04 May 2017
Israel and the Syrian Civil War
An increasingly difficult balancing act.
by Neil Tidmarsh
A massive explosion shook Damascus international airport last Thursday. The blast was heard 15 miles away, in the centre of Syria’s capital city. It was an air-strike on an arms depot – but by which of the powers involved in this confusing conflict? By the USA, striking another punitive blow against the Assad regime? By Russia, hitting out against the rebels? By Turkey, against the regime? By the regime itself? By Assad’s ally Iran?
By none of them, or so it seems. The official Syrian news agency blamed Israel, and Israel’s intelligence minister Yisrael Katz didn’t deny it.
Israel and Syria are neighbours, sharing a frontier of about 100 kilometres (a disputed frontier which includes the Golan Heights; the two countries have been at war more or less since Israel was founded, and are technically still at war). But Israel has maintained a strictly neutral position since the civil war in Syria began.
Nevertheless, it has been supplying impartial humanitarian aid to Syrians in need throughout the conflict. The Israeli army has been transporting wounded Syrians across the border into Israel by the bus load to be treated in hospitals in northern Israel. More than 3000 individuals – mostly young male fighters – have received medical aid in this way. Patients are initially assessed in a small military field hospital in the Golan Heights, where soldiers ensure that they are not armed or carrying bombs, before being moved to civilian hospitals. The patient’s affiliation (regime or rebel) is regarded as irrelevant. Elsewhere, a dedicated clinic at Ziv hospital, in the northern Israeli city of Safed, has treated getting on for 1000 Syrian men, women and children suffering from illnesses and injuries not resulting from the armed conflict. Syrian children receive immunisation and Syrian babies are born in Israeli maternity wards.
Last Thursday’s air-strike, however, suggests that Israel is now prepared to undertake military as well as humanitarian intervention in its neighbour’s troubles. Its target was an arms depot supplied by Assad’s ally Iran, and which Israeli intelligence believed had just been stocked with weapons meant for Hezbollah (the Lebanese Shia militia group supported by Iran, dedicated to the destruction of Israel and proscribed by most of the world as a terrorist organisation); some hours before the explosion, four cargo planes from Iran had landed at the airport and at least one of them had links to Iran’s revolutionary guards. Israel’s main concern is that such weapons could be used against itself, outside the Syrian conflict, rather than just against the anti-Assad rebels which the Iran-backed Shia militias are fighting in Syria.
This wasn’t in fact the first time that Israel has intervened in this way. Four Israeli jets hit an arms depot near Palmyra last month; Syrian anti-aircraft batteries fired on the jets and one of the missiles was shot down over the Sea of Galilee by an Israeli defence system. None of the jets was hit, and an Israeli army spokesman said that the strike destroyed nearly 100 missiles bound for Hezbollah militants in the Lebanon. It’s thought that Israel has made at least ten strikes in Syria to prevent the transfer of advanced weapons (such as anti-ship missiles) to Hezbollah since last November, and as many as thirty since the start of the civil war.
So far such interventions have been aimed only at preventing Israel’s enemies from arming themselves for attacks against the Israeli state. The fact that Israel co-ordinates its action in Syria with Assad’s ally Russia (the Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov admitted last week that the two countries are in “constant dialogue”), suggests that such actions so far aren’t seen as breaching its neutrality.
There is still a danger that Israel may be drawn into the conflict, however, and that danger is increasing. So far there have been no incursions into Israel from Syria, but a few days ago an Israeli Patriot missile brought down a drone flying into Israel from Syria over the Golan Heights. Assad’s ally and Hezbollah’s sponsor, Iran, remains an avowed enemy of Israel. Its growing presence and strategic importance in Syria could be seen as a result of the lifting of sanctions following the controversial nuclear program deal which Israel fiercely opposed (and Israel has made it plain that it won’t tolerate a nuclear-armed Iran). The hostility between the two countries is one of the many oppositions manifested in the Syrian conflict which could make the civil war, terrible as it is, escalate into something even more terrible.
With the White House about to pronounce on its policy towards Iran (President Trump shares Israel’s opposition to the nuclear deal) and with presidential elections in Iran later this month which will determine whether President Rouhani will continue his détente with the West or be replaced by hard-liners, Israel’s attitude towards the Syrian conflict is likely to become more complex, intense and consequential in the weeks ahead.
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