Commentary
Israel escalates in Syria with a perfect pretext
The message is unmistakable: Israel is ready to replicate everywhere the fate meted out to Gaza and Hamas, Lebanon and Hezbollah.
A U.S. stand-up comedian (who voted for Trump) recently cracked that “Netanyahu is the worst president of the United States in the 21st century,” a punchline that says plenty about Israel’s sway in Washington – and about a prime minister who no longer heeds even his American patron, Donald Trump, now trying in vain to halt Israeli raids in Syria. Israel’s regional plan – from Gaza to Lebanon, from Syria to Iran – has one rule: keep a gun trained on everyone, with or without negotiations.
Every truce is broken unilaterally; an agreement with Netanyahu is now worth less than an IOU from the Mafia.
“The Syrian regime must leave the Druze in Sweida alone and withdraw its forces. Israel will continue to strike if it does not,” Defence Minister Israel Katz warned on Wednesday, addressing the Syrian army locked in fierce clashes with Druze fighters in the south. Only Europeans still pretend to buy the tired refrain of Israel’s “security needs.” Far from being “the Middle East’s lone democracy,” Israel is a colonial military power run by religious extremists, showing zero respect for national sovereignty or other peoples’ very existence.
Syria is emblematic. Israel now styles itself protector of the Druze – the only Arab minority split among Syria, Israel (where the Druze serve in the army) and Lebanon. For Netanyahu that is the perfect pretext to seize the whole Golan, occupy Mount Hermon and move troops within a few dozen kilometres of Damascus. At the same time, it’s true that the Druze in Suwayda have suffered brutal ethnic cleansing, public executions included, at the hands of militias and of the Syrian army commanded by Ahmed al-Sharaa, unable to control a land carved up by foreign forces, such as his Turkish sponsor Erdoğan, and host to a U.S. base in the east. As predicted after Assad’s fall, Syria has become a fighting ground for the new Middle East carve-up.
Perhaps Al-Sharaa – self-proclaimed president with a long jihadist background – thought he had secured his survival: first shaking Trump’s hand via Saudi mediation, then opening talks with Israel. As il manifesto’s Michele Giorgio noted, Israel and Syria are still in Azerbaijan discussing an enlargement of Trump’s Abraham Accords. Al-Sharaa showed “goodwill,” harshly suppressing the protests of Palestinians in Syria against the genocide in Gaza, and 10 days ago met with Israeli national security adviser Tzachi Hanegbi in Abu Dhabi to outline a deal.
However, Wednesday’s airstrike on the presidential palace in Damascus proved his illusions short-lived. Al-Sharaa has joined Hamas chiefs, Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Iran’s Pasdaran on Israel’s target list. Israeli Diaspora Minister Amichai Chikli tweeted in Hebrew that Al-Sharaa “is a terrorist, a barbaric murderer who should be eliminated without delay.” “We cannot stand idle before an Islamist-Nazi Al-Qaeda regime that must be fought,” he added.
Only now, it seems, have some in Israel – and in Italy – noticed that Al-Sharaa was a member of Al-Qaeda and ISIS before leading Hayat Tahrir al-Sham in Idlib. Yet when the jihadist took power with Turkish backing he was hailed as a “liberator” from Assad’s dictatorship, despite a U.S. multi-million-dollar bounty on his head.
We need to get clear on what Israel and the U.S. want in the Middle East after the catastrophes of Iraq 2003 and Afghanistan 2001, each sold as supposedly “exporting democracy.” Hints came during the “twelve-day war” with Iran, when Netanyahu flew the banner of regime change – an outright breach of Iranian sovereignty under an anti-nuclear pretext, met with skepticism by the Iranian population, more and more weary of the Ayatollahs yet dreading a descent into anarchy, as happened in nearby Iraq and neighboring Afghanistan.
Le Monde diplomatique notes that regime change by force – invoked again for Syria – is now Netanyahu’s lever to exert pressure on Arab–Muslim states that still refuse a normalization of relations without real movement on the Palestine issue. The message is unmistakable: Israel is ready to replicate everywhere the fate meted out to Gaza and Hamas, Lebanon and Hezbollah.
Israel cares nothing for Arab democracy; quite the opposite: it prefers pliant dictators it can manipulate. The self-proclaimed “only democracy in the Middle East” jealously guards its real defining feature: the creeping genocide in Gaza that continues every day. All very “democratic,” of course – for us included.
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/escalation-in-siria-lillusione-del-jihadista on 2025-07-17