Israel Is Leveraging Post-Assad Chaos To Move Into Syria

Israel’s message is clear: regardless of who governs Syria, Israel will ensure it does not possess the basic military capacity to defend itself.

By Jeremy Scahill and Sharif Abdel Kouddous, Drop Site

As armed opposition militias marched into Damascus and overthrew the government of Bashar al-Assad, Israel wasted no time in unleashing a massive campaign of airstrikes across Syria. While statues of Assad and his father, Hafez, were being pulled down from city squares across the country and thousands of political prisoners were being freed, Israeli tanks crossed through the occupied Golan Heights and invaded deeper into Syrian territory, occupying a “buffer zone” created in 1974. By Tuesday, Israeli forces had penetrated farther into the country, occupying a swath of territory twice the size of the Gaza Strip.

While Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has described the bombing and invasion as self-defense, many of the military sites destroyed by Israel were defensive weapons systems and conventional military facilities. Netanyahu declared that the Golan Heights, occupied by Israel for nearly 60 years, will remain part of Israel “for eternity,” citing its strategic importance for Israeli security. On Monday, Netanyahu heralded what he called “a new and dramatic chapter” in the history of the Middle East. “The collapse of the Syrian regime is a direct result,” he said, “of the severe blows with which we have struck Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran.”

As Netanyahu spoke, the Israeli military was expanding its sweeping campaign to degrade or eliminate Syrian military deterrence capabilities standard among nation states. Israel’s message is clear: regardless of who governs Syria, Israel will ensure it does not possess the basic military capacity to defend itself.

“It’s showing Syrian people straight away, ‘Our problem is with you. It’s with your sovereignty, it’s with your existence, it’s with your security. What we’re doing now is making sure that you are totally defenseless. We’re exploiting this moment of chaos to completely disarm you and make sure that you’re completely defenseless in the future so that we can do whatever we like,’” said Robin Yassin-Kassab, a British-Syrian analyst and co-author of the book Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War. “There’s never been such crazy Israeli bombing in Syria. They’re arranging to disarm Syria completely, to make it completely defenseless and to humiliate it. That’s the way that Syrians are understanding it as well. They are humiliating Syria.”

The U.N. special envoy for Syria Geir Pederse called Israel’s military operations in Syria “very troubling” in a briefing in Geneva. “We are continuing to see Israeli movements and bombardments into Syrian territory,” he said. “This needs to stop.”