Israel Faces a Reshuffled Strategic Deck in Syria | Opinion

Suddenly, Israel has a Syria problem.

For years, officials in Jerusalem had banked on a relatively predictable balance of power with the neighboring regime of Bashar al-Assad in Damascus. Despite Assad's enduring hostility toward the Jewish state and the inherent weakness of his regime, a tenuous status quo had been struck between the two countries, making it generally possible to anticipate how the Syrian dictator would behave. This has served as a perverse source of comfort over the past 14 months, as Israel has found itself preoccupied with the threat of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, and more recently, that of Hezbollah in Lebanon.

But no longer. The rapid December collapse of the Assad regime in the face of reinvigorated domestic opposition has demolished the old status quo in the Levant. In its place, the world has seen the rise of a motley coalition of Sunni extremist groups dominated by one-time al-Qaeda affiliate Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and its charismatic leader, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani.

A Syrian rebel fighter stands before Russian-built Syrian Air Force Mil Mi-14 military helicopters on the tarmac at the Syrian military base in Latakia province in western Syria on Dec. 29, 2024. AAREF WATAD/AFP via Getty Images

At first blush, that new order might appear beneficial to Jerusalem. After all, the overthrow of Assad has helped to dislodge Iran's previously-robust presence on Israel's northern border, which had entailed dozens of military bases and thousands of deployed foreign fighters. Thousands of Iranian civilians have already fled from Syria, fearing life under Sunni control, while Iran has been forced to rely on Russia to ferry its military forces to safety. Significant, too, is the fact that the "land bridge" between Tehran and Beirut—which the Iranian regime used for years to supply weaponry to Hezbollah in Lebanon—has now effectively been severed.

Yet a closer examination suggests that Syria's transformation represents a profound strategic challenge for Israel—one that the Jewish state is now scrambling to address.

"At this stage, I don't think Israel has devised a coherent strategy vis-a-vis Syria," retired Brigadier General Eran Ortal, who previously headed the Israeli military's in-house think tank and now serves as a senior analyst at Bar-Ilan University's Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, recently told Newsweek. Instead, Israel "is watching the situation closely and taking measures to secure itself, like deploying IDF units on the Syrian Golan Heights."

Still, the post-Assad picture in Syria poses a conceptual challenge for Israel's government, which has spent the past decade focusing almost exclusively on the threat emanating from Shiite Iran and its assorted proxies. "The speed and enthusiastic embrace of al-Jolani and his Al-Qaeda partners is a source of concern," Ortal noted, since "Jolani and his coalition of rebels are known jihadists and Israel has just woken up from the dream of being able to appease a jihadi regime, the one of Hamas in Gaza." Put another way, regardless of Jolani's current conciliatory rhetoric, Israel fully expects him and his cohort to revert to their extremist type, and likely sooner rather than later.

That, however, isn't the most concerning part of the new strategic dynamic taking shape to Israel's north. "There is a real possibility that Iranian influence in Syria will be replaced by that of Turkey," Ortal explained. "No one knows what the possible Turkish role on our border will be. It is a major regional power, a NATO member, a major defense manufacturer, and an extremely Islamist, anti-Israel player. We can already see [Turkish President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan's attempts to use the new Syrian regime to further his claims to the Eastern Mediterranean."

What might all this mean? "At the end of the day," Ortal argued, "the bigger picture is that regional competition is entering a new phase. Our region is going back to imperial competition, and Israel is caught in the middle."

So, too, is Washington. The Biden administration's response to Assad's ouster has been rapid, and largely uncritical, engagement with Jolani. This has, among other things, entailed a rollback of sanctions on Syria's de facto new power broker. Such steps are presumably intended to build confidence with the new powers-that-be in Damascus, and allow the U.S., after years of disengagement, to have a more favorable footprint in the country.

What they won't do, however, is safeguard America's interests in the broader region. That will be a job for the incoming Trump administration, which will need to decide what role it wants to play in the new strategic game now afoot in the Middle East—and how it can best support regional allies, like Israel, that are beginning to feel its effects.

Ilan Berman is senior vice president of the American Foreign Policy Council in Washington, D.C.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.