Israel's extensive Syria strike signals: Business as usual despite Trump and Putin
haaretz.com
The aerial attack on Syria Tuesday attributed to Israel came less than a week after U.S. President Donald Trump announced the pullout of American forces
from the country. The alleged Israeli strike may have been in pursuit
of some specific military goal - to bomb Iranian weapons depots, for
instance - but it has a broader political context. Israel is signaling
that from its perspective, it's business as usual again: Despite Trump's
announcement and despite Russia's fury about its Ilyushin plane getting shot down last September, Israel sees itself as free to continue attacking targets in Syria, when necessary. Israeli attacks on Syria have very much reduced
since the downing of the Ilyushin (which the Syria aerial defense system
shot by mistake during an Israeli air raid), according to foreign media
reports.
>> Read more: U.S. exit from Syria could redraw the map of the Middle East's blocs ■ Thank you, Trump, for getting out of Syria ■ Israel left with false Russian promises and a volatile U.S. president ■ Israel gears up for elections: Netanyahu’s strongest advantage over his challengers | Analysis
Russia,
wanting to stabilize the Assad regime, pressed Iran to reduce its arms
smuggling and attempts to establish a military presence in Syria; it
also leveraged the incident of the downed plane to press Israel to
reduce its Syria strikes.
The Israeli army sent
a delegation headed by General Aharon Haliwa, head of the IDF
operations division, to Moscow in mid-December. It is possible that
Russia's opposition to Israel's renewed attacks in Syria was softened to
some degree by that meeting. The Russians could also have an interest
in Israel constraining the Iranian drive to increase its military assets
in Syria.
It
is of interest in any case that the attacks ascribed to Israel are
focusing on the greater Damascus area, remote from the most sensitive
area from Russia's perspective – an air base and the cities of Tartus
and Latakia, in northwest Syria where the Ilyushin was shot down. Israel has another argument beyond the message
that Trump's withdrawal does not deflect it from its path. Last summer,
when Russia aided Assad's forces in regaining Syria's south, Moscow
promised Jerusalem that it would keep the Iranians 80 kilometers away from Israel's border in the Golan Heights.
In practice, the Russians didn't include Damascus and its suburbs in that no-go zone, and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard
Corps' Quds force continues to operate there. Moreover, there are still
signs of Iranian and Hezbollah activity on the Syrian side of the
border in the Golan Heights.
In
any case, the resumed Israeli-Iranian brawl in Syria is still low-key.
Israel may prefer to strike more targets in fewer raids to prevent a
gratuitous escalation of the situation. According to Syrian reports, the
Israeli jets that struck Damascus operated from Lebanese airspace. The
Syrian anti-aircraft systems responded, as they have done over the last
two years, with massive missile fire. One of the missiles seemed to
penetrate Israeli airspace and an intercepting missile was fired in
response. Insofar as is known, there was no interception and the IDF did
not specify which air defense systems were activated.
Meanwhile, the IDF is still working on locating Hezbollah tunnels
on the Lebanese border. Likud ministers on the talk radio circuit on
Tuesday following Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's surprise snap
election announcement said the mission up north is all but over.
It's a classic case
of reverse engineering the facts. To prevent Habayit Hayehudi from
abandoning the coalition in mid-November, Netanyahu used the excuse of
the tunnels (the nature of the challenge remains as mysterious to
Hezbollah as it does to the Israeli public), claiming that the military
situation was sensitive (so elections shouldn't be held).
Now
that the legal and political circumstances have changed and elections
are planned, one can hardly be in the middle of a sensitive operation,
hence the haste to declare it all but finished.
In practice, however,
it will take many more weeks to finish finding and destroying all of
Hezbollah's tunnels into Israel. This shouldn't affect the timing of
elections, but in hindsight also applies to Netanyahu's original
"sacrifice" speech more than a month ago.
The tunnels operation
is complicated and has some potential for trouble developing with
Hezbollah, which hasn't happened yet. That's all, and it has nothing to
do with the elections.
Haaretz Correspondent
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