Israeli factor in Syrian conflict

Nicola Nasser
More than two-and-a-half years on, Israel’s purported neutrality in the Syrian conflict and the United State’s fanfare rhetoric urging a “regime change” in Damascus were abruptly cut short to unveil that the Israeli factor has been all throughout the conflict the main concern of both countries. All their media and political focus on “democracy versus dictatorship” and on the intervention of the international community on the basis of a “responsibility to protect” to avert the exacerbating “humanitarian crisis” in Syria was merely a focus intended to divert the attention of the world public opinion away from their real goal, ie to safeguard the security of Israel.

Their “Plan A” was to enforce a change in the Syrian regime as their “big prize” and replace it by another less threatening and more willing to strike a “peace deal” with Israel and in case of failure, which is the case as developed now, their “Plan B” was to pursue a “lesser prize” by disarming Syria of its chemical weapons to deprive it of its strategic defensive deterrence against the Israeli overwhelming arsenal of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction.

Their “Plan A” proved a failure, but their “Plan B” was a success. However, the fact that the Syrian humanitarian crisis continues unabated with the raging non–stop fighting while the US is gradually coming to terms with Syria’s major allies in Russia and Iran as a prelude to recognising the “legitimacy” of the status quo in Syria is a fact that shatters whatever remains of US credibility in the conflict.
US president Barack Obama, addressing the UN General Assembly on September 24, had this justification: “Let us remember that this is not a zero-sum endeavour. We are no longer in a Cold War.

“There’s no Great Game to be won, nor does America have any interest in Syria beyond the well-being of its people, the stability of its neighbours, the elimination of chemical weapons, and ensuring it does not become a safe-haven for terrorists. I welcome the influence of all nations that can help bring about a peaceful resolution.”

This U-turn by the US dispels any remaining doubts that the US ever cared about the Syrian people and what Obama called their “well being.”

The US pronounced commitment to a “political solution” through co-sponsoring with Russia the convening of a “Geneva – 2” conference is compromised by its purported inability to unite even the “opposition” that was created and sponsored by the US itself and the “friends of Syria” it leads and to rein in the continued fuelling of the armed conflict with arms, money and logistics by its regional Turkish and Gulf Arab allies, which undermines any political solution and renders the convening of a “Geneva – 2” conference a guess of anybody.
Israeli “Punishment”

Meanwhile, Israel’s neutrality was shuttered by none other than its President Shimon Peres. Speaking at the 40th commemoration of some 3 000 Israeli soldiers who were killed in the 1973 war with Syria and Egypt, Peres revealed unarguably that his state has been the major beneficiary of the Syrian conflict. Peres said: “Today” the Syrian President Basher al-Assad “is punished for his refusal to compromise” with Israel and “the Syrian people pay for it.”

When it became stark clear by the latest developments that there will be no “regime change” in Syria nor will there be a post- Assad “Day After” and that the US major guarantor of Israel’s survival has made, or is about to make, a “U-turn” in its policy vis-à-vis the Syrian conflict to exclude the military solution as “unacceptable,” in the words of Secretary of State John Kerry on October 6, Israel got impatient and could not hide anymore the Israeli factor in the conflict.

On September 17, major news wires headlined their reports, “In public shift, Israel calls for Assad’s fall,” citing a report published by the Israeli daily the Jerusalem Post, which quoted Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, as saying: “We always wanted Bashar Assad to go, we always preferred the bad guys who weren’t backed by Iran to the bad guys who were backed by Iran.”
“The greatest danger to Israel is by the strategic arc that extends from Tehran, to Damascus to Beirut. And we saw the Assad regime as the keystone in that arc,” Oren added.

And that’s really the crux of the Syrian conflict: Dismantling this “arc” has been all throughout the conflict the pronounced strategy of the US-led so-called “Friends of Syria,” who are themselves the friends of Israel.

The goal of this strategy has been all throughout the conflict to change the regime of what Oren called the Syrian “keystone in that arc,” which is supported by a pro-Iran government in Iraq as well as by the Palestinian liberation movements resisting the more than six decades of Israeli military occupation, or otherwise to deplete Syria’s resources, infrastructure and power until it has no choice other than the option of yielding unconditionally to the Israeli terms and conditions of what Peres called a “compromise” with Israel as a precondition for the return of the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights.

Syria the Odd Number
This strategic goal was smoke-screened by portraying the conflict first as one of a popular uprising turned into an armed rebellion against a dictatorship, then as a sectarian “civil war,” third as a proxy war in an Arab-Iranian and a Sunni-Shiite historical divide, fourth as a battle ground of conflicting regional and international geopolitics, but the Israeli factor has been all throughout the core of the conflict.
Otherwise why should the US-led “Friends of Syria & Israel” care about the ruling regime in a country that is not abundant in oil and gas, the “free” flow of which was repeatedly pronounced a “vital” interest of the United States, or one of what Obama in his UN speech called his country’s “core interests;” the security of Israel is another “vital” or “core” interest, which, in his words, “The United States of America is prepared to use all elements of our power, including military force, to secure.”

Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist based in Birzeit, West Bank of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories. This article is reproduced from Counterpunch