too many options are opening up to be able to project the future course of Syrian-Lebanese and Israeli-Lebanese relations.
At the very least, a million Syrian refugees in Lebanon, a similar number in Jordan, and several million in Turkiye--another Erdogan concern--may now go home. On the eve of this revolution, roughly a third of all Syrians were refugees or internally displaced.
Q. And within Syria?
A. Remember Caesar? “Omnia Gallia in tres partes divisa est”: ‘All Gall is divided into three parts’, the opening sentence of The Gallic Wars. (Well, you’ll remember only if you’re old enough to have studied Latin.) The notion of fragmented countries brings Syria to mind.
At the heart of the Levant, Syria is divided territorially among US-backed Kurds in the northeast, a Sunni Arab majority in the center, Alawites along the Mediterranean coast, Druze in the south around Suweida near both Jordan and Israel, and important contingents of Christians, Ismailis and Shiites. Iraq, Libya and especially Lebanon are also badly fragmented ethnically, but Syria is in the worst shape. At the time of his demise, Bashar Assad ruled over less than 70 percent of his country.
The Assad clan, Alawites, ruled for 57 years by coopting the Sunnis economically, bringing the other minorities into the armed forces and, once confronted by Sunni Islamists and additional rebels in 2011, falling back on Russian, Iranian and (Iranian-proxy) Lebanese Hezbollah forces. This was a mafia-family regime and a major Middle East drug manufacturer and smuggler. Hafez the father and Bashar the son each murdered hundreds of thousands of their own citizens, some by using lethal gas. Good riddance!
Now the Sunni majority has retaken power. But these are primarily Sunni Islamists, not the Sunni merchants who in past centuries made the Levant a trading center. At least for now, the rebels’ 42-year-old leader, Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, projects an enlightened image on CNN.
How will the Sunni merchants respond? How will the new regime treat Syria’s minorities, especially Assad’s Alawites who oppressed so many Syrians? And how will the minorities react? Then there are Syria’s Arab Muslim neighbors in Jordan and Iraq, who fear a Sunni Islamist neighbor and a domino effect.
One way or another, there will now be hostile Syrian forces near Israel’s border. The IDF is already digging a deep boundary trench. It has stepped up the ‘Campaign between Wars’ bombing of Assad’s chemical and additional strategic weapons stockpiles lest they fall into Islamist hands.
The IDF could potentially be drawn into Syrian territory. It has already quickly occupied no-man’s land east of the Golan border. It has grabbed the highest Hermon peak, which dominates Syria to the east. All this makes sense at least until the dust settles.
But Israel learned a bitter lesson in 1982 in Lebanon about meddling in its neighbors’ domestic affairs. The Netanyahu government will hopefully now apply this lesson to Syria. Meanwhile, with its prominent Druze minority, Israel is concerned for the fate of fellow Druze in and around Al-Suwayda on the Syria-Jordan border.
Q. Bottom line?
A. An incredible and totally unanticipated chain of events has just transpired in the heart of the Middle East. Looked at through the (admittedly simplistic) lens of chaos theory, the beating of the butterfly’s wings that set this off was Netanyahu’s ‘judicial reform’ initiative of January 2023. The angry response of leading sectors of the Israeli public, who saw this as an attempt to dismantle Israeli democracy, and Netanyahu’s persistence, were seen by Israel’s Iran-led Islamist enemies as a sign of historic weakness of the Zionist enterprise. They attacked.
The IDF, caught on October 7, 2023 with its guard down, recovered, fought back and, in recent months, defeated the Islamists--particularly the Iranians and Iran-led Shiites in Lebanon who had been the mainstay of the Assad regime in Syria. Iran was now weak; so, incidentally, was Russia thanks to its Ukraine adventure. Together with Iran, Russia had sustained the Assad regime and rescued it from its ‘Arab Spring’ revolution. Now Assad’s Sunni Islamist enemies, led by a remnant of al-Qaeda and egged on by the Erdogan-led Islamist government in neighboring Turkey, sensed Assad’s isolation and attacked. Iranian and Russian support forces disappeared. The Assad regime and its army collapsed.
Israel may well have exchanged its Shiite Islamist enemies (Iran, Hezbollah, proxies in Yemen and Iraq) for Sunni Islamist enemies--the remnant of al-Qaeda that led a hodge-podge of anti-regime forces against Assad in Syria and that now sits on Israel’s Golan border. How the new Syrian regime will behave is impossible to say. Syria is full of dissident minorities, some of which could conceivably make common cause with Israel or with factions in Lebanon and all of which will now have to be either ‘managed’ or subdued by the new regime.
The IDF has provided humanitarian aid to warring Syrian factions in the past. This may again become advantageous in the future.
Q. Are there any state winners and losers here?
A. Turkiye appears to be a winner. It has installed a friendly regime in Damascus, one that presumably will now confront and weaken the Kurds who have developed autonomy along the Syrian border with Turkiye and tend to incite Turkiye’s large Kurdish minority. Still, it is not known whether Hayat Tahrir and Turkiye share the same end-goal for Syria. It is very possible that Erdogan simply wanted to set in motion a process that allows him to clear his eastern border with Syria of Kurdish dissidents and to return millions of Syrian refugees to Syrian soil.
Iran is clearly a loser, a development over which few in the region, Israel included, are shedding tears. Iran’s proxy, Lebanese Hezbollah, has now lost not only in Lebanon; its own expeditionary force helping Assad in Syria has fled. The vaunted ‘Shiite Crescent’ Iran created, linking Tehran via Baghdad and Damascus to Beirut--for years the focus of Israel’s ‘Campaign between Wars’--is, thankfully, in tatters.
The United States, incidentally, must tentatively be listed in the loser column. Its small but strategically-located forces stationed in Tanf near Syria’s borders with Iraq and Jordan and in eastern Syria, supporting Kurdish and other non-Islamist anti-Assad forces, will now be challenged by Syria’s new Islamist regime. Recall: Syria’s new rulers are a reemerging remnant of al-Qaeda and ISIS, the sworn enemies of the United States, which a US-led coalition once defeated. ISIS prisoners are still held by the Kurds and others in the eastern Syrian desert.
US forces have already bombed residual ISIS forces in eastern Syria to keep them from joining the victorious rebels. But the Biden administration has also reached out to the prospective new regime to test its declared moderation. In contrast, President-elect Trump professes to evince indifference to Syria’s fate right now. He should beware lest the new Syria ends up challenging American interests.
Russia has ‘lost’ Syria, its Middle East stronghold and a warm-water port. Will the new regime in Damascus now expel Moscow from its bases on the Syrian Mediterranean coast? Or will it seek accommodation?
Israel, tentatively, is a winner. The Iranian and Iranian-proxy threat has been significantly weakened. Al-Qaeda redux along the border is not nearly as bad. Meanwhile, there still is no resolution of Israel’s conflict in Gaza and, despite intensive US, Egyptian and Qatari efforts, no hostage release. Hamas may bear much of the blame, but the very same counter-functional Netanyahu government that indirectly helped launch the chaos in Syria is also a primary cause.
Sunni Islamist Hamas could now conceivably draw encouragement from the Sunni Islamist victory in Syria. Then too, events in Syria pose the prospect of new grand-strategic regional developments that could divert Israel’s immediate attention. Still, it is most likely that Hamas now feels more isolated than ever, hence more inclined to do a hostage-for-ceasefire deal with Israel.