Why Israel fears Iran’s presence in Syria

While Israel has refrained from trying to shape the outcome of the Syrian war, it has aggressively pursued a narrow set of goals designed to protect its interests. It launched an air campaign to prevent Iran from establishing permanent military bases in Syria or transferring advanced missiles to Hezbollah. It funded and armed Syrian rebel groups in the south to keep Iran and its allies away from its border, and retaliated when either side fired shots that landed in territory under its control. And finally, the Israeli military prepared to prevent any rebel advance into parts of southern Syria occupied by the Druze, an ethnic group that incorporates elements of Islam as well as other religions, due to pressure from its own Druze population, which feared the consequence of the rebels’ conquest of the area.

While this strategy has insulated Israelis from the bloodshed in Syria, it has done little to prevent a worst-case scenario for Israel from taking hold in Damascus. A resurgent Assad is consolidating his control over his country, buoyed by unprecedented support from Iran. Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps officers and Hezbollah fighters in Syria have expanded and strengthened their military networks, and now possess advanced long-range missiles capable of bringing unprecedented destruction to Israeli cities. On Monday, Iran and Syria reportedly signed a deal for further military cooperation.

Israel, in turn, has launched more than 100 airstrikes against Hezbollah arms convoys since the beginning of the war to counter this threat. Earlier this month, it also reportedly used a car bomb to assassinate a Syrian scientist who played a leading role in the country’s advanced-missile program. “We can do a lot,” Yaakov Amidror, a former national-security adviser for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, told me. “We cannot do everything, but we can do a lot to force the Iranians to decide if they are ready to pay the price” for their intervention in Syria.

Netanyahu has invested an extraordinary amount of time in his personal relationship with Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, in order to keep up the pressure on Iran and its allies. They have met face to face nine times since Russia’s military intervention on Assad’s behalf in 2015—more than Netanyahu has met with any other world leader. As a result of this diplomatic effort, Moscow has refrained from using its air defenses to strike Israeli warplanes when they enter Syrian airspace to target Iranian or Hezbollah fighters.

Israel’s reliance on Russia is a result of President Donald Trump’s hostility to a long-term commitment to Syria. Trump told the military earlier this year to prepare to withdraw all U.S. soldiers from the country, and earlier this month announced that the United States would not spend $230 million that had been earmarked to help rebuild the country’s shattered infrastructure. “If you’re an Israeli policy maker and you’re looking at Syria, you see Russia is there and obviously staying,” Itamar Rabinovich, Israel’s former chief negotiator with Syria in the 1990s, told me. “And you see the United States—the president says one day that he wants to withdraw the 2,000 [American] troops, and the next day he faces some pressure and keeps them there. But is that reliable in the long term? Doubtful.”