This Editor’s Note was sent out earlier Wednesday in ToI’s weekly update email to members of the Times of Israel Community. To receive these Editor’s Notes as they’re released, join the ToI Community here.
One hundred hostages are still held in Gaza. Tens of thousands of Israelis are only just beginning to hope that stability has been restored to the north. Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis are still capable of launching rockets and drones. Soldiers are still losing their lives in Gaza and in south Lebanon.
But 14 months after Hamas invaded, on the worst day in modern Israeli history, it is the Iranian “Axis of Resistance” that is falling apart, and the State of Israel that is pulling itself together.
After the unfathomable failure to defend against Hamas’s overt preparations for invasion and slaughter in the south, and a subsequent slow and protracted military campaign in Gaza, Israeli intel, ground and air forces over the past three months devastated Hezbollah — Hamas’s far more powerful terrorist army across the northern border — and in so doing rendered Bashar Assad’s regime in Syria vulnerable to a jihadist overthrow.
This would not have happened if Netanyahu had been prepared to end the war in Gaza in order to secure a deal for the hostages. It could have happened earlier if the Gaza war had been less ponderous and the IDF had been freed up more quickly to effectively tackle Hezbollah.
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Deeply wary about assurances from Syria’s new jihadi leader Abu Mohammed al-Golani that Syria is “exhausted” by war and won’t be embarking on new ones, Israel reacted to the Islamist rebels’ lightning takeover in Damascus with a lightning strategic assault of its own: destroying not Bashar Al-Assad’s Syrian Army per se — its troops had melted away — but Assad’s Syrian armaments.
An aerial photo shows Syrian navy ships destroyed during an overnight Israeli attack on the port city of Latakia on December 10, 2024. (Aaref Watad/AFP)
Al-Golani’s very name underlines his roots in the Golan Heights; his Hayat Tahrir al-Sham group’s name translates as “Organization for the Liberation of the Levant” — historically seen as the area covering today’s Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and, yes, Israel. He has been wanted for terrorism by the United States since 2017, with a $10 million reward for information leading to his capture.
On Sunday, the very day he hailed victory in an address at Damascus’s Umayyad Mosque, a knot of unidentified rebels, also in a mosque in Syria’s capital, proclaimed that they would, in time, be heading to Israel’s capital: “This is the land of Islam, this is Damascus, the Muslim stronghold. From here to Jerusalem. We’re coming for Jerusalem. Patience, people of Gaza, patience,” declared one of them, a promise endorsed by the gunmen around him with cries of “Allahu akbar!” (“God is greatest” in Arabic.)
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Deep Israeli wariness, and taking measures to prevent worst-case scenarios, are thus precisely what was needed. If only Israel had done the same before October 7.
The leader of Syria’s Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) group that headed a lightning rebel offensive snatching Damascus from government control, Abu Mohammed al-Golani, addresses a crowd at the capital’s landmark Umayyad Mosque on December 8, 2024. (Aref TAMMAWI / AFP)
Syria had been a potent threat to Israel in the past — a ferocious, deadly enemy in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and a would-be nuclear power until Israel intervened to destroy its North Korean-built nuclear reactor in 2007. As of last week, it boasted the largest concentration of air defense systems in the world, according to former Israel Air Force chief Ido Nehoshtan.
It also had vast arrays of weaponry, chemical weapons infrastructure and substantial arms-production facilities.
This aerial view shows the aftermath of an overnight strike attributed to Israel on the Barzeh scientific research center affiliated with the Syrian defense ministry in northern Damascus on December 10, 2024. (Omar Haj Kadour/AFP)
An estimated 80 percent of that Syrian military capacity has now been eliminated by the Israel Air Force — giving Israel air supremacy along the very corridor where the ayatollahs had sought to hold sway — from the Mediterranean, through Lebanon and Syria to Iraq and Iran.
Necessarily, too, Israel has taken over the buffer zone on the Syrian border, including the Syrian side of the strategic Mount Hermon. Iran-backed Assad was a potentially potent threat but not an immediate one. The border was stable.
IDF troops are seen on the Syrian side of Mount Hermon, December 8, 2024. (Courtesy)
That is no longer reliably the case, and thus Israel moved quickly to ensure that its citizenry is protected.
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Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has described this as a temporary measure, and indeed it is, in theory. It’s just hard to foresee how and when Israel will deem it safe to withdraw.
A damaged poster of Syria’s ousted president Bashar al-Assad in Aleppo, November 30, 2024. (Reuters / Mahmoud Hassano)
Israel is doubtless also watching with concern the potential for violent insurrection in Jordan, the state with which it shares its longest border, and that constitutes a crucial bulwark against Iran. Jordan is led by a domestically unpopular monarchy that is publicly and relentlessly critical of Israel even as bilateral security coordination is strategically vital. The two leaderships dislike and mistrust each other; it is in both countries’ core interest to work to improve that relationship.
But the key strategic concern in an era where almost all bets are off in this region, and when staggeringly dramatic events are playing out on a weekly basis, is, of course, Iran.
The Islamic Republic’s two main proxies in the bid to destroy Israel have been massively degraded, Bashar al-Assad’s regime briskly despatched, and its own vulnerabilities exposed and magnified by the relative failure of its two strikes on Israel and the potency of what was a relatively limited Israeli response.
An F-16I fighter jet of the Israeli Air Force’s 253rd Squadron prepares to take off during an operation to bomb a Syrian nuclear reactor in Deir Ezzor on September 5, 2007. (Israel Defense Forces)
The fear is that the ayatollahs, running out of options, may conclude that Assad in Syria, like Muammar Qaddafi in Libya and Saddam Hussein in Iraq before him, proved vulnerable because he never got to the bomb, and that they will expedite their nuclear weapons drive. They are already openly discussing the issue. They are already accelerating uranium enrichment. They already have potent long-range missile capabilities. They are already deeply alarming US intelligence and the UN’s nuclear watchdog.
We must hope that US and Israeli intelligence know everything they need to know about how far the regime has already progressed on the road to weaponization, and how urgent is the imperative to thwart it.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (center) arrives at the Tel Aviv District Court before the start of his testimony in the trial against him, December 10, 2024. (Chaim Goldberg/ Flash90)
Incidentally, while Netanyahu’s legal tactics have been a central factor in the inordinate length of his corruption trial, and while Netanyahu routinely spends a great deal of his time on ceremonial and self-promotional activity, it is plainly not good for Israel to have its prime minister testifying in court three days a week right now and doubtless spending many more hours working on his testimony.
A less onerous court schedule would seem more appropriate, since Israeli law enabled him to refuse to step down when he was indicted, since the legal authorities reached an agreement with him under which he continues to serve as prime minister even when testifying in his own defense, and since these are radically atypical and fateful times for Israel.