Washington DC, May 27, 2025 --  

Israeli attacks on Syria have little to do with defending the Druze and everything to do with destabilizing its neighbor.

When Syria's Assad dynasty was finally toppled in December of last year, the regime's torment of neighboring Lebanon was finally at an end. For nearly three decades after its 1976 invasion, Syria's military occupied the northern half of Lebanon. After its withdrawal, it continued to exert control for the next two decades by backing the Hezbollah militia's control in Lebanon's southern half right up until the fall of the regime.

For 48 years, Syria inflamed Lebanon's ethnic and sectarian divisions for its own selfish political goals, causing many thousands of deaths, widespread destruction of property, and multiple economic crises in a once great but bitterly divided country. Today's Syria has a new government, but is weak and faces its own ethnic and sectarian divisions. It is now getting a taste of its own medicine courtesy of Israel.

Last week, Israel launched airstrikes on a column of Syrian government tanks near the city of Al-Suwayda in southern Syria. That city is dominated by the Druze minority, and was the site of violent ethnic clashes between Druze and Sunni Bedouin militias. Israeli warplanes later fired missiles on the ministry of defense in the capital of Damascus in a warning that the central government stay out of the region.¹

But Israel faced a setback when violence resumed late last week, and the United States and Turkey made a deal for the Syrian government to send troops to end the violence with America restraining its Israeli ally. Israel, for its part, gave a 48 hour deadline for central government troops to finish the job and get out of the region.². That deadline passed yesterday, yet reports are that Syrian security forces remain in the area evacuating Bedoin civilians who face Druze retribution after a government withdrawal.³ The United States plans to mediate the dispute between Israel and Syria on Thursday.⁴

Israel claims to be defending the rights of Syria's small Druze minority -- a non-Muslim sect that also inhabits Lebanon, northern Israel and some towns in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. But the Syrian Druze have not requested nor have they broadly welcomed the Israeli assistance. Just like the Assad regime's actions in Lebanon, Israel's actions in Syria are designed to foment division and weaken the Syrian state.

This is not the first time Israel has attacked Syria since the end of the civil war. Immediately after the fall of Damascus last December, Israeli warplanes destroyed the toppled regime's abandoned anti-aircraft sites, air force bases, naval facilities and large weapons stores, all but eliminating the Syrian military threat to Israel.

It also launched a small land invasion over the border from the Golan Heights, occupying parts of the UN buffer zone formerly separating Syrian and Israeli forces from the Israeli-occupied territory at the end of the 1967 war. It went further to occupy small pieces of Daraa province which sits between the Golan Heights and Al-Suwayda on Syria's southern border with Jordan.

In the near-term, Israel will probably push for a zone of influence in southern Syria from the Golan Heights, through Daraa and Al-Suwayda all the way to an American base at Al-Tanf, just inside Syria from where the Syrian, Jordanian and Iraqi borders converge. But longer-term the Israelis are likely to stick their fingers into the mix wherever they can foment division and help keep the regime down -- exactly like Syria's Assad regime did to Lebanon.

Syria Ethnoreligous Map, Courtesy Wikimedia Commons. Additional Annotations by Author.

As in Lebanon, there is plenty of opportunity to foment division in Syria. The Mediterranean coast between Lebanon and Turkey is inhabited by the Alawyte minority, an offshoot of Shia Islam and the heartland of the deposed Assad regime. This was the site of ethnic fighting earlier this spring. The northern and eastern part of the country are dominated by the Kudish minority and controlled by Kurdish militias or Turkish occupation forces and their local proxies recruited to fight the Kurds, which Turkey's government sees as its enemies. And scattered in various spots of the country you also have Assyrians, Turkomans, Circassians and Levantine Christians, each with their own competing interests and historical grievances.

Israel's dominance in the region was sealed even before the fall of the Assad regime. More than a year earlier in October 2023, its stunning assassination of the Lebanese Hezbollah leadership using pager bombs and the subsequent war on the militia severely weakened the once fearsome proxy force of the Assad regime, which at times had been used to bolster Assad's forces in the civil war. But even Israel was taken by surprise when the Assad regime fell within a year of its neutering of Hezbollah.

While these changes are likely good news for the long-tormented people of Lebanon, they are not good news for people across the border in Syria. So long as Israel remains at the apex of its power, expect it to continue its heavy-handed meddling in Syria, no matter the consequences for the Syrian people.

Notes:

1. New York Times, Israeli Attacks Threaten 'Chaos' in Syria, Syrian President Says, July 17, 2025

2. Times of Israel, Israel Says It's Allowing Syrian Forces to Enter Sweida for 48 Hours Amid Renewed Clashes, July 18, 2025

3. Anadalou Agency, Syrian Interior Ministry Reaches Deal to Evacuate Civilians from Suwayda Amid Security Unrest, July 21, 2025

4. Axios, Scoop: U.S. to Mediate Israel-Syria Meeting Thursday to Avoid New Crises, July 22, 2025