For three months, the new regime in Damascus has used every opportunity to say it does not want a fight with Israel.
It has done this is in private messages, through proxies and in multiple interviews.
The governor of Damascus, Maher Marwan, told the US broadcaster National Public Radio: “We have no fear toward Israel, and our problem is not with Israel. There exists a people who want coexistence. They want peace. They don’t want disputes.”
The message has been reinforced by Syria’s new leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa. He toldThe Times of London: “We do not want any conflict whether with Israel or anyone else and we will not let Syria be used as a launchpad for attacks. The Syrian people need a break, and the strikes must end and Israel has to pull back to its previous positions.”
Two days after his appointment as president, Sharaa praised US President Donald Trump in an interview with The Economist. On Israel, he walked a tightrope between his new policy of peacemaker and his own father’s history of arriving in Damascus after becoming a refugee from the Golan Heights, which Israel occupied in 1967.
“We want peace with all parties,” Sharaa said - but he indicated that in light of Israel’s continuing occupation of the Golan, it would be premature to consider any agreement to normalise relations.
Israel, on the other hand, took these multiple peace offerings as a sign of weakness, spurring ever-bolder and more belligerent action.
Thwarted by the unexpected collapse of the Syrian army in its original plan to divide Syria into thirds by keeping the country’s former dictator, Bashar al-Assad, in charge of a UAE-funded rump state, Israel quickly switched to Plan B when it became clear that no-one could stop Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) from sweeping to power.
It unilaterally declared a mission to support two Syrian minorities, the Druze in the south and the Kurds in the north.
Without pause, Israeli jets then destroyed Syria’s navy and its heavy weaponry in a series of devastating air strikes, which continue to this day. Israeli jets on Tuesday struck military sites in Kiswah, south of Damascus, and in the southern province of Daraa.
After seizing Mount Hermon and an area greater than Gaza, Defence Minister Israel Katz said that Israeli military forces were preparing for a long stay.
Initially, security officials quoted in the Israeli media talked of establishing in Syria a 15-kilometre demilitarised zone and a 60-kilometre “zone of influence” where potential threats could be monitored. One source told Ynet ahead of Trump’s January inauguration: “We’re building an operational concept for this new reality.”
That operational concept soon became a fully fledged military doctrine. But the Israelis were still being coy about their territorial ambitions, which extended way beyond their border.
On Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu brazenly demanded the “complete demilitarisation” of southern Syria from the forces of the regime in Damascus.
Netanyahu said that Israeli forces would remain in the Mount Hermon area and the Golan buffer zone “indefinitely”, adding: “We will not allow forces of the HTS organisation or the new Syrian army to enter the area south of Damascus.”
Netanyahu is going further in southern Syria than the status quo Israel is attempting to establish in southern Lebanon. At least in Lebanon, Israel recognises the legitimacy of the Lebanese army, albeit in a highly limited and self-serving fashion.
In Syria, it is going a step further by refusing to recognise the military forces of a government that has seized power from a brutal dictatorship, to huge popular assent.
Even Netanyahu’s latest words might be an understatement.
The true scope of Israel’s military adventurism could be to create an inverted-C-shaped state running the full length of the border of the Golan Heights, along the south of Syria, and then to the Kurdish-controlled northeast.
Even without an Israeli-controlled buffer state, Sharaa, who is about to announce an interim government, may not be in control of much of his country.
The Kurds not only control a third of Syria’s territory, but its best oil fields, farmland and a dam that powers much of the electricity in the east.
The Syrian economy reportedly halved between 2010 and 2021, while more than 90 percent of Syria’s population of 23 million people live below the poverty line. As of early 2017, about one-third of Syria’s housing stock had been damaged or destroyed, along with half of the country’s medical and educational facilities.
Syria is broke. The government could not even pay the salaries of government workers in January.
Help is not at immediate hand.
Saudi Arabia is running a current account deficit, and the days when Riyadh handed out money “like rice”, as Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi once so delicately put it, are long gone.
That leaves the UAE, which was in the process of buying Assad off on condition that he expel the Iranians and Hezbollah.
Doha is delaying a much-needed infusion of funds because of uncertainty over US sanctions, and without Syria being allowed to join the Swift banking transfer system, the billions of dollars needed cannot arrive.
Israel, of course, is doing its damnedest to keep international sanctions in place. Foreign Minister Gideon Saar had the temerity to lecture his 20 EU counterparts at a recent meeting on why Europe should not place its trust in the new government in Syria.
“I hear talks about transition in Syria,” Saar said. “This is ridiculous. The new government is a jihadist Islamist terror group from Idlib.”
He said a stable Syria could only be a federal one. The same, of course, could be said about his own country, Israel.
But who is an Israeli minister to dictate how a neighbouring country should be run? By what right is Israel trying to shape the future and limit the sovereignty of the most important Arab country on its immediate border area?
It is because of the biblical claim to an area that extends from Damascus to the Euphrates and the Nile, or simply because it now thinks it can? I fancy this has nothing to do with the Bible and everything to do with brute force.
But when Sharaa looks around him, what his state lacks most of all is a functional army. He has around 30,000 fighters who are spread thinly around the entire land.
They are battle-hardened, but lack any kit of a modern army. Syria’s heavy weaponry, tanks, artillery, airforce, missiles and radars have been knocked out.
Syria’s vulnerability is well recognised. The need to rebuild its armed forces was high on the list of priorities at the Syrian National Dialogue conference.
The only neighbour that will provide Syria with the ability to defend itself is Turkey.
Sharaa and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan have discussed a defence pact, but progress is painfully slow when compared with the speed at which Israel is establishing facts on the ground on Syrian territory.
