Why Israel fears Iran’s presence in Syria

From Bashar al-Assad’s perspective, the more than seven-year war to save his family’s nearly 50-year rule has been a huge success despite the half a million lives it has claimed, the millions it has displaced, the destruction it has wrought, and the war crimes perpetrated mainly by his regime. Assad has tried to use the war in Syria to turn himself into the region’s indispensable leader. Indeed, his Russian patrons are casting him as vital for repatriating Syrians who fled the war, stamping out Islamist extremists, and defending Israel as part of Moscow’s quest to reap major dividends from its military intervention on Assad’s behalf. Israel, too, can accept his victory because it means stability, and an entrenched strongman with a demonstrated ability to control Islamist threats just across the border.

Russia wants to convince Israel that restoring the Assad regime’s full control of southern Syria offers the best chance to return to the calm that prevailed before 2011, while keeping Iran and its proxies away from the Golan Heights. Moscow’s confidence in its pitch to the Israelis dates back to the signing of a U.S.-brokered agreement to end the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. In June of 1974, Assad’s father, Hafez, hoisted a flag proclaiming “liberation” from Israel at the roundabout in Quneitra to the chants of supporters and glare of TV cameras. (It was the same spot where his son’s forces raised flags last week.) But this was hardly the victory portrayed by the senior Assad’s propaganda machine. Hafez had joined Egypt in the October 1973 war against Israel to reclaim the strategic and water-rich Golan Heights, which Syria had lost to Israel in the 1967 war. To secure support for his coup in 1970, Hafez promised his Baath Party comrades and the army generals that he would recapture the Golan. But his gambit failed, imperiling his regime.

Lucky for Hafez, then-U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, after months of shuttle diplomacy between Damascus and Tel Aviv, convinced Richard Nixon that giving the Syrians the town of Quneitra and a few surrounding villages on the foothills of the Golan Heights was crucial to Hafez’s “political survival” at home. Israel demolished Quneitra and returned it to Syria, but a quid-pro-quo was cemented between Damascus and Washington that essentially allowed Hafez to rule his people with an iron fist and launch rhetorical barrages against the “eternal enemy,” Israel; in return, Syria would halt all direct threats against Israel from the Syrian border.

The regime went out of its way not to antagonize Israel in the Golan Heights, but officially, Israel and Syria remained at war over the next 26 years—a fact that Hafez used as a pretext to decimate all internal challenges to his authority, and to show Washington that any attempts to challenge his rule could imperil the Arab-Israeli peace process. Meanwhile, Hafez nurtured an array of Palestinian factions that continued to attack Israel from Lebanon. Later, his partnership with Iran gave birth to Hezbollah, which targeted both Israel and Western interests. Hafez’s message to America: Only he and his regime could control and rein in all the fanatics who wanted to “annihilate” Israel. He was at once the arsonist and the firefighter, never directly targeting Israel but more than happy to cultivate groups that would.