The timing of the Israeli air raid early on 30 January on a Syrian target that has yet to be identified coincided with hard-to-refute indications that the aim of effecting regime change in Syria by force, by foreign military intervention and by internal armed rebellion, has failed, driving the Syrian opposition in exile to opt unwillingly for negotiations with the ruling regime with the blessing of the US, the EU and Arab League. As a Deutsche Welle report on 2 February put it, “nearly two years since the revolt began [Syrian President Bashar Al-] Assad is still sitting comfortably in his presidential chair.” Nonetheless, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has said that Israel is preparing for “dramatic changes” in Syria, though senior Israeli Foreign Ministry officials have accused him of “fear-mongering” in order to justify his ordering what the Russians have described as the “unprovoked” raid on Syria on 29 January. One Israeli official told the Israeli Maariv newspaper that no Israeli “red lines” had been crossed with regard to the reported chemical weapons in Syria to justify the raid. On 16 January, Israeli National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor said there was “no evidence” of any Syrian steps to use such weapons. On 8 December last year, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon said there were “no confirmed reports” that Damascus was preparing to use them. Three days later, former US defense secretary Leon Panetta said that “we have not seen anything new” on chemical weapons “indicating any aggressive steps” by Syria. On 31 January, NATO Secretary-General Andres Fogh Rasmussen said that “I have no new information about chemical weapons [in Syria].” Syria's Russian ally has repeatedly confirmed what Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on 2 February that “we have reliable information” that the Syrian government has maintained control of its chemical weapons and “won't use” them. This is what Syria itself has kept repeating, and “there is no particular reason why Israel is to be believed and Syria not,” according to a Saudi Gazette editorial on 3 February. It is more likely that Israel is either trying to escalate the situation militarily in order to embroil an unwilling United States in the Syrian conflict, in an attempt to pre-empt a political solution out of a belief that the fall of the Al-Assad regime will serve Israel's strategy, according to the former head of the Israeli Military Intelligence Directorate Amos Yaldin, or it is trying to establish a seat at any international negotiating table for itself that might be detrimental in shaping a future regime in Syria. However, escalating the situation militarily at a time of political de-escalation will not secure a seat for Israel in any forum. This is the message that the Israeli chief of general staff, General Benny Gantz, should have heard during his latest five-day visit to the US from his host in Washington, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin E. Dempsey. The head of Israel's National Security Bureau, General Yaakov Amidror, in Moscow at the same time, should have heard a similar message from his Russian hosts. The Israeli military intervention at this particular time fuels a Syrian fire that has recently started to attract firefighters from among the growing number of advocates of dialogue, negotiations and a political solution nationally, regionally and internationally. The escalating humanitarian crisis and the rising death toll in Syria have made imperative one of two options: either a foreign military intervention, or a political solution. Two years since the US, EU, Turkish and Qatari adoption of the idea of regime change in Syria by force, on the lines of the Libyan scenario, the first option has failed to materialise. With the legitimate Syrian government gaining the upper hand militarily on the ground, the inability of the rebels to “liberate” even one city, town or enough area in the countryside to be declared a buffer zone, or to host the self-proclaimed leadership of the opposition in exile, which failed during the Paris-hosted Friends of Syria meeting on 28 January to agree on a “government-in-exile”, makes it more likely that the second option of a political solution is the only way forward and the only way out of the bloodshed and snowballing humanitarian crisis. In this context, the Israeli air raid sends a message that the military option could yet be pursued. The rebels, who have based their overall strategy on a foreign military intervention, have discovered that the only outside intervention they have been able to get has been from the international network of Al-Qaeda and the international organisation of the Muslim Brotherhood. It should come as no surprise, then, that the frustrated Syrian rebels have been losing ground, momentum and morale. An Israeli military intervention would undoubtedly revive their morale, but it would do so only temporarily because it would not guarantee that it could succeed in improving their chances where failure has doomed the collective efforts of the Friends of Syria, whose numbers have dwindled over time from more than one hundred nations two years ago to about 50 in the group's last meeting in Paris. Such an intervention would only promise more of the same, prolonging the military conflict, shedding more Syrian blood, exacerbating the humanitarian