ABSTRACT
From the Golan Heights, artillery can command the north of Israel. Israel captured the Golan from Syria in the Arab-Israeli War of 1967 and then again in the war of 1973, and it has retained control of the strategic heights ever since. Any talk of peace between Israel and Syria will center on the return of the Golan to Syria. Syrian president Hafez Assad held promising peace talks with the Israelis, but with his death in 2000, the negotiations ended without a conclusive agreement. Bashar Assad succeeded his father, and the prospects for Syrian-Israeli peace looked bright for a while, but again no agreement has been concluded. In fact, Israel remains on the defensive against military threats from Syria. In September 2007, Israeli jets destroyed a plutonium reactor in Syria out of concern that it could be used to develop nuclear weapons. Israel’s attack was aided by the tacit cooperation of both Turkey and the United States. But the concern is not just with the Syrian threat in itself but with a concerted action against Israel by Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Hamas in Gaza. Syria is a major conduit through which Iranian arms and other support flow to Hezbollah and Hamas. As Hirsch Goodman emphasizes, Israel’s foreign policy strategy toward Syria is not simply to establish peace between the two countries but to “draw Syria away from the sphere of Iran, Hezbollah, the Islamic Jihad, and Hamas.” Meanwhile, learning their lesson from the unexpectedly difficult struggle Israel had against Hezbollah in 2006, Israeli military planners have targeted thousands of Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon, should the need to strike arise again. However, Assad’s regime is considerably weakened by the internal turmoil currently wracking the country. Because of his oft-times brutal crackdown on dissidents in his country, Assad is increasingly isolated even among the region’s Arab states and faces as well the sharply negative American assessment of Syria’s connections to Iran and its nurturing of Islamist forces. Given all that, Goodman concludes, “a war with Israel is surely the last thing on Assad’s mind.”
