Monday, October 14, 2013
Israeli Factor in Syrian Conflict Unveiled
By 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
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, i.e. 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 United States
is gradually coming to terms with Syria’s major allies in Russia and Iran as a
prelude to recognizing the “legitimacy” of the status quo in Syria is a fact
that shutters whatever remains of U.S. credibility in the conflict.
President Barak Obama, addressing the UN General Assembly
on last September 24, had this justification: “Let us remember that this is not
a zero-sum endeavor. We are no longer in a Cold War. There’s no Great Game to
be won, nor does America
have any interest in Syria
This U – turn shift by the U.S.
dispels any remaining doubts that the U.S.
The U.S. 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 U.S. itself and the “friends of Syria” it leads
and to rein in the continued fueling of the armed conflict with arms, money and
logistics by its regional Turkish and Gulf Arabs allies, which undermines any
political solution and render the very convening of a “Geneva – 2” conference a
guess of anybody.
Israeli “Punishment”
Meanwhile, Israel
Speaking at the 40th commemoration of some
three thousand Israeli soldiers who were killed in the 1973 war with Syria and Egypt
Peres said: “Today” the Syrian President Basher al-Assad
“is punished for his refusal to compromise” with Israel
When it became stark clear by the latest developments that
there will be no “regime change” in Syria nor there will be a post- Assad “Day
After” and that the U.S. 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 this October 6, Israel got impatient and could not hide
anymore the Israeli factor in the conflict.
On last 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 that’s really the crux
of the Syrian conflict: Dismantling this “arc” has been all throughout the
conflict the pronounced strategy of the U.S.-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 sixty 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.
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
U.S.-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.”
The end of the Cold War opened a “window of opportunities”
to build on the Egyptian – Israel
peace treaty, according to a study by the University of Oslo
This has been a Syrian national strategy long before the
Pan-Arab Baath party and the al-Assad dynasty came to power.
Therefore, the U.S.
* Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist based in Birzeit,
West Bank of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories.