crisis, multiplying the numbers of those displaced inside the country and the Syrian refugees abroad, postponing an inevitable political solution, and significantly rallying more Syrians in support of the ruling regime in defending their country against the Israeli occupier of the Golan heights, thereby isolating the rebels by depriving them of whatever support their terrorist tactics have left them. More importantly, however, such an Israeli intervention also risks inviting an outburst of violence in the region if it is not contained by the international community or if it succeeds in inviting reciprocal Syrian retaliation. Both Syrians and Israelis have gone on record in the aftermath of the Israeli raid to the effect that the bilateral rules of engagement have already changed. The Friends of Syria have also gone on record to the effect that they have been doing what they could to enforce a “buffer zone” inside Syria. They have tried to create such a zone through Turkey in northern Syria, through Jordan in the south, through Lebanon in the west and on the borders with Iraq in the east, but they have failed to make one materialise. They have tried to enforce the idea by a resolution from the UN Security Council, but their efforts have been aborted three times by a dual Russian-Chinese veto. They have also tried, unsuccessfully so far, to enforce such a zone outside the jurisdiction of the United Nations by arming an internal rebellion that is on the public payroll of Qatar and Saudi Arabia and is logistically supported by Turkey and the US. This rebellion has also been supported by the British, French and German intelligence services, and it has been spearheaded mainly by the Al-Qaeda-linked Al-Nusra Front. It has focussed on the peripheral areas sharing borders with Turkey, Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon, after the failure of an early attempt to make the western Syrian port city of Latakia play the role Benghazi played in the Libyan scenario. Israel has now stepped into the conflict publicly for the first time, in order to try its hand at enforcing a “buffer zone” of its own in an attempt to succeed where the Friends of Syria have failed. On 3 February, the British Sunday Times newspaper reported that Israel was considering creating a buffer zone reaching up to ten miles inside Syria modeled on a similar zone it created in southern Lebanon in 1985 and from which it was forced to withdraw unconditionally by the Hizbullah-led and Syrian and Iranian-supported Lebanese resistance in 2000. The Israeli daily Maariv the next day confirmed the Times report, adding that the zone would be created in cooperation with local Arab villages on the Syrian side of the UN-monitored buffer zone, which was created on both sides of the armistice line after the 1973 War. Israel in fact has been paving the way on the ground for an Israeli-created buffer zone in Syria. Earlier, in a much less publicised development, Israel allowed the UN-monitored buffer zone between Syria and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights to be overtaken by “Islamist” Syrian rebels. The European Jewish press reported on 1 January that Netanyahu had been informed that the rebels “have taken up positions along the border with Israel, with the exception of the Quneitra enclave” during a visit to the Heights. Earlier, on 14 November last year, Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak was quoted by the news agency AP as confirming that the “Syrian rebels control almost all the villages near the frontier with the Israeli-held Golan Heights.” On 13 December, The Jerusalem Post quoted a “senior [Israeli] military source” as saying that “the rebel control of the area does not require changes on our part.” There are about 1,000 UN observers monitoring the zone. An “Israeli officer” told a reporter for the US McClatchy news organisation last November that the rebels in the zone were “fewer than 1,000 fighters”. Canada withdrew its contingent of monitors last September, and Japan followed suit in January. In the previous month, France's ambassador to the UN, Gérard Araud, warned that the UN peacekeeping force on the Golan Heights could “collapse”, according to The Times of Israel, citing the London-based Arab daily Al-Hayat. The 1974 armistice agreement prohibits the Syrian government from engaging in military activity within the buffer zone. Should it do so, it risks military confrontation with Israel, and, according to Moshe Maoz, a professor at Jerusalem's Hebrew University, “the Syrian army doesn't have any interest in provoking Israel” because “Syria has enough problems” of its own. However, it is anybody's guess how long Syria will be able to tolerate the turning of the UN-monitored demilitarised buffer zone into a terrorist safe-haven and a supply corridor linking the rebels in Lebanon to their brothers in southern Syria. Israel has now military challenged the presence of the Al-Qaeda-linked rebels on its side of the supposedly demilitarised zone, and it has not complained to or asked the United Nations for reinforcement of the UN monitors there. Ironically, Israel has cited the presence of those same rebels along the borders of the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights as a pretext to justify “considering creating a buffer zone” inside Syria.
The writer is an Arab journalist based in Bir Zeit on the occupied West Bank.