Both Ankara and Damascus are cautious. Initially, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan used every speech to say that Turkey sought a partnership of equals, and would not use Syria as a proxy.
In the past, he has shown equal caution with Israel. In the context of the Gaza war, when Turkish attempts to set up a broader contact group were undermined by the US, Ankara gave the primacy of attempts to gain a ceasefire to the leading Arab states.
It took around seven months, and one particularly bad election for the ruling party in Turkey, for Ankara to impose serious trade sanctions on Israel - and even now, oil from Azerbaijan to Israel continues to flow through its ports.
Israel hawks have long identified Turkey as a bigger military threat to Israel than Iran. For a long time, Turkey was reluctant to engage. But as Israel’s military incursion into Syria grows by the week, and it appears intent on adding teeth to its proposal to ally with the Kurds and the Druze, Ankara’s tone is changing.
Fidan gave Israel a clear warning this week, saying Syria’s territorial integrity was a red line for Turkey: “Any attempt to divide it - whether through PKK [Kurdistan Workers’ Party] control or Israeli intervention - will only create further instability.”
A stable and sovereign Syria is indeed a Turkish national security requirement. Damascus’s need to regain control over all of its territory, and Turkey’s need to have a stable border and a stable Syria, are intimately linked.
It is no accident of timing that PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan, who has been imprisoned since 1999, has now made his long-awaited call on the group he founded to lay down its arms.
The statement will open up a degree of political space for Kurdish parties. The pro-Kurdish Dem party formed a contact group known as the “Imrali Delegation”, which has visited Ocalan twice on the island where he is imprisoned. They have been relaying his messages to Turkish political parties and Kurdish political groups in Iraq.
The last thing Ankara needs at this delicate point in attempts to end an insurgency that has lasted for decades is for Israel to stick its nose into Kurdish affairs.
There are other powerful domestic reasons why Turkey’s posture towards Israeli incursions into Syria will harden, not least of which is to see three million registered Syrian refugees return home.
What is more curious than the caution with which Turkey is treading its path as a regional power is the reluctance of the new regime in Damascus to seek Turkish military help.
There are historical reasons for a degree of distance between HTS and Turkey. Relations between the two in Idlib were not always rosy, especially when HTS clashed with other armed groups supported by Turkey. Turkey, on the other hand, cooperated with HTS, but not always as the group wanted.
That’s not the only bump on the road to a fully fledged security pact. Damascus remains optimistic about restoring relations with Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
This is a mistake, as Damascus will soon find out. Right up until the last moment, Abu Dhabi was engaged in Plan A, which was to keep Assad in power but buy him off, at the cost of expelling the Iranian Revolutionary Guards from Syria.
This was essentially Israel’s agenda to neutralise Syria by dividing it into cantons.
History has shown repeatedly that just because one pet Emirati project fails, it does not mean Abu Dhabi gives up. Mohammed bin Zayed, the president of the UAE, is nothing if not persistent.
Opinion at home is changing as well. The new government has to show it’s in control of its own land. Without that, it will not be taken seriously by the many elements and forces that could yet undermine it.
The Syrian Druze are not the playthings of Israel that the Palestinian Druze became after 1948. Firstly, the three provinces of Syria’s south are ethnically mixed. Secondly, tribal opinion matters.
Netanyahu’s statement that he would not allow HTS or the new Syrian army to enter the area south of Damascus was met with widespread anger across Syria, particularly in the south.
Druze protesters held a demonstration in Sweida, carrying banners that rejected Israel’s encroachment in their region, with one placard describing Syrian law as the people’s “protector and the guarantor of their rights”.
“The idea that the Syrian army will not be allowed to deploy south of Damascus is extremely appalling,” Syrian expert Robin Yassin-Kassab told Middle East Eye. “Of course, the Syrian government cannot accept that, and it puts them in a really difficult situation. It suggests that Israel is going to treat the Syrian army as it treats Hezbollah.”
Sharaa has only a limited amount of time in which he can continue with his current policy of turning the other cheek.
There is a historical precedent to the dilemma Sharaa is now facing.
The Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire, which started with British support in June 1916, reached Damascus and then Aleppo by October 1918. The goal of this revolution was to create one unified Arab kingdom.
Forces led by Prince Faisal were still fighting for control of the Red Sea port of Aqaba when he learned of the signing of the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement by British and French diplomats to divide the pickings of the Ottoman Empire into two separate spheres of influence.
The agreement was uncovered more than a year later, in November 1917, when Bolsheviks came across the document in the Russian government’s records and published it in state media.
Faisal had been betrayed by the British, but it took three more years to realise that the fight for Syria was futile.
In 1919, the Syrian National Congress was formed in Damascus. The following year, it declared Faisal king of the Arab Kingdom of Syria. The San Remo Conference subsequently granted France an even larger slice of Syrian territory than was provided for under Sykes-Picot.
But France issued an ultimatum to Damascus to submit to French control. Syrian nationalists took up arms, but could only scrounge up a few hundred fighters, who were quickly dispersed by French cannon fire.
Faisal’s mission was doomed, because his use to the allied powers in destroying the Ottoman Empire had ended. He had no meaningful international support.
But Sharaa does have the support of Turkey, a strong regional state with a strong army - and he should use it.
Sharaa has to make a strategic decision. Israel is the biggest enemy to a unified, sovereign and independent Syria. He would do well to remember that it was the Second Intifada that prompted him to become a fighter in the first place.
Replacing his fatigues with a suit and tie should make no difference to his inner conviction that an adventurist Israel represents a mortal threat to Syria, and to him personally.
Israel is acting like a hegemon, not the small country it really is. It has to be faced down in Syria - and soon.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.