Israeli strikes on Iranian assets in Syria raise concerns the US and Israel are acting in concert

Israel’s heaviest strikes against Iranian targets in Syria, in response to apparent missile attacks on the occupied Golan Heights, reveal how much has been uncorked by Donald Trump’s decision to quit the Iran nuclear deal this week. If confirmed, it is the first time Iranian forces have struck at Israeli positions from inside Syria and the response was the largest Israeli strike yet against Iranian positions.

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In the run-up to Trump’s decision, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, used an interview with Der Spiegel to advise the US president to think through the consequences. He said Trump would be “opening a Pandora’s box, which is tantamount to war. I don’t think Donald Trump wants war.”

Events since Trump’s announcement on Tuesday vindicate Macron’s warning. The lid on Pandora’s box has at least been opened. Inside appears to be the long-flagged direct war between Israel and Iran.

Macron’s concern for months has been that the Iranian crisis has to be seen as inextricably linked to the situation in Syria, and as a result the US and the west should not cede the Syrian peace process to an alliance of Russia, Iran and Turkey.

His concern was less that Bashar al-Assad might emerge the temporary military victor from the eight-year civil war, but that Iran might secure that victory on behalf of Assad, and so remained entrenched in Syria for the foreseeable future.

Israel would never accept an outcome to the civil war that left Iranian-backed forces – who number as many as 100,000, according to the Syrian political opposition – permanently encamped on Syria’s southern front and capable of hitting Israel.

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Washington’s withdrawal from the nuclear deal on the basis that Iran was cheating would hand Israel the casus belli it needed to intensify its assault.

In fact Trump went much further, and gave Israel every encouragement. He cited the Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent presentation on Iran’s alleged secret nuclear weapons programme as a prime example of why Iran could not be trusted. He also laid out new demands, including a requirement that Tehran end its quest to destroy Israel.

Netanyahu immediately accused Iran of deploying “very dangerous weapons” in neighbouring Syria. They were “for the specific purpose of our destruction”, he told reporters.

Trump’s emphatic rejection of the deal this week was Israel’s dream moment, according to one European diplomat.

The question now is whether Israel and the US are acting in concert, with Washington applying the economic pressure through sanctions and Israel the military pressure through airstrikes. Some diplomats hope these are mere skirmishes born of the tension in the region, and not part of a secret strategy.

The UK foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, told MPs: “After closely interrogating everybody I could find in the White House, I would say that there is no enthusiasm in the United States for a military option, and there is no such plan.”

The British fear is more that there is no long-term plan, save to put pressure on Iran, a view borne out by a State Department official who briefed this week: “The goal is to prevent Iran from ever developing or acquiring a nuclear weapon and the detail beyond that is something we are going to have to flesh out.”

There is also a good deal of exasperation in Europe that the interagency incoherence that is always a feature in Washington is worse than normal. A visit to Europe by the new US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, is eagerly awaited to give Europeans a stronger sense of how far Washington is prepared to tolerate Israel’s military strikes.

Key newly installed figures in the Trump administration, such as the national security adviser, John Bolton, have been explicit in the past that they favour regime change in Tehran, and the twin leverage of of US economic and Israeli military firepower might hasten that moment.

Israel also knows that for the moment the disruption of Iran inside Syria has the implicit support of Saudi Arabia, most Gulf states and the Syrian political opposition.

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There is little to restrain Israel from trying to hit all of the 14 chief Iranian bases in Syria. Macron, and indeed Vladimir Putin, can appeal for de-escalation, but the danger is that a build-up of large historical forces are being unleashed.

Iran has long seen itself encircled and has built what Tehran calls the “axis of resistance”, an alliance of Iran, Syria, Hezbollah and, at times, Hamas against what it perceives as Israeli and US hegemony in the region. Syria has come to be seen as vital to that axis.

Unless diplomacy belatedly triumphs, the fear is that Syria’s long proxy war may about to become a direct war.