Syrian Requiem by Itamar Rabinovich

Author:Itamar Rabinovich [Rabinovich, Itamar]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780691193311
Publisher: PrincetonUP
Published: 2020-11-07T00:00:00+00:00

Israeli Policy

One of the many ironies of the Syrian crisis was that during its first six years—from March 2011 to December 2016—of Syria’s five neighbors, its nemesis, Israel, was the least involved in and least affected by the civil war raging north of its border. Israel’s calculus and level of involvement underwent some changes but was not significantly transformed until the capture of Aleppo by the regime and its allies, signifying the regime’s victory in the domestic civil war. This victory did not quite mean that the Syrian crisis was ending, or that a unified state controlling Syria was about to be reestablished. But it did mean that Israel had to assess the repercussions of a resuscitated Asad regime now controlling a large part of Syria under Russian and Iranian tutelage; an Iranian effort to construct an offensive military infrastructure in Syria; and the deployment of Syrian, Iranian, and Shi‘i militias in the Syrian Golan.

Israel’s original response to the Syrian civil war was shaped by two decades of lingering hostility and sporadic diplomacy between the two countries. Since 1992 several Israeli prime ministers had negotiated seriously with Hafez and Bashar al-Asad in an effort to resolve the Israeli-Syrian conflict. Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, Benjamin Netanyahu, Ehud Barak, and Ehud Olmert all used different versions of a formula that included a willingness to withdraw from the Golan in return for a package of peace and security, modelled after the Israeli-Egyptian treaty of 1979. Time and again, however, the brink of peace was not crossed.18 At the same time, the Asad regime continued to wage its conflict with Israel through its support for Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, and to bolster the regime’s legitimacy by depicting it as the bastion of Arab resistance (muqawama) to the United States and Israel. The unsuccessful war in Lebanon in 2006 demonstrated to Israel the severity of the challenge posed by the Iranian-Hezbollah-Syrian axis. When the Obama administration launched a mediation effort between Israel and Syria in 2010, it was predicated not on the familiar “territories for peace” formula but instead on the notion of “territory for strategic realignment.” In other words, in return for Israeli withdrawal from the Golan, Syria was to disengage from its alliance with Iran and Hezbollah, in addition to signing a peace agreement with Israel.

This mediation was terminated by the outbreak of the Syrian rebellion. Just before the outbreak of popular demonstrations in Syria in the spring of 2011, however, prospects for an Israeli-Syrian peace deal seemed real, as the American diplomat Fred Hof attested in a blog post published on July 20, 2018:

For several months leading up to mid March 2011 I had been shuttling between Jerusalem and Damascus as a deputy to Special Envoy for Middle East Peace George Mitchell. I had in my briefcase a draft Israeli Syrian treaty of peace. A document I had composed with the help of a senior White House official [Dennis Ross]. My objective was formal Israeli Syrian peace. The phased

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.