April 8, 2017
By Col. (Ret.) Dr. Eran Lerman
Executive Summary: Israel has carefully managed to stay out of the bloody Syrian civil war next door that has dragged on for years, but the recent poison gas attacks carried out by the Assad regime against its own people raise a serious moral dilemma for the Jewish state, which achieved independence in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust and many of whose citizens came from families killed in gas chambers. Shall Israel intervene in the struggle against Assad and risk the ire of Putin, his Russian patron—who is otherwise well-disposed toward the Jewish state? Or do the imperatives of realpolitik dictate a hands-off policy? Eran Lerman believes that Russia, in this instance, is a status quo power, and that its interests may diverge from those of Iran, which is the real engine driving radicalism in the Shi’ite world and the assault on the human rights of Syrians. In any case, Israel is only a minor geopolitical factor in the Syrian conundrum.
The dramatic events of the last few days demonstrate more sharply than ever how paradoxical – and dangerous – are the realities of our region. While Israel lives the life of a normal country, indulging in nasty political squabbles even as it enjoys remarkable prosperity and growth, minimal unemployment, huge high-tech transactions and the prospect of gas exports to Europe, our next door neighbor Syria – if the country is still worthy of a name – is slowly burning to a crisp amidst unspeakable horrors now crowned by the chemical attack in Khan al-Shaykhun. (The Russian version – that the Syrian Air Force inadvertently struck a rebel chemical depot – seems, to use a current phrase, to be "fake news").This in turn has led to the unprecedented – albeit limited – action by the U.S. military against the airbase from which the lethal raid was launched; which in turn elicited angry Russian reactions and introduced a distinctly chilly note into a U.S.-Russia relationship that was supposed to be on the mend.
What should Israel do under the circumstances? What can it do? In Syria, the Russians are allied with the Iranian regime – an enemy committed to our destruction – in the ongoing effort to support Assad's murderous regime; and they have taken a more aggressive stance recently. The Israeli Ambassador in Moscow had been called in for a dressing-down over Israeli operations in Syria. President Putin called Netanyahu to protest that Israeli reactions to the chemical massacre were based on false information. Yet overall, Putin's Russia has taken a friendly attitude towards Israel, and just this week announced that it recognizes West Jerusalem as Israel's capital. Bilateral relations are good, as is the personal relationship between the two leaders (it helps that the Russians look upon Israel as a country populated by many "sons of the homeland," and that the memory of the suffering the two peoples endured at the hands of the Nazis forges a unique historical bond).
As for Assad, he is a despicable butcher of his own people. Yet in practical terms, he remains in firm control of much of what the French used to call "la Syrie utile" – the inhabitable parts of this makeshift country, thrown together by Sir Mark Sykes and Georges Picot, and then the League of Nations mandate a century ago. Assad’s control cannot be undone by any intervention, let alone Israeli – and in any case, his forcible removal would surely result in even broader bloodshed and chaos, with Islamist radicals likely to gain the upper hand. How should Israel, and the world, respond to this perplexing reality?
To begin with, this tangle of complexities comes to remind us that by re-entering international history through the agency of the Zionist project and the State of Israel, the Jewish People also undertook to live with the painful moral ambiguities and dilemmas that political life in a deeply flawed world entail. Moral clarity and consistency cannot long survive exposure to the raw, dangerous, and potentially destructive realities swirling around us: the familiar phrases about "living in a bad neighborhood" take on a new meaning when gassed children are brought to mass graves. But the moral urge to take major aggressive action on our own, to translate our outrage into a large-scale act of intervention that would be better handled by others may lead us down ever more frightening paths.
This is not to say that we should lose our moral compass altogether. A broad range of voices in Israel – the president, the prime minister, their political colleagues, the leaders of the opposition, the media, citizens in the street – expressed their horror in terms that echoed a specific Jewish outrage at the gassing of the innocent. Some went further: former DMI Maj. Gen. (res.) Amos Yadlin, now at the INSS, suggested an Israeli airstrike to destroy the specific Syrian Air Force assets that had been involved – roughly the course of action later chosen by the Trump Administration.But for Israel to become a combatant in the Syrian civil war is an open-ended proposition that not only can end badly, but can also easily serve the Assad regime as proof that he is a defender of Arab rights, and possibly ignite a war with Hezbollah along our entire northern frontier. Moreover, it would erase the existing understandings with Russia on deconfliction between our respective air forces, and end up narrowing, rather than enhancing, Israel's room for manoeuver in reacting to specific challenges in Syria.
