The most significant aspect of the civil war in Syria, which is now entering its fourth year without any sign of a conclusion in sight, concerns the scale of the humanitarian disaster. This includes not only the vast destruction – which continues unabated – and not only the constantly rising death count (the United Nations ceased publishing official estimates last month, due to its inability to authenticate them), but also the incomprehensible number of refugees and displaced persons. According to conservative estimates, more than a quarter of the country’s population now fall into these categories: There are (at least) two million civilians who have fled Syria, and four million who have been forced to leave their homes but remain in the country.

The consequences for neighboring states are also dire. Jordan reports that it has taken in 600,000 Syrian refugees, but the real number is probably a million, because at least 400,000 Syrians are in Jordan with the status of tourists. There are another 600,000 Syrian refugees in Lebanon. Hundreds of thousands more have been absorbed elsewhere in the region, including in Turkey, Iraq, Egypt and even the Gaza Strip. Gaza has taken in some “second-generation” refugees – Palestinians who fled from the camps around Damascus and found relative quiet under the Hamas regime.

In comparison to the instability in those neighboring countries of Syria, Israel finds itself in a relatively good situation. No refugees have arrived in Israel – just an estimated 700 wounded civilians, who were taken in by field hospitals set up by the Israel Defense Forces on the Golan Heights border and then transferred to hospitals in the north of the country. Most of them were returned to Syria afterward. But this is hardly the same as being inundated by Syrian refugees fighting for jobs, food and water, or – as in Jordan and Lebanon – drastically altering the country’s domestic demographic balance.

In fact, far from being hurt by the attempt to depose the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad, Israel has, overall, benefited from the developments. The Syrian army, Israel’s prime enemy and the reference point of IDF preparation activities in recent decades, has been all but incapacitated.

Maj. Gen. Aviv Kochav, director of Military Intelligence, said last week that the Syrian army is currently at its lowest level of fitness since it was founded. MI estimates that the Syrian army has already used about half the rockets and missiles in its arsenal in its war against the insurgents. Furthermore, the Assad regime’s chemical weapons stock – thought to total more than 1,300 metric tons, the second-largest in the world – is being dismantled (although at a slower pace than promised by the Syrians – 5 percent has been destroyed so far, not the 90 percent agreed in the initial timeline). This situation was brought about by the regime’s serious mistake last August when it murdered some 1,500 civilians by using chemical weapons against rebel-held neighborhoods near Damascus.

It’s worth recalling that both the missile and chemical arsenals were created originally by President Hafez Assad, Bashar Assad’s father, not as a means to massacre Syrian Sunnis, but to deter the IDF from approaching Damascus again, as it did in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. The weakening of the Syrian military forces is now making it possible for the IDF to reduce its ground forces somewhat, a process that includes dismantling a large number of reserve armored brigades.

The third aspect of the new strategic balance, in Israeli eyes, is related to Damascus’ disposition to foment regional instability. The civil war in Syria has already spilled over into Lebanon and put an end to the relative quiet there, as Sunni militias are now openly attacking Shi’ite Hezbollah. Israel is concerned – as the country’s leaders reiterate frequently – by the new and unprecedented concentration of tens of thousands of members of Global Jihad terror organizations throughout Syria, and especially by their presence near the Golan border.

In contrast to the rather naive enthusiasm with which the West greeted the uprising against Assad in its first year, Israel adopted a more cautious and skeptical stance from the outset. The more evidence there was of the atrocities being perpetrated by the regime, the more Israeli leaders publicly condemned the murderous president and called for his ouster. Such declarations, however, have been few and far between lately.

This development, which is actually a return to the original posture, stems from Israel’s realization that its interests will not be served, no matter which side emerges victorious. A victory by Assad, a member of the Alawite sect, will be seen as a major success for the Shi’ite axis in the region, led by Iran and with the support of Hezbollah. This is not a result Israel would like to see while it continues to lead an international campaign to halt the Iranian nuclear project.

On the other hand, with the Sunni radicals of Global Jihad, Al-Qaida and the rest setting the tone in the opposition camp, there’s no point wishing for the preferred interim result – i.e., a victory by the relatively moderate groups – on which the West pinned its hopes at the start of the war.

Other headaches

The crisis in Syria has also underscored the limitations of intelligence forecasts. For years, Syria was the No. 1 target of Israeli intelligence, producing a high level of information and knowledge about developments in the country. But even someone as experienced as Ehud Barak, a former chief of staff and director of Military Intelligence, was wildly off the mark two years ago when he predicted that Assad would fall “within a few weeks.” Barak himself has been out of office for almost a year, but Assad is still clinging to power.

Israeli intelligence currently has other headaches. The jihadist organizations are new players in the arena, and MI and the Mossad are still trying to collect information about them, figure out their loose internal hierarchy and predict their intentions. When bullets or other munitions from Syria occasionally land on the Israeli side of the border, local intelligence personnel have to clarify whether the firing came from Assad’s army or one of the rebel groups, and assess whether it was deliberate. Then a decision has to be made about the scale of the response needed to calm the situation and to achieve deterrence, not to mention the difficulty of knowing whom to take action against if it turns out that jihadist splinter groups were responsible.

Last year was something of a turning point in the civil war. If in the first two years of the crisis the end of the Assad regime seemed to be near, the third year was marked by the dictator’s success in containing the threat, with the watershed coming in the battle for the town of Qusayr last May. Assad’s victory there, with the particularly vigorous help of Hezbollah, clearly showed that the regime was able to stem the rebels’ momentum. No significant conquest of territory has taken place since then, but the sides are continuing to wage a war of attrition – in some cases across wide swaths of the country.

The crisis in Syria began in February 2011 with images of unarmed demonstrators in the town of Daraa chanting “peace” and demanding economic quality and improved civil rights. Three years later, this is one of the bloodiest civil wars in modern times in the Middle East, involving pitiless urban guerrilla warfare in which neither side has any compunctions about perpetrating ethnic cleansing.

The opposition was contained thanks to the reorganization of the regime’s forces, amid massive aid from Iran, Russia and Hezbollah. But a contributing factor of equal potency was the internal split among hundreds of rebel organizations with different agendas, notably, in the past year, large groups identified with Al-Qaida: the Nusra Front and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant).

The first group, to which most of the jihadist fighters in the southern Golan Heights belong, possesses a clearer Syrian identity and has more widespread support among the population. The second organization originates in Iraq, most of its members are not Syrian and its atrocities have spurred such strong revulsion that even Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of Al-Qaida, was forced this week to disown them. “How crazy do you have to be for even Al-Qaida to disavow you?” as a Brookings Institution expert in Washington was quoted as saying.

It may be that last month’s Geneva peace conference, which ended – as anticipated – in failure, nevertheless attests most accurately to the true situation in Syria. Even though the representatives of both sides – Assad and the main rebel groups (excluding those associated with Al-Qaida) – initially rejected the legitimacy of the other side, in the end they sat at one table under the auspices of the international community. That development stems from weakness, from the tremendous attrition being experienced by the parties to the conflict. This has also led to local agreements in recent weeks, such as in Homs and the Yarmouk refugee camp, for temporary cease-fires to allow supplies to be brought in.

Still, there is a very long way to go before a political agreement is reached that will end the fighting.

From its perspective, Israel is now worried that the inability to defeat Assad will prompt some of the jihadist groups to display their talents by perpetrating showcase terrorist attacks against Israeli targets in the Golan Heights.