It is upon these specific challenges that policy should now be focusing. To begin with, Syrian obligations under UNSCR 2118 must be reaffirmed and carried out in fine detail, rather than leave Assad (as the relevant Israeli agencies assess) in possession of a "residual" chemical weapon capacity - estimated at 10% of his previous arsenal, which had been one of the largest in the world. While many continue to criticize President Obama's decision not to attack in August 2013, but rather to work out a diplomatic solution – with Russia's active help – it should be said, even now, that the agreement that was reached at the time was a better outcome than could have been achieved by a half-hearted, limited U.S. and French air strike, a point well understood in Israel at the time. But for this to remain the case, the Russians should, and probably can, be called upon to convince him to fully implement that agreement andsystematically destroy all residual chemical weapon capabilities. The horror in Khan Shaykhun justifies at least a strong dose of suspicion and robust verification measures, closing all remaining loopholes in the rigorous procedures established by Sigrid Kaag and her team three years ago.
The second challenge is more specific to Israeli concerns.Israeli diplomatic strategy reflects the realization that down the road, Iranian and Russian purposes in Syria are bound to diverge. What the Russians want is for Assad to survive – and to be in a position to continue to give them the important naval base in Tartus and the air base in Hmeimim, which they see as the cornerstone of their strategic presence in the Eastern Mediterranean and on Europe's southeastern flank. Russia is, in this sense, a "status quo" power, intent on preserving what it has. Not so in the case of Iran. The Islamic Revolution is the ultimate "revisionist" force in the region, seeking to generate political, social, and religious upheaval and redeem the suffering it has inflicted on its own people by showing that this was the way towards a Shia apotheosis and the ultimate reversal of the wrong done to them at the hands of Sunni rulers in the 7th century and ever since. Being in the business of destroying Israel is a vital aspect of this grand strategy. But in order to be able to do so, the Iranians must first turn the West Bank, as Khamenei directed in his infamous tweet of November 2014, into "the next Gaza." And this can be done only if Jordan is so destabilized and weakened that it will not be able to resist the use of the East Bank of the river as a launching pad for penetration and subversion. In logical progression, this requires a free hand for Hezbollah and its Iranian masters in Southern Syria, bordering Jordan's northern regions, where a massive number of Syrian refugees have already upset the social applecart.
Thus, the main item on Prime Minister Netanyahu's agenda during his recent talks in Moscow was the need for the Russians to prevail upon their Syrian client not to risk his head (and all that they invested in him) by tangling with Israel or allowing Iran to establish a port and to conduct operations against Israel or Jordan from his territory. This was not a hopeless endeavor: the Russians may have grown more critical of Israeli operations in Syria, but, as already noted, have also previously agreed to arrange for deconfliction with the Israeli Air Force, which is another way of saying that they know, and implicitly accept, what Israel is doing to prevent Iran and Hezbollah from using Syrian territory as a conduit. Their reaction is tinged by a healthy respect for Israeli military abilities, and the same logic should lead them to tell Assad that a free hand for Iran in the southern Golan could land him and his house in very serious trouble. This is a message that needs to be shored up by an unambiguous U.S. position.
A third set of considerations and implications lies well beyond Israel's reach, and will require close attention by the U.S. as well as other major players such as Turkey: namely, whether Assad will be rewarded for his acts of mass murder by being given the opportunity to assert his control once again over the entire Syrian territory. This would be morally wrong and strategically dangerous. The Sunni areas in the north and east, possibly with indirect or direct Turkish support, should not be allowed to revert to his rule. Once liberated from the brutal Islamic State "Caliphate," they should be offered a political place in a much looser form of decentralized governance. The same, with even greater justification, is true for the Kurdish areas of northeastern Syria known as Rojava (West Kurdistan), whose contribution to the allied war effort against the Islamic State truly entitles them to the option of self-determination, which is also on the horizon for the K.R.G. in Iraq (or rather, what used to be Iraq). These are matters which the U.S. administration should press upon Putin, on the one hand, and Erdogan, on the other – and the sooner, the better.
Eran Lerman is the former deputy for foreign policy and international affairs at the National Security Council in the Israeli Prime Minister's Office. Prior to that, he served as director of AJC’s office in Israel.
